Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's the common problem with almost anything in physics or chemistry. The Good Stuff has some horrible flaw that makes it incredibly dangerous. When we invented refrigerators first, they used ammonia as a refrigerant which was awesome at moving heat around. It's still used industrially but people die from ammonia leaks. Then they swapped it for freon, which was just about as good at moving heat around, but rotted hol…
> They're in production today, and will probably be forever. I suspect their days are numbered, because they have become _far_ more expensive to dispose of, and that's only going one direction. > But for high power density, low cost, and and high current applications where you don't have to worry about carrying them or tipping them over, you're going to be stuck with lead in a bucket of acid for a while I suspect. Yo…
They're insanely easy to recycle. You melt lead, you recast it into new plates. Sulphuric acid is very easy to make, and we need to make a lot of it as part of the process of making fertilisers.
> You'd think, but they _haven't_ seen a lot of use in, say, grid-scale applications.
Every telephone exchange you have ever dialled through is powered by massive lead-acid battery, with cells about the size of a decent microwave oven.