• Lemminary
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    273 months ago

    Deep down chemists know all chemistry is physics, and that fact makes their bones tremble.

  • Pennomi
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    723 months ago

    It’s true. Give me a hot and dense enough furnace and I’ll recycle everything into iron. EVERYTHING.

    • @[email protected]
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      113 months ago

      Wouldn’t the hot part actually make it harder…? All you want is density and as little to counter gravity as possible.

          • @[email protected]
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            43 months ago

            I guess to overcome electron degeneracy pressure. Nucleus would collide more easily when electrons are stripped away. Not sure if i am conpletely true though

            • @[email protected]
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              23 months ago

              Heat means more vibrations, which means less density and more force needed to compress the matter to the same density. Just compare any solid material to plasma. Or the 100 million kelvin plasma at ITER, which has an absurdly low density (like a high vacuum) but still 1 bar of pressure due to the thermal pressure.

              Electron degeneracy pressure is always present when there are electrons, regardless if they are part of an atom or free moving in a plasma.

              • @[email protected]
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                13 months ago

                Higher heat also means more violent collisions. It would be much harder to collide nucleus by just pressing it. But yeah maybe with even more pressure it might happen but nuclear reactions usually happen with high speed collisions.

                When electrons are bound to nucleus, it may prevent collision by having an additional layer causing degeneracy pressure between two colliding nucleus. That won’t happen if electrons are unbounded to nucleus. Atleast that’s what i imagine

                • @[email protected]
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                  13 months ago

                  The electron pressure is always there.

                  But you are right regarding the thermal energy making fusions easier, which can happen at any pressure or density with enough velocity. At this point I am not even sure which of the 2 approaches (cold and far denser or hot and far less dense) would be “easier”, where we would have to first define what easier would actually be…

      • Pennomi
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        103 months ago

        Fair enough, though I promise at those pressures things get spicy.

  • @[email protected]
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    83 months ago

    They’re not recyclable yet. In a few years when we have Mr. Fusions and replicators, things will be different.

    • @[email protected]
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      173 months ago

      PET bottles yes, other plastic bottles not so much, or at least until someone figures out a way to turn plastic trash into a cheap alternative to petroleum.

    • @[email protected]
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      33 months ago

      Not really. Plastic gets damaged when heating it up to melting temps. You won’t get a product that has the same properties, unlike with aluminium for instance. You can maybe get away with adding a small percentage of recycled pellets back in, but that’s it.

      • @[email protected]
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        33 months ago

        Metals are also not 100% recyclable due to contamination. We just have plenty of use for low grade metal alloys.

        • @[email protected]
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          33 months ago

          Which literally means “anything other than aerospace engineering”. Aluminium and other metals are infinitely more recyclable than plastics, which as I’ve said before, degrade immediately to being barely usable.

        • @[email protected]
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          13 months ago

          Don’t most of the contaminants come out as slag? (IDK I’m not an industrial furnace)

          • @[email protected]
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            23 months ago

            It depends on the contaminant. For example, if iron is polluted with carbon, carbon will dissolve and even react with iron to produce cementite. That’s how iron becomes steel.

            And slag itself results in a metal loss. You can’t drain it off and not waste some of the material you’re recovering.

            Basically there’s no such thing as 100% recovery of recycled material in an industrial setting. You can do it in the lab at astronomical costs, sure, but your local metalworks are not capable of that. But that doesn’t mean we should stop recycling.