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Comment by Sevaris | Hacker News Reader

Wouldn't a sodium-ion battery be much more environmentally friendly to produce? It seems like there's value in sustainability that makes this attractive over lithium-based batteries.

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The drooling part is that those batteries could be much less damaging when discarded. Even more, in a coastal area or a ship the danger of those batteries eventually ending in the water could be practically negligible by comparison with any traditional battery. And if done just with NA would be basically non poisonous for humans if reaching the food chain or water supply.

It they really work is a good leap in the right direction.

We must remember that some forms of NA will explode in a fire ball in contact with water.

Unfortunately, this battery still contains significant amounts of cobalt and nickel in the cathode, and battery electrolytes don't tend to be the type you want circling in your blood system - far from non poisonous.

It's valuable research, but still nowhere close to a superior end product.

Just occurred to me that a desalinization plant and sodium battery plant might be a good combination? Assuming brine could be used a source for sodium batteries being manufactured, it could be a good solution for all of the undesired byproducts of the desalination process.

Only if the energy density is not important for your application. There are such applications, but they are a minority. Smartphones, laptops, car batteries all want to be both light and small.

Is it a minority? What about batteries tied to energy grids like the Tesla battery farm in Australia? Wouldn't that be a potential use case which would be useful across the globe?

Yeah, but if all the grid storage and powerwall production could go sodium, that would free up lithium for the places it's needed.

The same argument could be made for nickel-iron batteries, though. They're heavy and bulky, but they last literally forever, and their source materials are ludicrously abundant. Why don't we see nickel-iron grid-scale storage? I'd love to know.

They are relatively expensive, they have fairly high self-discharge rates and aren’t very efficient. Last I checked, they had on the order of 1%/day discharge (some versions are as low as ~20%/month). They also are not very efficient in the charge/discharge cycle, losing 30-40% of the power put in. Lithium currently is around 10%.

Their primary use is in applications where their long lifetimes outweigh all other considerations.

Maybe, sodium is after all spent by megatonnes in inorganic chemistry

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