Not to interrupt class, but we’d better get back to cars, somehow.
Hey, the discussion is clean, and not controversial. Well, clean energy, at least!
And @RandomTroll, you are a nerd! Keep up the good work.
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Yeah but this is Car Talk, not Physics.
If it quarks like a duck…
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Using pure logic how much is gold actually worth? It’s pretty. Easy to work with. An excellent conductor of electricity but so is copper @$2.75 per ounce. In a post apocalyptic world water, beans, and bullets would be worth much more than gold.
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At 19.32 grams per cubic centimeter, gold would make excellent bullets. Lead only weighs 11.34 grams per centimeter. Yet, gold has an atomic number of 79 and lead is 82. Gold is actually heavier than depleted uranium which weighs 19.1 grams per centimeter.
So gold would be an ideal material for wheel weights on your car.
I have never had the opportunity to pick up a brick of gold, but I bet most people would be surprised at how much one weighs.
Well, I googled the weight of a gold bar and it’s about 27.3 pounds. It would be all I could do to pick up three of them. I’m not 30 years old anymore. Imagine the fun you could have with gold bar bell weights (painted black) that look like iron. Hey Cletus! Bet you caint pick up that thar barbell!
Yeah, gold may be a better conductor than copper or aluminum but those metals are far cheaper. Gold is also ductile and corrosion resistant. They may find it worthwhile on a spacecraft but our common cars get copper wiring or tinned copper wiring.
I find this type of thing very interesting personally as I am always amazed at how much money a truckload of junk brings. I was once doing some computer work at a winery and they gave me a bunch of computer junk to recycle. Then they made mention of having some broken winery equipment. There was a bunch of copper, aluminum, and stainless. That was like a $1000 haul but it was trash to them and just in the way. One man’s junk is another man’s treasure!
I find it interesting how electric cars and such are driving innovation in other sectors much like the space program. I would have never thought I would have considered buying an electric chainsaw but now have to say I am impressed. Materials we never dreamed would be valuable are behind all of this.
I’ve never had a box of gold but I do have a small box of lead. They are from the duck decoys from my dad. I can hardly lift the dang box. Maybe I can get some money for it when the Apocalypse comes. Don’t ever do this to your kids. Prolly 70 years ago my dad got them (hand made) from his cousin and the deal was he only paid $35 for them, but the deal is they can only be sold to another relative with the same last name for $35 again. So there about 5 gunny sacks full sitting in my attic. I can’t find any relative that duck hunts anymore. I even offered to pay myself the $35, but no dice. It’s a curse. Maybe I could find someone that was willing to change their name? So yeah, lead is heavy. The thing is I have to pass them on to my son if I can’t get rid of them, and then his son.
Oh sorry, cars. They’re in the attic over my cars.
Gold is actually third behind copper and silver when it comes to being a good conductor. Silver is the best conductor and compared to gold, is rather affordable. Gold’s strong point is that it doesn’t tarnish and that makes for reliable contacts in low voltage relays and connectors.
$35 for duck decoys in 1948 seems like a significant investment in the sport. Add the cost of clothing, license, weapons and transportation. I think I would rather hire a chef to cook a duck for me several times a year.
The amount that some pay for such an activity indicates their passion for the sport or hobby.
When someone asks if $8,000 is too much to pay for and old car some people respond with a comment that they would not pay more than $500 for a car that old (not you in particular, some of the regulars).
Some are duck hunters, some have an interest in older cars.
Interesting… I learn something new everyday and had no idea gold was behind copper in regards to conductivity.
I understand aluminum wiring is coming back due to the lower cost but I personally would want nothing to do with it. My parents had a house with it when I was very young and they still talk about all the problems they had and how the house almost burned down several times. Apparently non-compatible stuff had been installed and galvanic corrosion took place.
Which means that a gallon is 160 pounds, 3 million $
A company bought the mineral rights to Santa Clara county’s water; gold & silver, etc., wash off circuits.
Lead bullets poison the environment, killing even the ducks they don’t hit. Switch to steel. Lead is recyclable; they’ll pay you for it.
It’s coming back because copper wire is worth stealing. There are 3 reports in today’s ‘Albuquerque Journal’ about street lights out because of copper theft. I see new lights in town that have stickers telling us that they have alumin(i)um wire.
