Totaled Tesla goes up in flames three weeks after crash A totaled Tesla Model S burst into flames in a Sacramento junkyard earlier this month, causing a fire that took "a significant amount of time, water, and thinking outside the box to extinguish," firefighters said. The vehicle was involved in a comparably unexplosive accident that sent it to the junkyard three weeks ago – it's …
This happened after the Mountain View crash in 2018 as well. But I'd be rather concerned about using water to extinguish these battery fires.
The article isn't quite accurate. Water and metallic lithium is bad, but not "explosive".
But batteries don't contain metallic lithium (water and potassium is even more bad, but you can put bananas in your cocktail)
The problem with Li-Ion batteries is that they contain their own oxidiser so smothering them with water (or CO2) doesn't really help - the general plan is to dump water on them to cool them down so the reaction stops and the fire goes out. The problem is then if they dry out and heat back up the reaction and fire can start again.
If it was in a scrap yard I would have thought leaving it to burn was probably the easiest option.
A lot! These wastes get into the ground water, even in dry areas this can be very harmful, it is a major contributor to cancers like leukemia!
This is why I get so furious with the anti-CO2 crowd. You want to reduce the substance that keeps oue planet warm* while in the same effort contaminate the planet with deadly materials. You won't allow mining of rare earth metals in western countries with safety and labor laws but your fine with them being mined in Peru, Columbia, Chile, and the Republic of Congo where much of it is done with child slave labor! All these operations are destroying the local environment for the black and brown people you claim to care so much about!
Hypocrites, one and all!
*During the early Eocene epoch CO2 levels were as high as 700-900 ppm and life flourished on this planet, the Earth was literally ice free! We are currently at 400 ppm, we could not burn enough fossil fuels to produce that much CO2 in a million years! Even if we could life on this planet would survive! Lowering CO2 levels to 375 or even 350 ppm could have devastating consequence. One or two large volcanic eruptions (there are several very large ones that are overdue, i.e. Yellowstone) could plunge this world into a cascading ice age!
You act as though burning oil isn't quite toxic. Burning coal is even more toxic - it releases heavy metals including radioactive ones into the atmosphere. If you add up all the radiation released into the environment from TMI, Chernobyl and Fukishima it doesn't come close to the radiation released into the environment from just the past decade's coal burning.
But yeah, you go on denying science and being ignorant of the fact that CO2 levels were around 280 ppm since human civilization began until we started burning fossil fuels. So 375 ppm wouldn't be "disastrous" like your bald faced lies make it out to be or humanity would never have survived to the point where we could start changing our planet's atmosphere.
And no, Yellowstone is not "overdue", and shows no signs of blowing for many thousands of years. It may erupt again in a few hundred thousand years, but that would devastate most of the US and greatly affect the entire planet for at least a decade regardless of the CO2 level that exists when it happens.
CO2 levels were around 280 ppm since human civilization began
If you define the industrial revolution as the starting point of civilization, then yes.
If you care to read up on the medieval as well as the roman warming period, and take a few moments to consider the impact of the little iceage on food production in Europe, you may start to see some problems with your reasoning.
The CO2 level was pretty constant at 280 ppm since humanity evolved until the industrial revolution. Stuff like the medieval warming period, little ice age etc. were not influenced by CO2 level nor did they change the CO2 level.
No one is saying there aren't natural processes that can and do cause climate change, just that the recent spike in warming is clearly due to increase in the CO2 level in the atmosphere - if there is one thing climate scientists are 100% sure about it is that more CO2 means a warmer planet.
Volcanic eruptions cannot be "overdue" unless you are writing a script for a sensationalist Discovery Channel documentary. Eg that estimate for the Yellowstone super volcano every X thousand years is based on a sample size of 2 previous eruptions and is meaningless. Volcanoes aren't busses that follow a timetable.
All complex manufactured goods including cars that run on petrol or diesel as well as electric vehicles include minerals that are mined by child slave labour in the 3rd world.
I think you're a bit confused, someone can be the most vile racist arse and still believe that CO2 is a serious issue that needs to be addressed (probably at the expense of all the people he doesn't think are people). There's no need for hypocrisy.
Also, no one* is talking about reducing the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere, they're talking about reducing the amount of CO2 that humans are adding to the atmosphere.
* OK there probably are some people talking about it but there are some people talking about how Elvis is still alive and well and living on an island with Princess Diana so there's no accounting for what some people talk about.
You're misunderstanding the "anti-CO2 crowd" then. No-one thinks that rising CO2 and rising temperature levels will kill all life on Earth.
What a return to Eocene conditions will (provably) do though is kill most existing species, because most species cannot tolerate such extreme temperatures. Humans have the technology to ensure we survive as a species, but (also provably) the living space for billions of people will become uninhabitable. Most of those people are black or brown.
The "anti-CO2 crowd" think that mass extinctions and widespread starvation or displacement of people, caused solely by human action, is a bad thing. YMMV.
Separately, many of the "anti-CO2 crowd" also think technologies that allow fat rich white people to keep using the same unsustainable level of resources, just *different* resources, are a bad thing. There's widespread recognition that electric vehicles aren't going to help a society that normalises 100-mile-a-day commutes.
I think the best answer is removable batteries. As well as this issue, it makes the problem of degrading batteries less, makes it quick to change rather than slow to recharge, allows faster adoption as the users do not have to buy the batteries, and makes closed loop recycling easier.
