Ebo David

@Russell, I did not snap to it until you mentioned "Eagle-Picher nickel-iron batteries", that my sister worked in one of their battery packing plants in New Mexico.  I have no way to know 40 years later, if she worked on the Edison Cells, but it is a small world... Interesting about the feeder lines, but I seem to remember reading something about how the batteries off-gassed.  

Back at the beginning of the pandemic, I was looking to rebuild my Prius (gen-II) traction battery with advanced CATL cells.  I ended up purchasing a pack from Toyota -- because the  battery died-died in the middle of the supply-chain fiasco, and I had to fix my only transport.  

I would love to hear anyone playing with Sodium-Ion batteries.  There are a couple of places where you can now get cells in standard packages.

@russell, LiPO/LiFePO and the like have minimum temperature concerns.  LiPO/LiFePO operate between -20°C to 60°C (-4°F to 140°F), and AGM -30℃ to 70℃.  That extra 20C comes with some additional cost, but may be worth it.  Take a look at your use case.  I would be interested in hearing from folks with experience with the ancient Edison cells, but that is more a curiosity than practicality.  I would love to be proven wrong on the practicality end ;-)

@Cory Hunt, I am not sure if you were replying to me with the links to the Abundance Build Channel YouTube channel, but he uses cement and not lime as his binder.  That said, I would be curious if rodents burrow into the cement bound styrofoam like they do into plain styrofoam.

@Anne Miller, I do not know about you, but I have to drive 100 miles ONE-WAY, to purchase a bag of high calcium lime.  So making a lime clay paint is borderline impractical for me.  For those in this same boat you might be interested in Milk Paint.

Jay Angler wrote: It was a library book from Britain where they refer to these sites as "Brownfield". Not sure my library would even still have it, but I'm not in my home province at this time. My recollection was that it was a highly contaminated site, thus they were able to concentrate certain chemicals into plant matter sufficiently to be worth a company extracting it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brownfield_land gives some of the lingo, but I'm not in a position to hunt further at the moment.

I am not in a hurry, and if you are willing to put this on a "when I get around to it list", I really would like as much details that you can get me.  I'll poke around online and see if I can dig things up as well.  Part of my background is in restoration ecology (both in the UK on projects in the Norfolk Broads, the Peterborough Fens, and a little work in the New Forest), as well as wetlands/uplands all over the US, and dry-land forests of the Rocky Mountain west.

My current interest in phytoremediation/bioremediation is to consider using that as a technique next to my wife's house -- which is heavily contaminated with lead over the last 100 years.  I have other research interests that are more directly related to the mining, but that will be a full on research paper, and I am not even close to discussing that as a project publicly, but you gave me a place to look for interesting literature ;-)

Short term monocultures may have their place, but I always worry that they're a pest magnet and if money gets involved, humans tend to use negative measures to control "pests" rather than working with nature to find safer solutions. A monoculture of sunflowers for even several years in an effort to clean up lead contamination would be understandable, but surrounding that field with a polyculture border to support predator insects, might be enough to support the sunflowers. I was at a talk about bees and a case study was about planting around the edges of industrial strawberry fields and they were actually able to show how far into the field the insects went - in other words, optimum field size for pesticide free strawberry growth. There is so much nifty research people could do, by thinking outside the box and observing nature.

Nice spatial planning on the boarders.  Decades ago I worked for a landscape ecology academic researching similar.  If you have large fields, you can plan islands of refugia for pollinators and predators dotted across the mono-culture fields, and as long as they are within the flight dispersal distance of the species of interest, you are golden.  I would also not place the islands at the max distance, but more like 80%, so that the species flow is sufficient to keep them well stocked.  As a note, you can do this in the opposite -- and separate plantings by significantly more than that distance to discourage propagation or diseases, pests, disturbances (like fire).

