How Long Before Sodium Batteries Are Worth Their Salt? | Hacker News Reader

How Long Before Sodium Batteries Are Worth Their Salt?

spectrum.ieee.org

71 pointshliyan34 comments

If price was the only factor that matters, we could be using nickel-metal-hydride batteries. They also last longer.

A more important aspect where Sodium would be better than Lithium for batteries is that it doesn't catch fire that easily. Lithium batteries are prone to thermal runaway, where if you increase their temperature that makes them release more energy and increase their temperature even more until they combust violently.

A graphic example to this is where Grand Tour's Richard Hammond recently crashed an electric car, which then continued to spontaneously catch fire five days after the crash (https://www.total-croatia-news.com/made-in-croatia/23852-the...)

Will sodium based batteries be also more environmentally friendly to dispose?

When it comes to batteries, disposing them is the smaller problem as it’s quite straight forward to recycle. Mining resources is what accounts for the majority of pollution & environment damage.

While sodium may be more stable than lithium, its not something to joke around with...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7IT2I3LtlNE

+1 to the top gear reference. So glad that guy didn’t die.

I don’t think he was part of Top Gear at the time of the crash

Spontaneously catching fire five days after a crash seems really good! Somewhere between five seconds and five minutes is when it would be problematic.

Yes, but the reason for fire is the liquid electrolyte. Lithium batteries don't have to catch fire. A short clip from PBS Nova: https://youtu.be/m9-cNNYb1Ik

Sodium Carbon batteries have the same issue with flammable liquid organic solvent electrolytes. There is research being done into using a solid electrolyte and a metal anode though.

I like that the article doesn't answer or even ask the question in the title: "How long?". But the tl;dr seems to be that while lithium is cheaper than sodium, the performance is way worse and practical problems remain. And a startup making a vaporware-ish promise of 2020.

Lithium batteries is 50 year old technology, so I guess one might be optimistic and halve that. Unless there's a big, unforeseen lithium supply or production crunch coming, I'd expect sodium batteries to be common in about 25 years then?

It is hard to compete with a new technology against an older that was optimized for decades (see electric cars). But in the present case, resources in lithium are not unlimited so we expect its cost to rise in the future.

Note that it took a decade or so before lithium batteries were reliable and trustworthy. I remember every second report in the '80s being "fascinating technology! huge capacity! whoops it caught fire again, but"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_battery#Lithium...

I agree with you, the bigger problem with Li-ion is that once they become popular, there are about six countries with massive deposits of Li. Even among them, the most are in Chile-Bolovia-Argentina triangle. The more popular Li-ion gets the more scarce or expensive Li becomes (say 10 years from now), so we have to move to batteries made of really abundant resources like Na (sodium).

2040 seems to be about right time, Startfor science analyst predicted something like that an year or so ago.

Wonder how cost effective nuclear transmutation of H into Li could become, depending on demand

You can extract it from seawater far more easily.

I'm surprised it's not more abundant. Usually, the smaller the atomic number, the more abundant the element is in the universe. But surprisingly, Lithium, Beryllium and Boron are not that abundant (compared to, say, Carbon).

Edit: at least not in the Earth's crust...

I thought this was a good question so I looked it up.

While on average, lighter elements are more common, it looks like after hydrogen and helium, the rest are far less common and not in atomic mass order ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abundance_of_the_chemical_elem... ). This seems to be due to matter being created in two phases, primordial nucleosynthesis (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Bang_nucleosynthesis) where hydrogen and helium formed out of protons and neutrons, and then later stellar neucleosynthesis (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stellar_nucleosynthesis) where heavier elements were formed inside stars via fusion.

This explains the distribution of heavier elements, because they were created by specific fusion pathways rather than just hot stuff cooling down.

My guess is that that explanation doesn't provide even a good first approximation to the abundances of element in the Earth's crust.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abundance_of_elements_in_Earth...

I think there's just a lot of chemistry and geology going on.

I think neither chemistry nor geology can alter the relative abundance of elements.

You'd be wrong. First, light gases escape from the Earth's gravity, which is why there's no molecular hydrogen or almost any helium whatsoever. Second, the crust is not the same thing as the Earth, and the distribution of elements by depth depends a lot on the density and other properties of the material elements are chemically bonded into.