Fine in theory, not so good in practice. Early Teslas were built with battery swaps in mind, but if your battery changeover equipment goes out of alignment, you run the risk of damaging the battery pack. AND then the problem you were trying to solve is instead exponentially worse.
Or legislation that mandates batteries part of a car involved in a crash are dismantled within a few days. If the car is not deemed a write-off the battery pack is replaced. Of course there'd be lots of push back from insurers but that's what legislators are for. Oh, I see the problem.
The problem is disposal! These batteries are expensive to dispose of! Do you really think Joe-Bob at the junk yard has the capabilities to dispose of the battery? Do you think he's going to pay $1000's to dispose of the batteries in a car that was dropped off to him? No, he'll do what this guy did, just stash it on the yard!
If you believe that every one of these batteries are gong to be disposed of properly your naive! We can't even guarantee the proper disposal of current toxic and electronic waste! There will be black market battery disposal operations that will just illegally dump these batteries and they will leak into the environment!
And all you hypocrite greenies just want to close your eyes and act like this isn't a problem!
"The problem is disposal! These batteries are expensive to dispose of! Do you really think Joe-Bob at the junk yard has the capabilities to dispose of the battery? Do you think he's going to pay $1000's to dispose of the batteries in a car that was dropped off to him? No, he'll do what this guy did, just stash it on the yard!"
He'll be miffed then at paying a fine after not disposing of batteries properly.
Batteries can be recycled perfectly fine if removed from a vehicle and repurposed in to all sorts of uses.
Just because hick scrapyard owners want to do jobs badly doesn't mean we should continue to use ICE, where I presume they're already not bothering to dispose of Asbestos, fuels and oils appropriately.
I'm not a fan of EVs myself, but, yeah, it's not like ICE vehicles aren't full of combustible and flammable materials, hazardous waste, etc. Complex machines that have to perform a number of functions generally will be.
The spontaneous-fire issue with EV batteries is newsworthy mostly because it's novel. I have a friend who had a towing service and car lot on one of his commercial properties for several years, and while there was never a major fire there, that was at least partly luck. You get gasoline spills and whatnot at a wrecking yard. And water isn't great for putting out gasoline fires, either.
Hell, remember magnesium-block engines?
"....Batteries can be recycled perfectly fine if removed from a vehicle and repurposed in to all sorts of uses...."
In the case of the subject of the article, it is pretty clear that the battery pack was damaged by the crash, and was absolutely NOT fine to be repurposed.
"....The problem is disposal! These batteries are expensive to dispose of! Do you really think Joe-Bob at the junk yard has the capabilities to dispose of the battery? Do you think he's going to pay $1000's to dispose of the batteries in a car that was dropped off to him? No, he'll do what this guy did, just stash it on the yard!...."
Perhaps the USA allows cowboy 'junkyard' operators to carry on as they please, but in the UK at least, scrap yard operators have to be properly licenced and have to operate according to the requirements of the law regarding end-of-life vehicles - the law stipulates what has to be removed, and how it must be treated or disposed of. The scrap yard operator then has to fill out forms to confirm that they have done what the law requires.
If UK law says the battery has to be removed and sent for recycling, then that is what the scrappy has to do.
And they will the want to pass the costs on and charge a disposal fee for scrapping vehicles.
Scrap yards are businesses. The scrap value of the materials must exceed the costs of breaking them for the businesses to be viable. If the value of the scrap materials does not, they will want to charge for the disposal of the vehicle.
And if you can't afford to scrap a car, I can see a lot of accidental vehicle fires at the end of many vehicle's lives.
"If UK law says the battery has to be removed and sent for recycling, then that is what the scrappy has to do."
You are utterly clueless about scrapyards in the UK. In fact you're beyond clueless.
How do you think the "travelling community" sell off the huge amounts of metal they steal? Do you think they ship it out of the UK or something?
NOBODY is enforcing the regulations in the UK and they never have. You're more likely to find a unicorn than you are a 100% legitimate scrappy.
On the contrary, you are clueless.
If you know of any business that is acting illegally, then report them. Your local council,and the Environment Agency WILL take action, as the number of prosecutions of such people that they carry out make clear. If you think there is no enforcement, you are 100% wrong.
There is a very big difference between a 'dodgy' scrap metal dealer/recycler taking in metal which has been stolen by travellers, and the processing of end-of-life vehicles which is generally done by auto breakers prior to the remaining scrap metal being weighed-in at the recyclers.
"This is only going to become a bigger problem as more battery packs arrive at the scrap yard. Having the space to remove and isolate battery packs from each other lest we see cascading fires is potentially going to be a big problem. :("
Yep. I note there was no comment about how the wrecked Tesla was stored or if the scrap yard had any special consideration for how they treat and store scrapped Evs. If they just "rack'em and stack'em" like they do with conventional ICE cars, then that's asking for trouble. A well managed and good scrapper with drain the wrecks of the various fluids for environmental reasons and remove the batteries for safety reason (and sell any that are "good". They will probably have new processes in place for hybrids and EVs, like removing all the batteries. After all, those batteries are valuable parts if in good condition as well recyclable.
Water is also not a good method for lithium battery fires, not just pure lithium fires. This isn't a Telsa thing, and the article leans pretty hard into making this an anti Tesla rant. I get that in general, people are pretty pissed at both the company and the man these days.
It's terrible in this case in particular, because the details matter. I first ran across this issue because of the lithium battery fires on the Boeing dreamliner. What they are reporting on for these Teslas is the same problem. Not just the fact that most modern lithium batteries are, well more then temperamental, lets call them downright furious in specific situations.
