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It took 50,000 gallons of water to put out Tesla Semi fire in California, US agency says (apnews.com)

submitted 3 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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California firefighters had to douse a flaming battery in a Tesla Semi with about 50,000 gallons (190,000 liters) of water to extinguish flames after a crash, the National Transportation Safety Board said Thursday.

In addition to the huge amount of water, firefighters used an aircraft to drop fire retardant on the “immediate area” of the electric truck as a precautionary measure, the agency said in a preliminary report.

Firefighters said previously that the battery reached temperatures of 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit (540 Celsius) while it was in flames.

The NTSB sent investigators to the Aug. 19 crash along Interstate 80 near Emigrant Gap, about 70 miles (113 kilometers) northeast of Sacramento. The agency said it would look into fire risks posed by the truck’s large lithium-ion battery.

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago (1 children)

As I was saying in my first comment: If energy is produced by renewable sources, then they can be clean, so there's no argument here.

Re:

https://www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/p/lithium-electric-vehicles

the article focuses on lithium, which is not the only problematic material used in electric batteries
the first source I checked (on total lithium in the world) was offline, so I could not confirm my suspicion that the author was talking about the total amounts including those inaccessible in the Earth's mantle
the author admits herself that we have "enough lithium for decades to come", which is in-fucking-credibly stupid, because this planet has been around for billions of years, and one of the biggest flaws of mankind has been to empty a natural resource over a few decades "coz profits". Creating a demand for a resource that would only make it last a few decades would create another clusterfuck like all the wars and blood shed over crude oil. As a matter of fact, for mining conditions, we already have this clusterfuck, if you look at e.g. how cobalt is mined in the "democratic" republic of Congo

Finally, like I asked another commenter: could you provide a source on EV batteries made without rare earths?

By the way - sodium requires salt, and that's also limited on Earth. Knowing mankind, we'd extract locally (desalinification hurts the ecosystem there) and dump waste locally in another location (again, hurting the ecosystem).

My overall point is: the world's car market is just too big and we need to shrink it, but mankind as a whole is too fucking selfish and stupid and short-sighted to accomplish that, and I WISH time will prove me wrong on that.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago (1 children)

People also dont get the differece between average and marginal. Adding consumption doesn't build more wind farms. Adding extra electricity consumption means in short run burning more coal and gas. They are the ones that can be ramped up / ran more hours.

In the long run they might build more nuclear, but that takes a (very) long time. Generally they're building solar and wind pretty fast already, it is hard (costly) to ramp that up.

Adding new sources of electricity consumption just keeps the fossil fuel power stations running for longer. Efficiiency is stuff like electric mass transit to replace as many car trips as possible - and using as much wires as possible instead of batteries. But no all the money will go into facilities and subsidy for battery powered cars.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago

Adding extra electricity consumption means in short run burning more coal and gas. They are the ones that can be ramped up / ran more hours.

I think that's only gas plants, that can react dynamically to changes in the grid?

I think what we need is consumer electronics that can tolerate more variation in the grid power supply - e.g. a laundry machine that runs on 80% voltage just as well, but then takes a bit longer to finish.

Nuclear power plants are only preferable to burning fossil fuels, and only when run by responsible entities (i.e. not by humans ;) - definitely not by profit-oriented corps) - I hope we can transition to enough wind, water & solar power, but we definitely need to cut down on energy consumption.