Lithium Ion Batteries Are the Curlicue Lightbulbs of Energy Storage

In general, the regler media is fascinated with the sturm and drang of nearly meaningless politics, and any other form of social friction they can drum up and lord over. They’re not very informative on a good day, and they’re more likely to lie than not if it suits whatever is residing in their cobwebbed heads and cankered hearts. So you have to poke around, and adduce how regler life is really going. And changing.

The idea of electrifying everything only caught on fairly recently, and without much forethought. Electric cars were supposed to get rid of gasoline powered cars. What was supposed to happen to the gasoline wasn’t specified. It’s a by-product of cracking crude oil. Whether we drive around burning hydrocarbons or not, that oil is going to be cracked and made into component substances we still need. Maybe we can go back to the solution the Cleveland refiners had for it back in the 19th century. They cracked oil to get petroleum jelly, and kerosene for lamps. They didn’t have any use for the gasoline, so they just dumped it on the ground. Cleveland had some interesting fires back in the day.

Eventually Rockefeller and some other fellers decided the gasoline might make good motor fuel. This led to the suburbs and the perfection of the car horn, so the jury’s still out on the whole scheme. But to get back to the topic at hand, electric cars were supposed to be the way forward out of tailpipeland problems.

As I’ve occasionally remarked, electric cars are not an electric car problem. Some of the first automobiles ever made were electric. It’s pretty easy to make an electric car. The problem has always been the battery. Gasoline has a whole lot of get up and go in it per gallon, and it’s nearly impossible to cram the same amount into a battery unless it’s really big and nasty. If you don’t believe me about the amount of energy in a gallon of gas, check your car’s gas tank with a match next time, and get back to me. I won’t wait up for you, though.

So electric car manufacturers and cellphone makers and other assorted manufacturers kind of solved the battery problem with lithium ion. They had a dry run with nickel cadmium, but lithium holds more juice, and takes up less space to do it. Your phone and your Tesla are loaded with the stuff.

Luckily for us, you can mine lithium using nobody but little children armed with those plastic pails and shovels you once took to the beach with you back in the day. So no downside there, amirite? But lithium is really nasty stuff, and once it catches on fire it burns like a Cleveland river. You can’t really drive that far on lithium-ion power, and it takes too long to recharge, and the battery wears out pretty quick. Oh, and they cost a lot. And you have to recycle it like it was plutonium’s little brother. Other than that, it’s great stuff.

Someone is bound to solve the battery problem someday. I always figured the solution wouldn’t be a battery per se. It would be a capacitor, a kind of solid state battery, if you will. Hey, if those little cylinders in the back of grandma’s TV set, or next to the speakers in my Fender Vibrolux, could store enough juice to give me quite a tingle, or maybe even kill me, they must be able to drag a car to the supermarket and back eventually, right?

I’ve always suspected that Li-On batteries were some not-too-bright-intermediate stage in battery production, sort of like those curlicue lightbulbs we were all required to buy just before they were basically banned from polite speech and the Home Despot aisles. Go ahead, look up CFL on Gargle, and you’ll get lots of info shoved at you about the Canadian Football League, but not much about Compact Fluorescent Lights. They were full of poison, and caught on fire more often than I require for table lamps, and wouldn’t even emit light when it was below freezing.

So what’s going to be the battery equivalent of LED lighting replacing CFLs, if we’re to continue this inapt simile? Could be sodium-ion batteries:

Lithium-free sodium batteries exit the lab and enter US production 

Natron says its batteries charge and discharge at rates 10 times faster than lithium-ion, a level of immediate charge/discharge capability that makes the batteries a prime contender for the ups and downs of backup power storage. Also helping in that use case is an estimated lifespan of 50,000 cycles.

So these new batteries weigh more than Lithium-Ion batteries per kilowatt-hour stored. But that 50,000 charge life cycle is as close to immortality as a battery can get, and the charge rate solves the main problem with existing batteries. These batteries will be used in stationary things first. Battery backups and power management stuff. But they’ll get better and probably replace the curlicue lithium ion batteries in cars pretty soon.