Because the details matter, I will try to tightly define this problem. Firefighters need to be, and have not been, properly and thoroughly trained to deal with battery fires. Neither have whole classes of other people who need to know better. In this case that includes the auto dismantler/recyclers.
One of the early battery failures on the Dreamliner at an airport near me was accelerated when the fire crew responded to reports of "smoke" coming from the battery compartment. That battery was in a flight rated case that was specifically designed to contain a battery failure. It did up until the point the crew, not knowing better, did what came naturally and pried it open to spray water(technically PFOA laden fire foam in all likelihood) on it's contents, at which point a contained problem became a larger unconstrained disaster on national news. No one should throw those firefighters under the bus, but battery fires are one of the hundred other things they need to reliably deal with safely, just like other industrial hazards like oil and chemical fires.
The firefighters and the wrecking yards did almost everything wrong. Batteries need to be stripped out of cars just like air bags, and for similar reasons. They are basically pyrotechnics. Having failed to safely remove the battery(a valuable thing in the aftermarket as well) it was only a matter of time before things got "interesting".
The description of what next reads like a modern keystone cops script, with the fire crew trying almost everything they tell you NOT to do to a battery fire. It's like they were trying to become Youtube famous. Fire hoses on a sealed battery pack aren't going to help much. It would help if the Tesla(and other automakers) had to build a mechanical relase for the battery. At least the Tesla's is bolted on from the outside, so it could have been disconnected, mine is built into the interior, and you'd have to rip out the whole back seat to get to it.
What they should have done it put sand or dirt on it(or ideally use a copper based extinguisher to kill the reaction)
Instead they end up digging it a swimming pool, which was like sticking a fork in a toaster full of M-80s then throwing into a bathtub. This is what happens when people with plenty of the wrong training attack a problem that requires specific handling. Instead of digging a hole, they should have just buried the damn car if all they had was a bulldozer. Again, more the fault of the department that they haven't been trained properly. What they were trying made sense in general, it just wasn't going to work on a burning EV. The training materials we already have tell you NOT to do stuff like this. The whole car was doomed to be a total loss when the wreckers didn't safely decommission the battery packs. They also could have caused somebody to be electrocuted. I doubt their state mandated any safety precautions or training for dismantlers at all. Probably have seven laws for airbags, catalytic converters and old seatbelts though.
Disconnect and remove is not enough. What you need to do is discharge the battery so it contains less energy to start or maintain a fire. Recycling would be a good next step. Last time I checked this was difficult because battery technology changes fast enough to obsolete potential investment in recycling before a likely payoff.
Discharging the battery seems an excellent idea although IIRC Lion doesn't tolerate complete discharge well. You won't be reusing the battery or its component cells if you don't manage the discharge properly. There's also the issue of getting rid of maybe 50kwh (180000000 joules) of energy without (further) damaging anything. I don't think this is something one would want to try at home.
There's also the issue of getting rid of maybe 50kwh (180000000 joules) of energy without (further) damaging anything.
The first thing you'd want to do is inspect the cell packets for mechanical damage and whether their temperature is markedly over ambient. Which would mean opening up the battery compartment(s) (probably not as simple as turning a slotted cover using a coin) and pointig a FLIR camera at the contents.
The cells considered safe could then be hooked up to an inverter delivering mains power to be consumed by whatever. This would of course need some appropriate infra at scrapyards dealing with EV.
When I was in the military, our unit would go through a boatload of lithium batteries that were used in radios. Each battery had a discharge button on them, that would put a resistor across the battery to discharge it slowly and completely. We'd typically mash the button and load up 40-50 of them in a connex and come back in a week with a voltmeter to check that they were discharged fully. If they were, great. Into the trash as "commercial waste". If they wouldn't discharge, they'd have to go into a hazmat barrel and turned in for recycling. Every once in a while, one would catch on fire, but they wouldn't burn up the connex. We'd just have to shovel out all of the molten batteries and chuck them into another hazmat barrel! Totally safe! :D
The battery pack has a pyrofuse in it which breaks the connection as soon as the airbags go off. The battery is effectively open circuit.
This won't really help stop a thermal event if the battery is damaged, but prevents electrocution for first responders cutting you out of the mangled wreckage.
It is more complex of a decision than that.
If a vehicle has been involved in a fatality, it is often kept in custody of the wrecking yard for an extended period of time to allow the investigation to complete. If there is any indication the fatality was the result of a defective vehicle, it could be held as forensic evidence for years through a court trial.
Removing the battery could result in the unintentional destruction of evidence. Evidence that could exonerate or convict. It doesn't matter how well the mechanic did at removing the battery, the fact the evidence was touched can be used by a sharp attorney to create a 'reasonable doubt' for a jury.
You need to stretch that line of argument past the point it resembles logic anymore. We don't do that with other dangerous evidence and it stands up fine in court. It's not like the bomb squad piles armed explosive devices in the evidence room and then waits for your court date to dispose of them.It's not like the cops don't unload a gun used in a crime. It's not like they dive someones Walter White RV to the courthouse so the jury can taste the chemicals. They take pictures, write up a report, and then let the professionals deal with mop up.
What you describe is not, and never was, how the rules of evidence work. We have seen a lot of crap lawyering recently, so peoples expectations are shifting, but hiring a layer with that line of thinking is a great way to get convicted/lose in court. It is not a well reasoned legal defense.
