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Ten years left to redesign lithium-ion batteries?

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Re: Ten years left to redesign lithium-ion batteries?

#211

Post by gok »

magduf wrote: post #200
gok wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ban the selling of devices with sealed-in batteries altogether in major markets [...] making batteries at least somewhat easily removed to facilitate recycling. The opposite is true; removable batteries almost entirely end up in landfills. Putting batteries non-removably inside devices makes them much more likely to be recycled, along with the rest of the recyclable components of the device.

>The opposite is true; removable batteries almost entirely end up in landfills. Right now , that may be the case, but that's because those batteries generally have zero scrap value, so you're just hoping users will care enough about the environment to not do this, and take them to a proper recycling bin (like at the entrance to Target). But the parent was predicting that batteries would become significantly more expe…

CPUs, cases, screens, memory chips, radios, antennae...none of the other parts of phones are standardized or swappable, and unlike batteries they are already expensive. Why would batteries suddenly behave differently when they become expensive?

Re: Ten years left to redesign lithium-ion batteries?

#212

Post by gepi79 »

opportune wrote: post #207
gepi79 wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IMO Thorium reactors are too late. In some decades, there will be enough solar power, wind power and fusion power anyway. But there is enough Uranium and Thorium for many centuries, even millennia. The most important problem to solve is climate change; besides aging as the most important reason for misery and death today. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W6HyNk5Duvk

This is probably true, but they should still be researched in case they become useful in other settings, e.g. Mars, or even places on Earth with poor renewable energy potential A big problem with Mars is that getting fuel there is expensive, they sometimes have large dust storms, and their atmosphere is very thin. Solar power would work fine there 90+% of the time, but outside of fission, there doesn't seem to be any…

I agree.

But going to Mars in the next decades is a useless horrific suicide mission that only serves to make a few people famous.

IMO persons will colonize moons, planets and space ships once their biological body is replaced by a machine body. In a biological sense, the human race will die on Earth.

Re: Ten years left to redesign lithium-ion batteries?

#213

Post by opportune »

gepi79 wrote: post #212
opportune wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is probably true, but they should still be researched in case they become useful in other settings, e.g. Mars, or even places on Earth with poor renewable energy potential A big problem with Mars is that getting fuel there is expensive, they sometimes have large dust storms, and their atmosphere is very thin. Solar power would work fine there 90+% of the time, but outside of fission, there doesn't seem to be any…

I agree. But going to Mars in the next decades is a useless horrific suicide mission that only serves to make a few people famous. IMO persons will colonize moons, planets and space ships once their biological body is replaced by a machine body. In a biological sense, the human race will die on Earth.

I agree that focusing on Mars soon is useless, but in the near-term Thorium could be useful for non-windy locations near the poles.

Re: Ten years left to redesign lithium-ion batteries?

#214

Post by misterprime »

opportune wrote: post #192
misterprime wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Global warming, especially if it reaches a runaway tipping point Thought we reached that a long time ago, and yet things haven't really changed.

we have somewhat, in that a significant amount is going to happen even if we switch to 100% carbon neutral energy tomorrow. I’m thinking more about a Clathrate Gun kind of event Also things have changed. Something like 10 of the hottest years on record have been within the last 15 years. Global warming is not simply a modeled prediction, it is very much measurable and ongoing

>Something like 10 of the hottest years on record have been within the last 15 years.

Is that based on straight up measurements, or based on measurements that were adjusted based on a realization that the measuring method was flawed to begin with? Aren't the adjustments based on a best guess by people that may have a bias?

Re: Ten years left to redesign lithium-ion batteries?

#215

Post by bluGill »

telchar wrote: post #149
bluGill wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is biofuels the very worst? Are you an oil shrill? (I'll admit to having an interest in biofules)

Some biofuels, particularly corn ethanol, are bad for the environment. Given the low return on energy invested for corn ethanol, it's functionally a way to launder fossil fuels (e.g. diesel for tractors, natural gas for fertilizer production, coal or gas for distillation) into "green" fuel. With a nice side effect of further degrading valuable farmland.

Fud from the oil industry. The energy return on investment it actually pretty good and getting better.

Modern farming is actually building soil. You probably aren't aware of how farming has changed since the 1930s - that is the last your history books covered anything...

Re: Ten years left to redesign lithium-ion batteries?