And once again, I’m sure we’re way ahead of the Chinese on this.

Or not:

Forget Chat AI. What About the Fusion Gig?

There certainly has been a lot of pixel ink spilled over Chat GPT, or OpenAI, or whatever incongruous acronym or nickname everyone gives to their autofill “artificial intelligence” monsters. That’s all they are, too. Autofill writ large. Instead of finishing your word, they finish your sentence. And your paragraph. And your very short essay, if you force it to. They have introduced a form of voting to the autofill procedure. The machine read (reads) the internet and decides what word would be likeliest to follow another based on every website’s bad writing and worse thinking. People somehow think this is going to spoil the internet. I have news for them. The internet comes pre-rancid. Way back when, Google pretty much destroyed the internet singlehandedly by demanding everything on the internet be designed for phones, and then search engine optimized to their standards — or else. There isn’t one website in 10,000 worth looking at anymore, and one YouTube video in 100,000 as a consequence. Ho hum.

The public face of this OpenAI “revolution” is Sam Altman, a strange dude that seems to be in the cockpit of great affairs for no apparent reason. His grrrllbosses on the board of directors of OpenAI tried to fire him recently, and found themselves on the curb instead, clutching a banker’s box filled with the tchochtkes from their own desks, waiting for their mothers to come pick them up. It’s unwise to wound a king, as they say. God knows who crowned him.

But I’m not particularly interested in OpenAI. It’s already being dumbed-down and bowlderized to accommodate the touchy zeitgeist, guaranteeing that its brand of intellectual margarine will never compete with my buttery writing, for instance. But Altman has his thumbs in all sorts pies, and one of them is Helion. And based on my very unscientific impression of this enterprise, I think it could work. And autofilling the entire energy grid of the world would be a bigger accomplishment than autofilling a recipe article for some Adwords site.

From the Wikiup:

Helion Energy, Inc. is an American fusion research company, located in Everett, Washington. They are developing a magneto-inertial fusion technology to produce helium-3 and fusion power via aneutronic fusion, which could produce low-cost clean electric energy using a fuel that can be derived exclusively from water.

Now, if you’ve ever seen Kirk Douglas feeling up Scandinavian women while thwarting Nazi nuclear programs, you know all about heavy water. Kirk plays a nuclear physicist in the tale, which is much less believable than the fact he’s doing it with one hand up every female shirt in the picture, but it’s still a fun movie. The Germans thought Deuterium, i.e. heavy water was the way to get a nuclear bomb.

But we’re not trying to split atoms, here, we’re trying to fuse them. It’s actually pretty straightforward to perform fusion with deuterium. Lots of people do it all the time. But getting more energy out of it than you put in is the trick. Helion’s approach looks feasible in this regard.

If you compare the scale and complexity of the things Helion is making in a big garage in the Pacific Northwest to the elephantine Rube Goldberg Tokamaks everyone one else is building at great public expense, you get some idea of why I might think this is practical, never mind feasible. Here’s a tokamak:

Come on. That’s a James Bond set, not a practical solution to anything.

Everyone in the industry is claiming that they’ll maybe have working nuclear fusion in forty years if you ladle another 10 billion soccer-dollars on the project. Helion is selling contracts for the electricity they’re going to make already. They say they’ll deliver a working model as soon as this year. They’re making these things in a glorified self-storage garage, using what looks to my eye like regular people to do the work. I’ve worked in factories as complicated as that, and I’m not too bright. The machine can make its own fuel, too. They’ve also pushed the limits of capacitors, instead of batteries, batteries being the ultimate logjam in electricity from anything other than goo and gas from the ground.

I can see lots of reasons why this might not work. I can’t figure out any reason why it can’t work. Big difference. Say, are you guys hiring? I could use open AI to design your next version. Unfortunately, it would look just like the last one, just filtered through the internet first.