The chemicals in the battery are quite valuable, and there are facilities that can recycle them. Doing so should be standard practice, especially since they can be a hazard if left lying around and especially if damaged by rough handling in the junkyard.
Partly because Tesla battery packs are still being re-used extensively. So unless they are shot, they will get stuffed into another EV, or taken apart and re-certified. Been that way since about 3 years into the Model S production.
We still need to keep out foot on the pedal ramping up recycling at scale to match the increase in EVs and hybrids we are selling, but right now there isn't enough volume of old packs to recycle to bootstrap that without underwriting the plants losses till the volume in the dismantling market catches up.
IIRC, Audi take in a lot of "used" batteries and re-use them in the factories for forklift trucks and pallet shifters etc. The reduced capacity is more than enough for those jobs and have a lot less overhead than heavy lead/acid batteries traditional used.
That doesn't sound right at all, blocking panels in a connected array will kill the output of the whole array, while doing nothing useful, wasting a roll of tape and your time to boot. I suspect there are some other details there, but the key is that while panels can burn if set on fire, they rarely spontaneously combust.
A HVDC solar string can eat itself if the electrical connections are @$$3D up any starts melting the wires though. In both cases your roofs on fire though.
So, this Tesla has been wrecked, caught on fire, doused with water, caught on fire again, (repeat etc.), tipped on its side, dropped in a pit, and submerged in thousands of gallons of water.
In today's used car market it's probably, after all that, still worth about $10K over the new retail price.
I wish I were joking...!
Usually they strip them before stacking them like that. Just need to set up a battery dude in a parts van to pull the pack, dump it in a fireproof tub with a copper suppressor fitted, and haul it off when the car first arrives(or even before it's towed.
Made-up crisis?
Melting ice caps and glaciers. Oceans getting warmer causing sea level rise. More frequent and more severe extreme weather events.
If you think the human population as a whole, and not just the richer parts of the richer nations, can deal with that while the planet is not even at 900ppm CO2, then I would strongly suggest that you go copulate yourself.
Not quite, damaged Lithium ion cells can still be storing a ton of energy. Once they have gone exothermic it becomes a chain reaction and in packaged cells the heat and explosions damage adjacent cells. If you cool a damaged cell down, it will still be decomposing and out-gassing energetically (instead of burning), and still releasing it's stored energy as electricity and or heat in addition to venting vaporized electrolyte(which can look like smoke, but technically isn't). Cooling by itself just slows things down for a while, but it's pause, not rewind. The cooled cells will still fail catastrophically once the cooling stops if they are damaged. So you mix it with sand and let it punch itself out or chemically kill it with something like powdered copper.
This is one reason why they stuff misbehaving devices in a burn-bag on airplanes, and why they suggest dry sand is better than cooling or water for managing a runaway failure on a larger battery pack. Cover it, wait it out, and shovel the mess into a barrel for further processing.
Better still, remove the battery before it goes china syndrome and discharge it to a safer level for storage, resale and reuse, or recycling/decommissioning.
I think the bigger risk will be to insurance premiums. Insurers can't sell crashed vehicle on a salvage title, and there'd presumably be liability if the scrapyard is storing the vehicle. If they've bought it to part out, the risk would presumably be to the scrapyard's insurance policy.
Newer EV designs would seem to make the risks even worse, ie by embedding batteries into frame elements, it makes fire fighting and battery removal a whole lot harder.
Depends. If there is enough crash damage, there may be no practicable way of safely disposing of the battery.
In a way, it's like defueling a nuclear reactor in a power station. If you manage to pull out all the fuel rods, get them into the cooling pond, all it well. If just one of them gets stuck because of some damage somewhere (e.g. a graphite block, after years of being transmuted by the neutron flux, has crumbled and is jamming a rod guide), you've now got a huge problem to deal with. Same with scramming the pile: you need to do it quickly, whilst it's still possible to do it at all, because very soon it won't be!
With an EV, getting rid of the battery energy is easy, provided the battery is in good shape. The only way of making a battery of this sort (with fundamentally very reactive constituents) safe otherwise is to fragment and disperse it, but it'll likely catch fire whilst you're doing so.
At least with petrol and especially diesel, there's a good chance that a cracked tank will just drain away, and as long as it doesn't land on something hot / sparky, you can make it safe with a bucket of sand / water.
There are a lot of Teslas on the road in the USA - probably 10x as the next competitor.
Most of the other manufacturers models are sold in small numbers, to meet 'must sell an EV model' rules and have very small low performance batteries.
China is the main market for non-Tesla and you aren't going to hear about a fire in China on the evening news.
EVs are still about 50x LESS likely to be involved in a fire than dead-dinosaur mobile, but a burning Chevy doesn't make the front of el'reg
A burning Chevy will be a not burning Chevy in a couple hours (or a few minutes if the fire brigade arrives and extinguishes it). And once put into storage (dumped at a junkyard), it doesn't tend to catch fire on its own without outside influence (such as dowsing it in petrol and throwing a match in).
A burning Tesla (or any other BEV) is more like a tyre-junkyard fire, just sit back and watch it burn for weeks. And it'll just spontaneously combust weeks after any impact event without any outside assistance. Even with fire brigade intervention, it'll still burn for days without extraordinary intervention - digging a whole, shoving the still-burning car in it, then filling it entirely with water.
Better for the environment is perhaps a better statement.
People don't seem to realize just how polluting oil refining is, not to mention the enormous amount of energy oil cracking requires.
