The man who brought us the lithium-ion battery has an idea for a new one

tl;dr the path he has chosen involves one of the toughest problems in battery science, which is how to make an anode out of pure lithium or sodium metal. If it can be done, the resulting battery would have 60% more energy than current lithium-ion cells. That would instantly catapult electric cars into a new head-to-head race with combustion. Over the years, numerous scientists have tried and failed—it was lithium metal, for instance, that kept setting Stan Whittingham’s lab on fire at Exxon in the 1970s.

It's a very interesting profile/historical review of this great scientist and his work, but if you were curious about the actual headline, the lede was buried almost at the end.

What I'm worried about is the waste of lithium and other battery/accumulator metals. In theory, people should turn electronic devices and batteries to recycling facilities, but a large part of the population ignores the rules and throws their gadgets into the trash when broken...

I wonder if someday we will find a way to "separate" trash on atomar level (i.e. put arbitrary stuff in on one side, get raw atoms on the other side)...

Well that would require a lot of energy !

Given what happened before you really can't fault him.

> I don't know how "real" its technology is

He's got an amazing track record.

> but SolidEnergy promises a 50 percent increase in energy density using an "ultra-thin metal anode". The company promises commercialization for phones in 2016 and for EVs in 2017.

The problem with battery tech is that it is a bit like solar: every year there are 10's of announcements like that, usually not from parties that have had such breakthroughs in the past. As is noted in the article since better battery tech is such an absolutely incredible breakthrough there is no shortage of those that would use this to their benefit absent any actual science.

So for battery and solar breakthroughs my personal hurdle is 'show me', until then I will happily wait by the sidelines (not as if it would matter in anyway if I didn't). But I'll give this particular scientist a break and I'll say that I will be much less surprised if he's going to the the one to nail the next substantial increase in battery efficiency. I hope the result will be as safe to use as Li-Ion or LiPo. We're getting to the point where chemistry of explosives and chemistry of batteries is quite comparable and that's one reason why this is such a hard problem. Making a better stable battery is the hard challenge. And LiPo is pushing it there, those are not batteries I'd want on my person or in a spot where they can cause a lot of damage when they go.