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Comment by samatman | Hacker News Reader

This sort of speculative analysis is pretty useless. The process of bringing products like this to market is where the actual industrial manufacturing process is proven and improved, and meanwhile the assumptions they made about the raw material are continually changing as industry marches on.

There's a role for this sort of napkin-level environmental accounting, but it's a limited one. The toolkit is most applicable for products which actually exist, as products.

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Please note this is an ieee.org article, targeted at electrical/electronic engineers, talking, in part, about peer reviewed research [1], which you're calling napkin math. There's lots of money and focus going into lithium-sulphur batteries, because they are promising, and any engineer that works with batteries is keeping an eye on them.

Talking about the possible future, and shortfalls of the current state, isn't useless, it's the foundation of engineering. And, it's fun.

[1] https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/10418456

It's "IEEE Access".[1] That's the low end of IEEE publications. Costs US $1,995 to publish an article. There's some minimal peer review, plus they run the content through a plagiarism checking program. This is two notches down from Proceedings of the IEEE.

[1] https://ieeeaccess.ieee.org/

Sure, but calling it "napkin math" is disingenuous. If there's a specific problem with the math presented, they should point it out, rather than slandering the authors.

Every time something is defended like this, it's usually bullshit. There's just something about appealing to the authority of the thing and being outraged that one would consider that authority nonsense. Most often happens to bullshit. Usually accompanied with adjectives "problematic", "disingenuous", or "no evidence that". Strong markers of nonsense.

Yes. Various companies have been trying to make lithium-sulfur batteries for decades, without much success. The latest company trying is Lyten.[1] Supposedly they started up a battery production line in San Jose in 2023. Or at least they issued a press release about doing so. Can you order sample batteries from their web site? No. Is there pricing info? No.

Lyten uses graphene sheets, which may not be cost effective.

Toyota and CASIP (a battery consortium in China) are investing heavily in solid-state lithium-ion batteries. That's likely to be working sooner. And, of course, lithium-iron phosphate batteries are taking over the low end.

It will probably be a good thing when batteries capable of thermal runaway disappear from the market.

[1] https://lyten.com/products/batteries/

As someone who buys, sells, installs, and operates enormous volumes of battery assets, I disagree.

No one I know who is in battery tech for a living is writing off sulfur batteries as napkin-math-interesting only. I’m curious to know who you work with that believes otherwise in industry so assertively.

Is anybody actually selling a lithium-sulfur battery? Even as a sample?

Who cares? It’s a technology in development intended to help solve an unsolved problem — efficient energy storage. This is research.

I've worked at a battery-analytics company which given your background you might have heard of, this involved hosting the Bay Area battery research community on a monthly basis. I'm not dismissing lithium sulfur as a viable technology. I'm saying that trying to calculate the environmental impact of a technology like that before it has sizable production and several rounds of process improvement is napkin-scribbling. Useful in some ways, but it's premature to draw conclusions from it. That's all.

Fair enough. Indeed my only point was that lithium-sulfur has production potential, as does solid-state, etc. and that’s where the industry interest originates.

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