Yeah, EVs require minerals that need to be mined, but gasoline/petrol doesn't emerge from the ground with a preset octane rating.
Yes, the current state of EV technology has room for improvement, it is in its early stage but as a bridge to the future it should be much better in time..
But there isn’t much further to go with improving the impact of the ICE, particularly when you sharing a high sided urban street with hundreds of foot-born air breathers.
"....so either farmland is converted from human-food-producing to car-food-producing..."
Quite a significant area of farmland in Europe (and the UK in particular) has already been turned over to producing oil crops for energy production (bio-diesel from oilseed rape, and bio-ethanol from cereals), added to which there is now a fairly large (and increasing) area being used for production of maize or rye silage to feed anaerobic digesters which then produce methane gas which is burned in a gas turbine to drive a generator to produce electricity for the Grid (and to help provide the electricity needed to power your EV).
No, but you're redeploying arable land from providing food to providing fuel. Market economics means production will move to places where food is cheaper, but the people who live there will find their local food production has been replaced with fuel production for export. Do this at scale and starvation follows.
You can do it with food waste or stalks, of course. And there was some research into doing this with land unsuitable for food production, using a scrub plant, but don't recall the details. But above a certain price point you're always going to see potential food being used to make fuel.
(edit @AC - snap!)
Yeah, the net effect of burning that Tesla is probably to put into the atmosphere greenhouses gasses in excess of the equivalent CO2 which has been saved during the car's (unduly short) lifetime. Also, we have to count all the CO2 that went into putting out the fire - including getting the appliance in situ, digging that pit, and pumping all those kilolitres of water.
Unless, of course, if it turns out some of the chemicals produced in the fire create aerosol cooling and the whole thing was a net benefit to the environment - in which case we need to BURN MORE TESLAS, STAT.
> Yeah, the net effect of burning that Tesla is probably to put into the atmosphere greenhouses gasses in excess of the equivalent CO2 which has been saved during the car's (unduly short) lifetime.
So one out of 1000 BEV's doesn't end up being as good for the environment as we had hoped.
I guess that makes the other 999 perfectly fine BEV's that haven't experienced this spontaneous combustion event that replaced 999 oil-buring cars useless?
> Is that good for environment to extract lithium?
Not particularly, no. But it's also no worse than extracting petroleum. In fact, I'd say it's much better than extracting petroleum because petroleum gets used once only, whereas lithium in the existing batteries is used again and again and again each time it is charged and then dischared. 100's of times. It's not a single use item like petroleum is. And it is recycleable, petroleum is not. While there may not be a lot of recycling yet, that is an industry that is still being built up and long term there will be recycling. It just isn't possible to recycle petroleum (combusted in an internal combustion engine to produce power) at all, ever. It's just gone (well, besides the pollution its combustion has caused that is). And you have to extract more petroleum for the next use of the vehicle.
> Produce electricity from gas or coal?
Why do you say this? Those aren't the only sources, even now, of electricity. Hydro. Nuclear. Thermal. Wind. Solar. All of those contribute a significant proportion of electricity right now. In some countries (e.g. France) Nuclear produces more electricity than coal and gas. In others, e.g. Canada, hydro is a huge component of their grid. And those sources are gowing over time. And yes, actually, grid-scale coal and gas electricity generation is, in fact, much, much, more efficient and cleaner (relatively speaking, it's still dirty) than burning petroleum products in a car engine to produce power. For starters, they benefit from efficiencies of scale. Being stationary, they can implement efficiency measures that the extra weght to implement just isn't possible in a mobile device like a car. There is less waste of energy as compared to with a IC car, a gas or coal plant can run at its most efficient level in terms of turbine speeds and the burn-rate of coal and gas to maintain that speed for months on-end, no wasting extra fuel on speeding up, slowing down, speeding up again, idling at lights, and so on.
> Produce a new car using resource and energy to replace a still working one?
Why do you say this? At the current price of BEVs, they aren't purchased by the type of people who run a car into the ground over 20+ years. They are mostly purchased by the sorts of people who buy new cars every 3-10 years (often on lease-type arrangements), replacing perfectly good internal combustion cars with other combustion cars. Therefore buying a BEV does reduce internal combustion engined cars, because the purchaser hasn't replaced their IC car with yet another IC car, which they would be doing anyway, but a BEV. And, are you honestly, seriously saying with a straight face that a 3-10 year old IC car is going to be scrapped? Really? You haven't heard of the 2nd-hand car market? No. The IC car replaced by the typical buyer of a BEV will end up in a used car yard, being purchased by the sort of people who do run their car into the ground after 20+ years, to replace their 20+ year old, hugely inefficient by todays standards IC car, and that piece of shit car will then be recycled. Thus a buyer replacing their 3-10 year old IC with a BEV will result in some 20+ year old car, built to older emissions standards, being taken off the road as it is replaced by their 3-10 year old, more modern, more efficient, better emission-standard compliant vehicle that they traded in for their BEV.
> And what about recycling it?
Recycling what? Their IC they replaced with a BEV? They have done better than recycling, they will have reused it by putting it on the used-car market to replace an even older car, as per my previous point. And reusing is better than recycling for the environment, with recycling being better than tossing out.
