Ducky181

Ducky181 t1_iw74fnu wrote

The problem and issue with these articles are that they function in many ways as China based propaganda. As they fail to convey the entire context, and larger circumstances involved.

Due to much lower levels of environmental regulation, Chinese companies have had a huge Heavy Rare Earth mining cost advantage over western companies for decades. As they commonly engage in techniques that entails the discharge of harmful chemicals into the ground and then the collection of pregnant leachates at a downstream location. This process eliminates the need for more expensive, but more environmentally friendly techniques such as blasting and excavation. They are likely seeking to minimise their extraction procedure by claiming the mentioned aforementioned approaches are being used.

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Ducky181 t1_iqvb9xl wrote

- The world electricity consumption is only 22% of the world total energy consumption. The building of more solar and wind farms won't result in the required level of reduction in emissions over the long run unless we figure out a low-cost way to use solar and wind energy to make steel, concrete, chemicals, and the creation of highly dense energy for long-distance transportation. The only source that can fulfil the high energy and heat needs necessary to address these aforementioned problems is nuclear power.

- The majority of solar cells and high level batteries are made within China, with questionable labour standards. We have already learned in the recent Ukraine war on how damaging it is to rely on another state with world view's that are highly contradiction to ours.

- The world uses equivalent to 140,000 TWH of total energy each year. In order to produce this much energy we need about 1,363,154km2 of land mass dedicated purely to solar energy production. This is twice as large as the total landmass of Turkey, and France, and almost the size of Iran. These solar cells and batteries need to be replaced every twenty to thirty year's, and contain a plethora of dangerous elements with no foreseeable recycling option.

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