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Comment by Nasrudith | Hacker News Reader

If it is nonflammable I wonder what its failure mode would be and how it could be triggered and what counter measures are needed if any.

If it has the energy bound within and accessible there must be some way to release it and some would be faster than others.

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Probably the only way of releasing the energy fast is to short the battery with a thick wire, or to burn the whole battery with an external source.

There's no rule that having lots of bound up energy has to be dangerous, that it has to be possible to release it quickly. There's enormous amount of potential energy in pure hydrogen gas. If you can just fuse the atoms. But it's incredibly hard to release it.

Similarly, a candle carries over 10 times the energy of the same sized stick of TNT but you'd have to work pretty hard to get that energy out quickly.

Just throw the candle in a bucket of LOX.

The candle energy density number is very biased, as you still need to bring O₂, which weights a lot.

Do you have a source for the candle fact? Thats quite interesting.

A quick search shows tnt has 4 kJ / g while paraffin has 42 kJ / g. A lot of energy is in paraffin's hydrocarbon chain, but less energy per bond and it is less accessible.

I would think that it can still short out and overheat, but the material the battery is made of does not combust or have any exothermic chemical reaction. The energetic failure mode would be- "sparks and gets really really hot."

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