If you mean recycling their BEV, what of it? Apart from the battery, the rest of the car (shell, chassis, etc.) can be recycled by normal scrap-metal recycling, as any current car is. The battery can be recycled too. In case you hadn't noticed, BEVs haven't been around for very long, therefore the recycling of the battery is an industry still in its infancy, as is the entire BEV market. They currently take up an absolutely tiny percentage of cars on the road today. As the volume increases, more recycling will come on line to deal with the batteries. What? You expected capitalism to have the entire end-to-end process in place before they started selling BEVs? As each part of the end-to-end lifecycle (building from 'virgin' materials, new-mined lithium, etc., then those getting recycled to be used in later production) starts to build to commercial vialble levels, later stages will come online as it becomes economic to implement those parts of the system. Since BEVs have only been on the roads for about 10 years, and only any significant volume in the last 5, very few batteries from those vehicles relative to the overall production rate have 'worn out' or otherwise need to be dealt with.
There already is recycling of batteries, many countries have legal requirements for what to do with lead-acid, alkaline, NiCad, NiMH, and Li-ion batteries. They already do recycle these types of batteries, just not at the scale that will be required as the volume of BEVs increases. But, hey, it's an existing industry, it can be scaled up as soon as the economic incentives are there for them to do that.
I charge my EV from renewable sources. At the moment, it is charging using the output of my Solar Panels. This month, I have driven over 800 miles and used exactly 0.0000kWh of grid electricity. In winter, I still charge my car from solar and I get around 45% of the energy needed by the car that way.
When it is time to scrap the car, the body will be recycled as it is made of Aluminium. The battery will be recycled as well. Either used for powering a home (I already use 48kWh of old EV batteries to power my home) or broken down into recoverable elements which are a lot cheaper that using those same elements fresh from the mines.
I have pondered this question for many years and I'm still not sure.
I think part of the answer to this is that once we humans produce too much of something we tend to start destroying our living conditions.
The sheer volume of internal combustion engines in the world all pumping out foulness means we appear to be doing some damage to bits of our life systems.
EVs don't generate the same foulness as ICE vehicles, but the do generate other foulness that we're only just starting to properly be able to monitor.
Once EVs become the dominant transport choice (and I suspect they will) we'll no doubt discover we're shredding some other critical support system and we'll need to find a solution to that.
One thing to consider is that the ICE method has really really been perfected (ok not perfect but they're very very good)- very clever people have worked on them for over a 100 years, so any efficiencies that can now be found in them are teeeeny tiny.
EVs on the other hand are relatively new, and certainly new to mainstream manufacturers/consumers so there are probably a lot more efficiencies that are waiting to be uncorked in the EV realm which may ease our rampage on the planets resources.
One thing to consider is that the ICE method has really really been perfected (ok not perfect but they're very very good)- very clever people have worked on them for over a 100 years, so any efficiencies that can now be found in them are teeeeny tiny.
Still, well to wheel efficiency of an ICE is about 14% now even with a century of improvements, EVs manage double that even when charged off a fossil fuel power station: it's much easier to run those at maximum efficiency and there's of course the option to use their waste heat which you simply don't have with a mobile source.
Sounds about right.
The question then is, how do further improvements happen, to make best use of whatever green energy supply we have?
For EV's there's probably limited room for improvement; motors are already close to the limit of what could be achieved, no one has come up with much lighter battery, tyres have to be grippy and are therefore lossy, etc.
The only big way to improve on the energy expenditure of an EV is to address the losses - friction and charging / discharging efficiency. If they made a cross section area : length ratio better, that'd do something for drag (long and thin is better). If they reduced the rolling resistance, that'd help too.
So, what's the limits here? Well, suppose you made the wheels out of solid steel, and ran them on steel rails? That'd be next to no rolling resistance. Of course, having rails then means traffic becomes a bit tricky, so perhaps they all get joined up into a long, organised chain. That also help with the aerodynamic drag. And as the rails are fixed, you could have a wire overhead to supply electricity too, so you could get rid of the battery weight / danger, and also the charing / discharging inefficiency.
Of course, I'm (facetiously) describing a train. That, really, is likely the best possible answer, because it also solves the transport problem for freight. At the moment, EV's look sketchy for heavy freight haulage, but trains have been doing that job electrically for a very long time.
Does This Matter?
Of course, it only matters if we have a limited supply of renewable / green electricity. If we get nuclear fusion going in a big way, then perhaps efficiency at the point of consumption becomes less relevant.
Dedicated roadways for the computer controlled EVs/buses/trucks.
That "future" exists, we just aren't doing it, even on trains which already have a dedicated right of way. We just need to put the pieces together in a sane combination, instead of selling the retarded notion that some half drunk fool can walk into his garage, crawl into his car and take a nap while it delivers them across town.
Nor will there be any point in having an auto-driven vehicle in the first place, given the only routes it'd be able follow safely are ones consisting of nice straight and flat roads joined by very easy turns, all taken at a nice sedate pace so as not to cause any wheelspin/slip, and where at the slightest hint of rain/frost/snow the vehicle simply refuses to start up for fear of never being able to reach its destination in one piece...
If we get massive quantities of fusion energy available, we will pollute our environments with heat and light.
Easy enough to imagine people maintaining their gardens as tropical paradises all year even in the coldest of climates. Lots of heat and lots of light. Along with roads heated to prevent ice. And cooled in summer to prevent tarmac melting.
".....If we get nuclear fusion going in a big way, then perhaps efficiency at the point of consumption becomes less relevant......"
Everything I read suggests that getting from nuclear fusion 'in a big way' is about 20 years away.....
....just as it was 20 years ago....