The problem was alumin(i)um-brass contacts. The brass contacts of outlets and switches worked with copper okay. They didn’t think to test it with alumin(i)um. All you have to do is insert a bit of copper between the alumin(i)um and brass. New fixtures use a safe brass, as the Cu/Al written on them tells us.
That’s not the only problem that plagued aluminum wiring in the early years.
Yes differences in galvanic series caused corrosion issues. But so did conventional clamp terminals used for so long with copper. Using screw terminal type compression fittings resulted in loose connections over time as aluminum has higher tendency to cold flow under pressure than copper. Termination devices (outlets, breakers etc) are now designed to handle aluminum not just for compatible metals but also using spring or plate contacts that will not loosen over time as the metal deforms under pressure and thermal cycling. Or you can switch to copper for the tail to the end device.
Another issue was the need for dielectric grease or an anti-oxidant coating, especially at exposed contacts like the mains you may have today. If you’re knowledgeable (or just brave) take the cover off your breaker box and look at your mains wires. More than likely they are aluminum. The screw terminals should have a coating of dielectric grease or an anti-oxidant coating on them to prevent the inevitable oxidation that is prevalent with aluminum (one of it’s selling points in other applications). Same goes for wire nuts. They make special ones for aluminum wire with corrosion protection designed in.
Process is also more important. Copper is more malleable and can tolerate nicks when stripping. Aluminum can break more easily if nicked so be careful out there!
Our first house was built in the early 1970s, and had aluminum wiring. The light over the kitchen table stopped working. I pulled the cover off the light switch, wiggled the wires, and they shattered. We were lucky there was not a fire. I talked to my wife’s uncle, an electrical construction manager. He said they used aluminum wiring all the time and it was no problem as long as the system was assembled correctly. Copper pig tails were connected to the outlets, then the aluminum and copper wires were twisted together with the dielectric grease you mentioned. Then plastic wire caps were twisted onto the wire ends, and the assembled wires were pushed back into the outlet box.
Maybe that’s the source of the energy of combining electrons and protons to form neutrons then. Here’s a link to the 28 Nov 2018 report, maybe you can make sense of it. I don’t have the needed particle physics background myself. It appears most everyone agrees it isn’t what is commonly thought of as “cold fusion” though.
It requires water, a metal that will absorb hydrogen, like palladium, and energy. In the paper, the authors discuss using a laser. So, an expensive metal and maybe a lot of energy are required to make it work, at least for now. I’m not surprised the Navy is interested. If they can do this reliably, nuclear reactors in subs and aircraft carriers could be replaced. This assumes there are still subs and carriers in the fifty-plus years from now this might pan out to provide large amounts of power.
This paper makes no sense; I’m surprised to see it in Spectrum. You actually don’t need a lot of physics to understand that, if you want energy, you have to get out more than you put in. Even if you can get a proton and electron to combine to make a neutron, that takes more energy than you get out of the neutron’s decay. The combination of a proton & electron emits a neutrino, the decay of a neutron emits an antineutrino: the energy of the neutrino & antineutrino are lost in the process; the electron that comes off has a lot less energy than the one you started with.
I misleadingly referred to electron capture. Nuclei (neutron-deficient nuclei) capture electrons, turning a proton into a neutron, lowering the atomic number, emitting a neutrino; it isn’t really a reaction of a single proton with a single electron: a whole nucleus has to be involved. Coincidentally the primary mode of decay of isotopes of Palladium less than its stable isotope, 106, is electron capture. These guys may be seeing some of that; the process they describe has the same bookkeeping as EC. Note that each bit of energy requires the loss of a Palladium atom; it does turn into Rhodium, which is valuable too.
The right way to think about EC isn’t that a proton turned into a neutron, but that a Palladium nucleus turned into a Rhodium nucleus (for example): the whole nucleus was necessary, and its structure changed.
While not an expert on subatomic physics, my firm belief that if going from condition A to condition B is exothermic, then going from condition B back to condition A is equally endothermic, raised red flags when I read that report.
You can’t violate that basic principle any more than you can build a road that goes downhill back up to the top of a hill.
Lead in the environment does not kill living migratory birds. It possibly softens their eggshells. One advantage of steel shot is finding it with a magnet in your harvested game birds rather than with your teeth.
Not to get into ammo again and get the thread eliminated but the thing with lead shot for ducks is that it goes to the bottom of the lake. Then the ducks scoop it up from the bottom as food or grist and get poisoned from it. That’s what DNR says anyway.