Monday, August 26, 2024

Lithium-ion idiot dumping

4 comments:

The Ghost of John Lindsay said...

Fun City, no?

Anonymous said...

Many modern lithium batteries have built in computers that shut down at extreme temperatures. Many of the cheap ones do not or the use less fancy electronics. The explosion problem is manifold. Folks who didn't understand how gasoline or kerosene works used to start a lot of fires in the 1930s. First, if electrolytes have water, they can be hydrolyzed into to very explosive elements, oxygen and hydrogen. So non-aqueous electrolytes are a massive improvements. Second, many electrodes use carbon polymers, and guess what carbon, like coal and petroleum, do? They catch fire. So solid state, non-carbon, non-water batteries are better. Further there is something called dentrites, like the stalactites that form under overpasses from leaching rain water. Not only does lithium form dedrites, so does tin, which ahs replaced toxic lead in electronic solder: the Toyota brake problem of a decade ago seems to have been caused by tin dendrites or "whiskers". These dendrites grow and poke right through electrode barriers. There is hope using sodium instead of expensive lithium for batteries, which has really taken off in China. Lithium has the highest hydrogen reference potential, but fluorine has a nearly identical one. But, hydrofluoric acid is so potent, it is hard to contain. Potassium, Cesium and Barium then Calcium come close. And you can dope sodium with lithium to make it behave almost like lithium. Just as you can dope silicon semiconductors with all sorts of impurities to make them behave like more expensive gallium. In all this, you have to understand that environmentalism is really just a publicity front for electrification, as it the real reason is that if you use electric power, you can switch sources (fossil, nuclear, whatever) much more easily so as to not be hostage to hostile foreign suppliers. But you also have to appreciate that by definition, ALL stored energy (nuclear, fossil, battery) is explosive. The more densely you store it, the more explosive it is. In the 1940s car and submarine batteries exploded, too. Ideologues of all stripes often blind themselves to this very simple fact.

Anonymous said...

https://nypost.com/2024/08/31/us-news/junkie-migrants-turn-nyc-block-into-flaming-crime-ridden-nightmare-for-residents-its-scary/

Anonymous said...

So you're saying that the steeple need to learn how to deal with lithium batteries the same as they learned how to deal with gas and electricity.