....and (I suspect) just as it will be in 20 years time ;)
Not that you couldn't build much better electric trains, but we won't. The train industry is wedged between 18th century rail infrastructure based on Roman ox cart standards, and modern trainmakers that are as bad as aerospace companies about planned cost overruns.
Electric buses are cheaper, work on existing infrastructure, and come in more flexible sizes. Scaling up rail to meet the same level of ridership, routes and scheduling means literally tearing large tracts of your cities down.
The most useful transit is closer to something like the bus model of an electric Mercedes Sprinter. For the schedule to be quick enough to be useful you need smaller buses more often, meaning less people per bus on the (more numerous) secondary lines. Trains are the opposite of that, with a 4-8 car trainset that weights 10 tons per passenger, carrying the same number of people as a 5-ton bus, and stopping at 20 empty stations along the way. Trains only make sense on high density, long transit lines, and can't work on their own.
Trains are the opposite of that, with a 4-8 car trainset that weights 10 tons per passenger,
This sounded very wrong, and indeed. As an example, the Stadler Flirt, a common model used for regional services, weighs 76 ton for its shortest 4-car version and seats 116. That's 655kg per seat. A 6-car weighing 170 ton seats 333, at 510kg per seat. A double-decker intercity trainset in use here in NL weighs 350 tons and seats just under 600, again a tick over 500kg/seat. This of course fully occupied during rush hour, but rail companies tend to run smaller sets outside those hours, and it's rare to see trains less than half full.
"This of course fully occupied during rush hour, but rail companies tend to run smaller sets outside those hours, and it's rare to see trains less than half full."
Rush hour is the killer for public transport though. If you have enough trains or buses to cope with peak demand, then you have a lot of very expensive equipment lying idle or running at a loss. And you really don't want bus and train drivers working "gig economy" style for a couple hours morning and evening.
And you really don't want bus and train drivers working "gig economy" style for a couple hours morning and evening.
With trains that's less of a problem; a set can consist of 1, 2 or 3 EMUs but still needs only one driver. So the driver doing a 05:00 to 13:00 shift will not be idle (modulo their route roster) but just sit at the front of smaller sets outside rush hour. Of course you do need less other personnel on a shorter train, but those are jobs that are easier to fill and indeed can be offered as part-time though I'm not sure whether they are, more than occasionally.
...no one has come up with much lighter battery...
Actually they have. Aluminum graphene batteries have three times the power density, none of the runaway thermal problems, the ability to take a 0 to 100 percent charge in 10 minutes, and loses only 1 percent capacity after 7000 charges.
http://graphenemg.com/energy-storage-solutions/aluminum-ion-battery/
This new type battery solves most of the existing problems with EVs, leaving a standardized plug requirement and where to get the power from to begin with as the only problems left. And don't say solar on the roof, because that only works in the suburbs and the sticks, not in population centers. It also only works when you only travel locally, long distance travel still needs a place to charge.
The optimal efficiency for a gasoline engine is around 35%, and 45% for a diesel engine.
The efficiency of a thermal power station is around 40%. Add to this the losses when transporting electricity, with an efficiency of ~94%. 40% * 96% = 38,4% - A little bit more than a gasoline engine, but less than a diesel one.
Combustion engines in road vehicles rarely run even near their maximum efficiency point, so your calculation falls flat.
Also, power stations can run on less-refined oil, or on natural gas. Converting the black goop to what comes out of the fuel station pumps is ALSO part of the well to wheel calculation.
Any real data to support this or is this just your opinion?
"Efficiency increase of up to 50%"
No mention of the actual efficiency number, averaged over a certain route including more than just motorway.
Neither does this deal with the waste heat of a mobile ICE, nor the energy consumed in all the processes dealing with the sticky stuff you get out of the ground, once it's refined past fuel oil and turned into a fluid that diesel engines like to consume.
Still, well to wheel efficiency of an ICE is about 14% now even with a century of improvements, EVs manage double that even when charged off a fossil fuel power station: it's much easier to run those at maximum efficiency and there's of course the option to use their waste heat which you simply don't have with a mobile source.
https://www.motorsportmagazine.com/articles/racing-tech/the-best-engine-that-will-ever-exist-ultimate-efficiency-of-f1s-hybrid
F1 engines are running at ~52% thermal efficiency, which is much higher than a road car.
In other vehicles, there are also so,r highly efficient examples this from 2015
https://www.wartsila.com/insights/article/wartsila-31-the-most-efficient-engine-in-the-world
"Well to wheel efficiency" is the efficiency measured over the entire process. Meaning it's looking at the energy contained in a liter of crude, then taking the energy needed in pumping it up, transporting it to a refinery, turning it into diesel/petrol/fuel oil, transporting it again, subtracting all that as well as the additional losses in the car (engine, friction) and thus calculating what percentage of the energy initially present is used to actually move your car.
The efficiency of that car's engine is one of the smaller factors in the total chain. Improvements may be worthwhile in getting more kilometers per liter, but its effect on the total chain is nowhere near as big as the numbers for just the engine suggest.
It's reasonably valid to use price as a proxy for energy expenditure. Spend $40,000 on buying a car (or anything, in fact), and there's probably a relatively constant (constant between manufacturers) fraction of that is energy costs, somewhere down the line. I'd take a guess that it's pretty significant fraction - say, 80%? That will be energy for heating the factory, smelting the steel, the gas that the workforce burns to cook dinner at home, the delivery truck, etc. When one considers the amount of diesel / petrol represented by $32,000, it's years and years worth of buying petrol / diesel and driving about powered by it.
