battery problems (2023 Update)

Different kind of sad case.

We are sad about virus and you are sad about batteries.

Power densities are scheduled to increase; that's a premise for all sorts of applications, like grid storage and battery-powered aircraft. Stuffing agressive chemical reactants very close together, and for cheap, could be a challenge.

GM's global recall sounds expensive.

I'm not sad, as long as nobody forces me to buy an electric car. Actually, I'm rarely sad about anything, unless I curdle the bread pudding; that's the main anxiety in my life.

I am not really sad about virus either, just responding to Data about Doomday Deadly Delta Dawn variants. I am more curious than said, as data available from NCBI doesn't really agree with what everybody is saying in news media.

On a sunny day (Wed, 04 Aug 2021 13:09:06 -0700) it happened John Larkin <jlarkin@highland_atwork_technology.com> wrote in snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com:

Batteries are always dangerous. I have an old mp3 player, runs on one 1,5 V eneloop battery. Put it in my pocket, wanted to bring it upstairs, something burned in my side, thing was melting! Now eneloops do not catch fire, but I did not expect those 1.5 volts AAA to have that much power! Found the construction had a non-insulated wire to the positive pole all along the side of the battery, Battery insulation (just a piece of plastic foil) had been damaged over time, good short! If if happens with li-ion you would be on fire. Fixed it, new insulated wire, some hot glue, new battery terminal embedded in hot glue... Looks like shit, plastic all deformed by the heat.

Any stored energy is always dangerous. Big batteries are lot less dangerous than large chunks of chemical energy. Bulk storage of ammonium nitrate has produced a couple of mega-ton explosions.

As usual, the structures that store the energy have to be designed to cope with unexpected energy release, and the engineering isn't always quite as perfect as one would like.

The big battery will get rebuilt in a way that will make less likely to blow up in the particular way reported. With any luck the designers will anticipate a bunch of similar problems. It doesn't take too many iterations to make failures very infrequent.

Petrol/diesel burns quite effectively too.

It has recently been noted over here that car insurance costs are higher if the car is left in a garage rather than on the drive[1].

Battery fires are likely to exacerbate that.

[1]The suspicion is that cars are getting larger (think SUV) and so are a tighter fit into many old garages, with the inevitable scrapes.

Unusual for you to get your facts so wrong, Bill. A few kilotons, maybe, but megatons? Not a chance.

yeh, the three biggest are all around 3000ton of ammonium nitrate

This is so typical of the lack of intelligence in corporate and government management. Effective chemical fire extinguisher technology has been and continues to be developed to quench large lithium battery fires quickly and efficiency. This should be a legal requirement for any storage battery farm, an automated fire extinguisher, before they are permitted to build the project. Industry wants to skip it because it's expensive, and all they end up doing is hiding the true cost of their project. And don't hold your breath for any residential codes to require an extinguisher system for interior spaces used to park electric cars. These people are notoriously reckless and corrupt too. The idiots seem to think they're still in the 19th to mid 20th century mode of operation. Someone needs to remind them they are not.

Yep- a few million pounds in a ship's hold contaminated with fuel oil. It doesn't help when the dock workers try to break up a salt crust formed on top of the pile with a few sticks of dynamite.

There was this massive explosion at Picatinny nearly 100 years ago. Not sure about those numbers in the article. It started when lightning struck a earth bermed storage bunker causing it to start smoking. The fire department arrived, these were really fearless people, and started hosing the place down with water. According to witnesses, after just a few minutes, the place exploded, the fire crew and everything around evaporated. The shock wave from the explosion caused what's called sympathetic detonation of the remaining storage area, which was quite large. They ended up with a huge mess.

The article mentions battery capacity in MW. Is that just journalistic ignorance or are these batteries really measured in MW, not MWh? I'd think that _energy_, not _power_, would be the metric.

They are utilized to stabilize 300MW power plant.

That's a standard problem, especially with "greens" that pronounce on the subject. If I know I'm going to be coming across some of their literature (and I use that word advisedly) at an exhibition, then I take a marker pen to correct the inevitable energy/power idiocies.

Oops. My bad. I was thinking of Halifax in 1917 which was about three kilotons. A fire onboard the cargo ship SS Grandcamp docked at Texas City in 1947 detonated 2,300 tons of ammonium nitrate, which is in the same ball-park. A disaster in the Rhineland town of Opac in 1921 seems to have been just as bad. I have seen write-ups talking about a million tons of ammonium nitrate in warehouses going up but that must have been journalistic license.

Same thing happened to me, a 9 volt battery and some coins. Weird feeling.

But all the reactants are close together, in a reacting heap. It doesn't need air. The only way to stop the fire is to cool everything off, or disperse it all.

An explosion might work.

"Science reporters" can't tell a watt from a watt-hour, or a mega from a giga, and tend to neglect timebases.

Problem is packing more energy together and using more plastic than steel. We don't hear too much about Leaf battery fire, because there are lots of steel between cells. It's low range, but i can add external long range storage when needed.