The one place where I used the mono-culture thing to good effect was post dam removal on a 100 to 150 year old dam at about 3,000m elevation.  We selected plants that would not take the over wintering well to stabilize the soil.  Since they were required to monitor the site for several years, as part of the mitigation process, one of the tasks was set up specifically to make sure that it did not produce viable seed.  So the first year after seeding we had good ground cover, but it all died in the first heavy frost before producing viable seed.  Second season there were a small handful of seeds that germinated from the first round, but also died before producing viable seed.  By the second or third season it was all gone, the soil was stabilized, and the natives were filling the space in.  Anyway, that is how I remember that part of the project, but that was something like 30 years ago...

John Suavecito wrote:Yes, there are a whole list of plants that extract toxic metals.

Yes.  There is an entire scientific discipline focuses on that - Pytoremediation:
 
 https://www.epa.gov/sites/default/files/2015-04/documents/a_citizens_guide_to_phytoremediation.pdf

Jay Angler wrote: Special and important situation for you Ebo. I read a book about soil repair in Britain. Sunflowers were specifically grown for their ability to clean the soil of lead. You could grow and then dispose of to the dump, to get any lead off your land. In heavily contaminated sites, they actually dried the sunflowers and sent them to a company that burned them and recaptured the lead. Sometimes the problem really is the solution - less lead mined if we recapture it.

Can you find me any references to the work where they recaptured the lead from the sunflowers?  I would be very interested in this.

Anyway, the mutation I have is in about 3% of the population.  A different mutation is prevalent in ~30% of the population.  So it is a lot more common than people realize.  The 30% mutation does not effect the overall biochemistry over much, but the mutation I have causes me to hyper accumulate just about all metals before I started taking mentholated forms of my vitamins.  It does not help that I grew up in a family of potters, and we routinely went through a 55 gal drum of red lead paint each year.  At this point I am still leaching it out of my bones...

Jay Angler wrote: There are other plants with strong affinity to other elements/chemicals to the point that there is now talk of using them to "mine" those chemicals in suitable areas. My concern with the article I read on that subject is the tendency for humans to plant monocultures and then wonder what went wrong when Mother Nature gets annoyed.

There is a WHOLE other discussion.  I can see using monocultures of plants like sunflowers for a time (assuming they plan to eventually replace them with a divers mix, and natives preferably).

Phil Stevens wrote:Treatment temperatures above 400C will destroy any organic compounds present, so we don't worry about juglone or the antifungal properties of woods like cedar and cypress.

Heavy metals are another story altogether, but at the levels present in most wood I would not worry about it. If the trees grew in proximity to mine tailings or some other source, I would test the biochar just to be certain. You could still use it in non-environmental applications, like as an aggregate in concrete or asphalt. Or you could dump it into an abandoned mine ;-)

re: temperatures...
Agreed, but I also see listed places that some retorts work as low as 300C, hence my comment about removing any which has not been completely charred.  It would be interesting to look at how well it broke the organic compounds, but as someone mentioned (you?), placing that at the drip-line of the same species of tree would likely help it...

re: heavy metals...
I have a mutation of the MTHFR gene (see: https://www.cdc.gov/ncbddd/folicacid/mthfr-gene-and-folic-acid.html ).  Any lead, mercury, cadmium, etc., I can keep out of my food is worth any amount of extra trouble.  Also, you can have your soils tested cheaply and eaily by your local Agricultural Extension Service (or they will tell you who to send the samples to).  

Hmmm... that reminds me of another OT subject - never grow your garden in soils next to your house.  Many old houses used lead paint,etc., and the dust from this contaminates the soils near permanently.  (see: https://www.houzz.com/discussions/1406540/planting-veggies-and-fruits-next-to-the-house-ok for a discussion with lots of good info).  BTW, the main part of our house was built in the 1920's and the soil lead is high enough that the county agent said to keep kids from playing there.  One of the things we will try to "lock it up" is to raise the Ph (low Ph soils, i.e. acidic, will mobilize the metals in the clays and soils).