“Thiel, a co-founder of #Palantir and #PayPal, said: “The future demands more compute than we can imagine. Extraterrestrial solutions are no longer science fiction. #Panthalassa has opened the ocean frontier.”

The company’s “nodes” stand almost as tall as Big Ben in London or New York’s Flatiron Building. Most of the 85-metre-long solid-steel structure sits below the surface, including a hermetically sealed container holding the #AIServer, cooled by #seawater.

The vessels can drive themselves to their destination, using the shape of their hull to propel themselves through the #waves without an engine.”

Nothing, not the land, air or sea escapes the oligarch’s quest for wealth.

#AI / #Energy / #Power / #renewables> / #ocean 🌊 <https://archive.md/lmLvX> / (paywall) <https://www.ft.com/content/711ce313-16fb-4a12-b6be-fbed547c8a39>

How to Turn Seawater into Salt

https://tube.blueben.net/w/m6pXQRiEZy33F1WUiAJTXm

Drinking water near coasts is under threat worldwide: A recent study shows how the salinization of groundwater due to over-abstraction and rising sea levels is becoming a global problem 👉 https://press.uni-mainz.de/drinking-water-near-coasts-is-under-threat-worldwide/

#DrinkingWater #groundwater #water #seawater

Why #Seawater Isn’t the Answer to #Wildfires : Medium

Listen to #Earth’s #Rumbling, #Secret #Soundtrack : Tech Review

#Chemical #Pollutants are #Rife across the #World’s #Oceans : Nature

Latest #KnowledgeLinks

https://knowledgezone.co.in/resources/bookmarks

#SodiumIonBatteries offer an alternative to tricky #lithium

Oct 26th 2023

Excerpt: "Fortunately, lithium is not the only game in town. As we report this week, a clutch of firms are making batteries based on sodium, lithium’s elemental cousin. Since sodium’s chemical properties are very similar to those of lithium, it too makes for good batteries. And sodium, which is found in the salt in #seawater, is thousands of times more abundant on Earth than lithium and cheaper to get at. Most of the companies using sodium to make batteries today are also Chinese. But pursuing the technology in the West might be a surer route to energy security than relying heavily on lithium.

"Besides its abundance, sodium has other advantages. The best lithium batteries use #cobalt and #nickel in their electrodes. Nickel, like lithium, is in short supply. #Mining it on land is #EnvironmentallyDestructive. Proposals to grab it from the #seabed instead have caused rows. A good deal of the world’s cobalt, meanwhile, is extracted from small mines in the #DemocraticRepublicOfCongo, where #ChildLabour is common and working conditions are dire. Sodium batteries, by contrast, can use #electrodes built from #iron and #manganese [and wood #lignin], which are plentiful and uncontroversial. Since the chemical components are cheap, a scaled-up industry should be able to produce batteries that cost less than their lithium counterparts.

"Sodium is not a perfect replacement for lithium. It is heavier, meaning sodium batteries will weigh more than lithium ones of an equivalent capacity. That is likely to rule them out in some cases where lightness is paramount. But for other applications, such as #GridStorage or #HomeBatteries, weight is irrelevant. Several Chinese carmakers are even beginning to put sodium batteries in #ElectricVehicles."

Read more:
https://www.economist.com/leaders/2023/10/26/sodium-batteries-offer-an-alternative-to-tricky-lithium

Archived version:
https://archive.ph/7x6JX

#SolarPunkSunday #EnergyStorage #SodiumIon #NewTechnology #GiantLeap #Reuse #WasteReuse #NoLithiumMining #NoMining