battery fire

It wasn't lithium but sodium. Potassium was even worse. Lithium does react in a similar way, but it schools didn't keep stocks of lithium metal around fifty years ago, and probably still don't.

The standard technique for dealing with a lithium battery that has caught fire is to flood it with lots of water. Sea water contains about

What that word salad was supposed to mean?

Lithium reacts violently with water. Furtermore, it is lighter than ANY liquid known to a man so it floats in EVERYTHING you could put on it. But wait, there is more -- that black crust that it gets covered with in no time when subjected to air is not oxide but NITRIDE. Unlike sodium and potassium lithium readily reacts with both oxygen and nitrogen and it burns spectacularly even in pure nitrogen, without any oxygen present.

Ever seen burning lithium? Good luck to extinguish it with ANYTHING. Especially with lots of water... It looks like you skipped your chemistry classes at school and have never seen lithium metal yourself. Not just it reacts violently with water, it FLOATS in ANY liquid, water included. You can't FLOOD it with water for an obvious reason -- it is impossible.

The standard procedure with lithium fires is to somehow isolate it (protect as much surrounding objects as possible, maybe push the burning mass to an open space if possible) and let it burn until nothing left.

Just a month or so ago we had a truck loaded with lithium batteries overturned and caught fire on a freeway. It took a whole day or two (don't remember exactly) for our firefighters to push that burning wreck off the freeway into the desert with a bulldozer. Then it took it almost a week to burn out.

Pollution is not all that much a problem and pretty harmless. There is white lithium grease everywhere and nobody died from that :)

The Liz Tuddenham wouldn't have seen lithium reacting with water at school.

But sodium and potassium react more violently with water.

Enough water dissipates the heat generated. It doesn't extinguish the fire - just keeps the fire-\ground cool until all the lithium has been used up

Despite having completed a Ph.D. in physical chemistry, I have never seen lithium metal. Sodium is more familiar - I had to get rid of chunk of it once, and tossed it into an open drain, where it briefly created a spectacular effect (as I'd expected).

Probably not liquid nitrogen - which I have played with - or liquid helium which was too expensive for graduate students to play with when I was a graduate student.

Sure you can. It may not touch the surface for long, but it has to make contact to react.

But you have to get rid of the heat and the lithium compounds produced. Lot of water works fine for that.

As I pointed out, seawater contains 0.17pm lithium (as ions). It's probably more now than when our primordial ancestors lived in the sea, but it's not a pollutent to get worried about.

Really?

Furtermore, it is lighter than ANY

Let's be picky - it would sink in liquid hydrogen or liquid helium... ;-)

But

See the above video. It's a mixture of oxide and nitride.

Unlike sodium and potassium

Really?

How many times have you see burning *lithium*? Not the organic solvents in lithium batteries, but lithium metal itself?

If they had bulldozers why didn't they just push sand over it? That would have extinguished the flames. I guess they might have been worried about the organic solvents leaking out and spreading the flames; perhaps just leaving it to burn out was the easiest and safest thing to do as it was in the desert.

? What white lithium "grease"? If you're talking about the fire in the desert it was probably a mess of plastic, nonflammable solvents, and sand.

From direct experience, I know it is quite stable in dry air. It tarnishes in seconds in air with normal humidity levels, and yes, it reacts violently with water.

Jeroen Belleman

I didn't say I had seen it but I had been taught enough about the periodic table to realise that it would react with water. There were lots of other chemical reactions I learned about at school but didn't actually witness.

Depends. Yes, violently if confined, but merely vigorously if allowed to skate around on the surface expelling energy.

Have you actually seen it?

I have. (It was thick foil, not a lump, and it was not confined.)

Violent is the word that's fitting.

Jeroen Belleman

...and hydrogen?

But no worse than dropping a mint (Mento) into a coke bottle. Did the lithium foil reaction result in any fire?

That is really very simple.

The main costs of a planning application for this sort of thing in the countryside are roughly constant with only a tiny increase for surveying a larger piece of land. The value increase after obtaining planning permission is a proportion of the total contract value. Speculators drive the obtaining planning consent side in the UK.

Once they have obtained planning permission then they throw it over the wall to the builders from Hell to try and implement it. They even say as much on their website - to their investors see "Our Strategy" in:

No surprise that they try to go for the biggest chunk that they can. Ours is apparently a £1.2bn budget as is the one just down the road.

Not that violent - it scuds around on the water surface fizzing but it takes quite a big piece to actually catch fire with a nice lilac flame.

Oh yes they did! It was standard practice back then to demonstrate the progressively more violent reaction of lithium, sodium, potassium and if the school was very rich or teacher had friends in the chemical industry rubidium.

Likewise for chlorine, bromine and iodine.

Although I have seen fluorine made in a public lecture at UMIST back in the 1970's it would never be allowed today. A cauldron of molten anhydrous eutectic mix in one corner with long copper pipe up high. The first 5 minutes were spent on the evacuation procedure in case anything went wrong. You could smell fluoride of oxygen in the air afterwards!

You need so much water to quench one that it isn't realistic for BESS container scale fires - you have to try and limit the spread to other modules.

If one starts to go in an iToy you have only about 15 seconds to get it out of the house from the moment that the dense white toxic smoke first appears. You really don't want to breathe the fumes or worse still heavy metal nano-particles in black smoke that get emitted usually just before it goes up in flames. Far too hot to handle well before then.

This academic from Newcastle is a world expert on Li battery fires :

IIRC (I've studied organic chemistry more than this ionic stuff) all the metals in that periodic table group "iiberate" (to use the correct term) hydrogen in this circumstance.

Yes.

Are we talking about sodium or lithium here?

Yes.

Jeroen Belleman

Lithium. The foil was used in particle detectors installed on the LEP machine at CERN at the time.

Jeroen Belleman

If you had seen sodium and potassium reacting with water you might learned enough to expect that lithium would react less vigorously.

Jeroen Belleman has seen lithium foil reacting with water, but it has less thermal mass per unit surface area than bulk metal which introduces it's own complications.

I stand corrected. There are circumstances when lithium metal and water can result in a (hydrogen) fire, with quite a few examples from an internet search.

Yes. Lithium is quite tame compared to any of the other alkali metals which invariably self ignite with really rather small fragments.

There is a lithium metal battery with potentially an order of magnitude higher energy density than current Lithium ion batteries but it is proving hard to tame. Has a nasty habit of forming dendrites and shorting itself out internally with all the usual problems...

They may yet perfect it as a technology.

I'd go for vigorous. It melts fairly easily, floats and doesn't self ignite unless there is quite a decent chunk of it - more than pea sized.

Sodium is violent, melts and is self igniting at about pea size.

Potassium is close to explosive so best done with a very small piece.

Rubidium is explosively fast and memorable even for a tiny shard.