#216

Post by swaggyBoatswain »

hwillis wrote: post #199
swaggyBoatswain wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought nickel-colbalt has a significantly lower specific energy / energy density than other lithium-polymer batteries. They might be cheaper to make (or maybe not so much anymore), but they have a large space form factor. I don't know of any laptop today that's using a nickel cobalt battery. Those ones usually allowed you to remove the battery pack from the laptop. Now there all based on lithium-polymer now. Same…

No, LiPo (which really means li-ion with gel or polymer electrolyte) has a lower specific energy (kWh/kg) but higher specific power (kW/kg). > I don't know of any laptop today that's using a nickel cobalt battery. Those ones usually allowed you to remove the battery pack from the laptop. Now there all based on lithium-polymer now. Same with smartphones. They all use NMC (nickel manganese cobalt) cathodes. LiPo batter…

thanks for the clarification

Re: Ten years left to redesign lithium-ion batteries?

#217

Post by et2o »

ggm wrote: post #8

Oh god, another Erlich/Simons bet is needed: what's low is the level of rare earth exploration and exploitation not absolute supply. Is there a supply chain problem? Yes. Are we approaching a mad-max hell war for the last vestiges of humanities wonder mineral? Alas.. no. The ten years meme is based in a false premise. The article even says Australian known sources are only utilised at 14% and yet predicts a long term…

Indeed. It is quite odd (perhaps to the point of being misleading) to use scientific notation ahead of "tonnes of kg", instead of just using scientific notation combined with Kg.

I made this mistake reading the article–I divided 10^7 / 10kg per car --> only enough cobalt for about 10^6 cars (1 000 000) cars.

Instead the calculation is 10^7 tonnes * 10^3 kg/tonne = 10^10 kg / 10kg per car = enough cobalt for 10^9 battery packs = 1 billion cars.

I think we will be ok...

Re: Ten years left to redesign lithium-ion batteries?

#218

Post by justinator »

ajross wrote: post #208
justinator wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No, because it's far cheaper to mine it. OK, question answered. > As mentioned above, you've been fooled by the name of the technology and are looking at the wrong part of the periodic table. I asked about lithium recycling. How am I being fooled?

Because who cares about lithium recycling? We don't need recycled lithium to maintain battery production. Realistically it's one of those resources like iron or aluminum or phosphorous which we can't meaningfully "run out of". (Though I threw that last one in deliberately: we're pulling P out of rocks and throwing it into the biosphere at an unsustainable rate right now, and are going to have to radically adjust the…

Because then this is pretty much a false statement:

> Unlike petroleum, batteries are almost 100% recyclable.

Although they can be, they're not.

That's a big point in electric cars, that I think gets swept under the rug in the green-washing of electric cars: the main widget that makes electric cars electric cars is discarded as hazardous waste.

It's too costly and impractical to recycle them. We essentially want to replace a billion gasoline cars with electric ones, and the tech. to recycle those future billion batteries doesn't really exist.

Just a point I wanted to be cleared up.

Re: Ten years left to redesign lithium-ion batteries?

#219

Post by aurizon »

magduf wrote: post #164
aphextron wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>IANAchemist, but this makes me wonder if there's some other chemistry out there, either undiscovered or deemed uneconomic, that offers even better performance than lithium. There are, but of course there's tradeoffs. Lithium is the best all around cathode choice for economical reasons, but Sodium and Potassium are being explored as well. The real gains can be found in new electrolyte chemistries, though. My money is…

I wonder what the problems with sodium and potassium are. Sodium, for one, is an extremely common element on Earth's surface, which I can't say for Lithium. Potassium is also very common. You can get all the sodium you could possibly want just by drying out seawater. By contrast, lithium supply seems to be limited to a few places such as Bolivia.

http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/Chemical/electrod...

Re: Ten years left to redesign lithium-ion batteries?

#220

Post by mikeash »

merpnderp wrote: post #61
mikeash wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What market forces allow them to convert their demands into action?

Aren't all market forces in the end the result of private property and contract law? Without those, people would quickly stop being able to trust any deals they made, and would have to resort to cash, and even then only in cases where they have a high level of social trust in the person they're trading with.

I’m not sure how that connects with what I’m asking. The other comments said that market forces would result in people demanding reparations for the damage done by pollution. But in the absence of a legal framework giving them some rights regarding pollution, those demands won’t go anywhere.
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