And when the current vehicle is a Honda, that could be a loooong time.

But hey, maybe any remaining questions of EV reliability, battery replacement costs, or end-of-life handling will be resolved! THEN I can look at an EV!

Yeah, that was silly. I looked up atomic masses, got the molecular mass for tritium and didn’t think twice about it in the math. Thanks for the catch!

Why would you need twice as much if one lithium atom produces one tritium atom?

It better be, considering the volume of waste if all those batteries need replacement every 10 years. That would be the order of 1.89 billion kg of lithium every battery replacement cycle based upon 2030 numbers. Considering some of the issues with lithium, that would be all sorts of bad.

I don’t know that commercial scale recycling of said batteries is truly ready, but hence why it’s a big area of examination and study when it comes to converting transportation away from fossil fuels.

So for a comparison, a single EV battery requires something on the order of 63 kg of lithium. Assuming this is even remotely true, we then have references from Youtubers like Real Engineering who estimate a commercial fusion plant would need about 600g of tritium per day.

Switching from mass to equivalent atom counts and then back to relate, 600g of tritium is just shy of 200 moles (3.016 g/mol). Multiplying this by the molar mass of lithium (6.941 g/mol) gets us ~1,382g. I couldn’t easily find an efficiency rate, so let’s assume we’re terrible at conversion and only manage 1% conversion rate: a plant would require about 138kg per day.

So while the lithium usage by a commercial power plant would be noticeable if they became super common.. it would amount to about two EV batteries per day, per plant. Considering we may need over 30 million EV batteries per year by 2030, this would be a very small impact.

Edit: month —> day Edit2: I was lame, got the molecular mass of tritium (T2) rather than atomic mass, and ran with the math. All fixed now.

Some of this perspective isn’t true, but the survivor bias of what’s still around.

Was there cheap crap offered and sold back then? Of course! But it broke and went in the garbage. Same as now, what’s left are the things that happened to keep going and/or have such a massive stockpile as to still allow replacement parts to be found.

Frankly, this is more often the issue of the publishing than the academic source.

What sounds more likely? That an astronomer is so cloistered as to forget what a marshmallow is like? Or that they brought up a new discovery (lowest density, similar to marshmallow vs slightly less than water like Saturn) and the journalist jazzed it up to catch attention?

Inherently, you are correct about “the dead don’t breed” and thus it would eventually be conveyed generations down the road to absolutely never touch those things. And in either circumstance, being BRIGHT AND OBVIOUS to potential predators right now is a huge disadvantage. That disadvantage is massive if the trait banks on “the next generation is less likely to eat something like this”. Genetic memory isn’t an ideal value compared to the cost, while showing relevance to a non-deadly warning would be adopted faster. And it benefits the non-deadly variety since both warning routes receive selection pressure. Every event is potentially a usage of defense material (venom), injurious, or fatal, so even snakes with deadly venom are benefitted through avoidance rather than needing to expend the venom.

I think the above covers all the good points, so I’ll only add the types:

• Batesian mimicry is when another organism mimics the warning something else gives without possessing the trait being warned about. Example is a hover fly with black-yellow stripes like stinging insects while possessing no sting.
• Müllerian mimicry is when multiple species adopt the same warning signal while possessing similar traits. Example is how many stinging insects all utilize black-yellow or similar striping patterns.
• Mertensian mimicry is similar warnings among deadly and non-deadly threats. Mainly because the warning can’t be learned if every experience is fatal, so the non-deadly are the method of associating the cue with the warning.