Some people with their hands on the purse strings have promised South Africa a zillion dollars to develop a giant hydrogen fueled dump truck. This has got to be one of dumbest ideas ever. Hydrogen is like the absolutely worst fuel in the world. Nothing can contain it, it will leak right through the walls of a steel tank and on the way it will make the steel brittle. And if you want to carry enough to get anything done, you need to liquify it, which means cooling it down to like minus a zillion degrees. So you need fancy, vacuum bottle fuel tanks and you need a fancy rig to cool it and compress it. I'm not even going to talk about how you go about getting hydrogen. Like I said, it's the absolutely worst fuel ever.
But some people think they can make it work, so this dump truck is like an experiment. I doubt it will ever be economically viable, but maybe the guys working on it will learn something. And perhaps the guys holding the purse strings will learn something, but I doubt that. They will continue to spout fantasies, collect admirers and gain funding from whoever has money and believes in their fantasies.
Meanwhile, South Africa is serious mess. Yes, most of Africa is a disaster, but South Africa has, or had, a viable economy. Right now unemployment is running at 35%. The place is a disaster.
I'm thinking what might help is if they could put all those unemployed people to work. How about we forgo the dump truck and we put people to work hauling rocks out of the mine? How would this work out? To the spreadsheet we go.
We need some numbers to describe the situation. I pulled these out of the air. Say we have an open pit mine 100 feet deep and we have a road that leads up the side of the pit that is one mile long. A man should be able to carry 50 pounds up that hill. It will probably take him an hour to make the round trip. Yes, a man can walk a mile in 20 minutes, but going up hill carrying a 50 pound weight is going to slow him down, plus you've got turn around time. I think you'd be hard pressed to get eight loads per man in eight hours, especially if you are going to do this every day.
If a giant dump truck can carry 100 tons, you are going to need 20,000 men to carry that same amount of rock in one eight-hour shift. If these guys are getting paid $5 an hour, it's going to cost $4 million a week or $200 million for a year. No wonder mining companies prefer big trucks.
There's also the problem of how you are going to put all 20,000 men to work. Walking single file, you could have 500 men climbing the hill and another file of 500 men walking back down, so you would need room for 40 lines of men. Giving each man five feet of space means you would need a road 200 feet wide.
P.S. later the same day.
Well, if you've 20,000 men, I think you have the manpower to build a road 200 feet wide. Of course it doesn't have to be just one road 200 feet wide, you could have 10 roads 20 feet wide. Depends on the situation. In some bizarre circumstance one 200 foot wide road might be just the thing.
But what are we trying to do here? Are we trying to get the ore out of the ground, or are we trying to put 20,000 men to work? Ideally we would do both, but businesses don't run on what we want, businesses run on cold hard cash.
Hope much is it costing to have 20,000 unemployed men? Are they getting handouts from the government? And you know what they say about idle hands - they're the devil's workshop. How much trouble are these idlers causing?
And $5 an hour is the current minimum wage in South Africa. What if we only pay one dollar per hour? Get a fat tax break from the government for keeping all these blokes busy and you might actually make it work.
Or not. Even if these guys were only getting paid one dollar per hour, labor for a year would still be 50 million dollars. You could probably buy a giant dump truck that would carry 100 tons for under two million dollars. Hard to argue with those kind of numbers. Well, I suppose you could start a war, that would certainly keep a large number of people occupied.
P.P.S. I'm am using color codes in my spreadsheets these days. I'm trying to develop some rules. My only rule so far is that cells that contain formulas are colored light blue. I used a couple other colors here just to point out that they are different. I used tan for a constant and the bright blue and yellow cells get used farther along, so the colors indicate they are the same. White squares are for whatever numbers you want to put in there.
Spreadsheets are handy for almost anything involving numbers. And for anything tougher, there's always
Desmos.
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