Hm, those are actually pretty good points. I stand corrected.

Lithium is still relatively common though. The problem with it evenly spread out over the planet and there are few concentrated deposits of it.

You need about 1kg of lithium per kWh of battery, which is not nothing but Lithium is common and not used up by battery's making this far less significant than many assume. It's actually fairly common, we have ~700 times as much carbon but coal is 32$ per ton and the United States produces 1 billion tons of coal per year. Divide that by ~700 and your talking about a billion 1kwh batteries per year before recycling comes into play.

I think it's more like 1kg per 10 kWh. 1kg/kWh sounded too much to me, so I did a quick Google search:

https://www.researchgate.net/post/What_is_the_content_of_pur...

That actually sounds more reasonable, I was using "63 kg of lithium in a 70 kWh Tesla Model S battery pack" from here: https://electrek.co/2016/11/01/breakdown-raw-materials-tesla...

Anyway, my point was we currently mine highly concentrated lithium, but as long as we are willing to spend more it's not going to be an issue because it's not used up and overall it's very abundant.

We have no issue with lithium scarcity - it's tremendously abundant on earth, and we could recycle old batteries if we gave a damn... the lithium is just not currently worth recovering, that's how damned common it is. The problem now is the huge demand outstripping the on-hand supply, which has caused lithium prices to soar... but this year has seen a surge in new lithium projects and companies like Albemarle have seen their share prices surge accordingly. We've also seen numerous new projects in the Americas start producing lithium. Just let supply and demand fix this market, and it'll be smooth sailing.

...Cobalt, otoh, is more worrisome in the upcoming future and much, much worse to mine. Western demand for L-ion batteries has had China turn Africa into a wasteland (https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/business/batteries/c...) in search for more and more cobalt and copper to keep electrification projects going.

But it's not all bad news. There are alternative lithium chemistries that use less or no cobalt, just to date they either don't offer the same energy density or are not practical for mass production yet (lithium-sulfur).

I keep reading that there is an issue with sodium ion batteries in that the sodium ions are larger and tend to change size as they are absorbed by the anode. Which tends to degrade the anode quickly.

Answer might turn out to be never, as with a bunch of replacement candidates for silicon in semiconductors. Most have failed except for niche applications. GAS for radio front ends, etc, others for LED's.

What do you guys think of Vanadium Redox Batteries [1]?

Its primary advantage is, of course, in large installations. It cannot be used in cars and anything smaller but seems to be a good solution for stationary battery requirements.

I've been reading up a lot on it and would love to hear your thoughts and learn more.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vanadium_redox_battery

Vanadium electrolyte batteries are a mature technology. Vanadium is plentiful, cheap and (comparatively) non-toxic, and an accumulator can be built arbitrarily large (just add another electrolyte tank). The disadvantage is the energy density, but for grid storage other considerations, such as long-term stability) are more important.

Whoever wants to sell you lithium accumulators for grid storage probably owns a lithium battery factory.

Sounds good, but that makes me ask, so why aren't they already widely deployed? Makes me think there is some problem you aren't mentioning.

Per Wikipedia, flow batteries aren't as far along the research-production timeline as Lithium batteries.

That + grid-scale customers being extremely conservative = gradual uptake.

Actually, there are indeed at-least 5 big and established companies with finished products operating right now. I was talking to a cousin at the World Bank and got connected to a battery expert at the IFC. He calms me down that Vanadium Redox batteries are well proven and are being used now. Improvements are being advanced and announced regularly. In the next few years, I believe this will become common terms, as another means of storage.

Some of the "problems" are huge initial capital investment required to start up, the battery sizes start as big as (approx) 5x5x5 ft to get a 5kW output.

The recent bad news in the Vanadium Redox Battery is that of Imergy Energy shutting down[1] and their assets liquidated (I read somewhere, Sherwood Partners managed their liquidation).

For those interested, IFC recently released a 50+ paged Report on Energy Storage[2].

1. https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/flow-battery-as...

2. https://www.ifc.org/wps/wcm/connect/ed6f9f7f-f197-4915-8ab6-...

I found the notion of hard carbon : http://jes.ecsdl.org/content/162/14/A2476.full interesting too.

we really need an order of magnitude before these become exciting enough for people to change what they do, and once you have an order of magnitude on something like this the whole world changes.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com