So in countries like Norway, there has been a headlong rush for electric cars (Norway has a lot of hydro-electric power). In doing so, they're junking a national fleet of one sort of car, and buying another sort of car. If that's Teslas, well, a fair amount of the money spent is carbon derived energy consumed in the USA. They've exported a large fraction of their national emissions to another country!
Of course, ultimately, everything will become electric, and electricity will be derived in huge quantities from nuclear fusion. I mean, it's got to; we kinda screwed if it doesn't. But until then, it's probably best to promote and encourage, but don't provoke premature mass-scrappage of perfectly serviceable machinery. Every car scrapped ahead of its time gets replaced, and the energy cost of builing the replacement would be like driving a diesel / petrol car for (say) 10 years, but with all the emissions delivered in one single go...
With that comes the question, how long does a car last these days? They're distinctly more throw-away, more energy intesive today than ever before, even though in parts they last a lot better (rust, engine lifetime if expensively maintained (particulate filters, etc) are a lot better than a couple of decades ago). That right there is a huge problem that is largely unaddressed by EVs or any other development in law / design / standards. And at the moment, it looks like EV's will struggle to make it as far as 10 years without becoming economic write-offs.
Even the styling designers have a role to play here. For example, take the new BMWs with their godawful grills that even a mother would run away from screaming. They're going to look old, fast, and that will likely lead to an accelerated scrappage rate.
"Every car scrapped ahead of its time gets replaced, and the energy cost of builing the replacement would be like driving a diesel / petrol car for (say) 10 years, but with all the emissions delivered in one single go..."
I'm relieved that there are at least a few people who get this. Because I take my and my family's environmental footprint seriously, we try to not buy disposable stuff, buy used when we can, and don't replace perfectly working stuff just because something shiny and new and supposedly more eco-friendly comes along. As an admittedly extreme example, my car is one I rescued from the junkyard and restored. The environmental impact of building it was stamped "paid" in 1985. Yes, the marginal environmental impact of driving it vs. a new electric vehicle is not trivial, but neither is the impact of building a whole new car, and repeating that every few years.
I'm not suggesting that everyone should be like me and drive 35 year old cars. I get a kick out of minimizing my waste stream and keeping old things looking and working great, but I won't force that preference on you. But neither will I applaud the folks who junk perfectly good stuff and refuse to think about the environmental impact that causes.
And at the moment, it looks like EV's will struggle to make it as far as 10 years without becoming economic write-offs.
Ours IS ten years old this month or next (it's been registered September 2012, and it's fine. Battery is getting somewhat long in the tooth, but still at just under 80%. Mechanically it' should be able to clock at least another decade; its diesel nephew has managed that with just relatively minor but sometimes annoying problems like a worn linkage between gearstick and transmission, leaving it stuck in second.
And it's a Renault; when you buy one you can opt to lease the battery, which then gets replaced once its capacity drops below some value (sliding, depending on battery age). Replacement can be a refurbished one but is fully guaranteed. So battery replacement seems to be relatively easy, and it's certainly designed-in.
A couple of weeks ago my bicycle was at Lands End, yesterday it arrived in John O’Groats (nearly 1000 miles down the road) still carrying my middle aged arse (not to mention the rest of me). Pollution? Some particulates from the tyres, a little oil - and some particularly noisome exhaust after a curry in Glasgow - but, other than that, fairly minimal.
I do my commutes on it (16 miles each way) too. The point is that the car isn’t actually necessary for most journeys - and the least polluting fuel is the one that you’re going to need to consume anyway (breakfast). So yes, pat on the back Tesla for being less polluting than a fossil burning car (maybe) but it’s a bit like patting yourself on the back because your strychnine diet is less poisonous than novichok.
Oh, and before anyone complains that a bike isn’t practical for most people I’d like to point out that I met an 82 year old who was riding the same journey of 1000 miles on her bike.
A bike isn't practical for most people. 16 miles each way means 2 hours a day commuting by bicycle, plus needing to change (and probably shower) at the office, versus a 15 minute drive each way and you're ready to work when you arrive. Those 90 minutes each day are family time, social time, get stuff done time.
That's before you take into account disabilities, people with poor balance, any equipment they may need or use. Sure, the plumber could use a tricycle van but they'll earn more and make more profit with a Transit.
I completely respect the people that can and do cycle to work, but since doing that had a direct causal relationship to the disability the NHS tell me they can't do anything about, I'm just not going to accept that it's 'practical for most people'.
Most people don’t commute for that length of time, and most people don’t need to carry any more kit to work than their sandwiches and a laptop.
And a gentle ride into work won’t event break a sweat. So I maintain that a bike, for the majority (but not for all) is a very practical proposition.
I'd go as as to suggest that most people commuting don't carry a laptop either. After the big WFH adventure (still going on for many either full time or hybrid), there's probably more than pre-pandemic, but not everyone who commutes is an office worker and not every office worker takes a laptop home, So, sandwiches it is then :-)
Yes, when loading the office lift in the morning, we politely hold the doors for anyone approaching. Unless it’s the sweat soaked cyclist, nobody wants to stand next to him so we pretend we haven’t seen him and let the doors close.
If you see him waiting by the lift, take the stairs.
There's also been comments in UK news recently about some big tree planting initiatives that have either not looked at diversity (all the same species planted) or have planted the wrong kind of trees for the local area and watched them die off after a year or three. There's more to planting a tree than just "planting a tree".
in their cars made in China and possibly for those made in Berlin.
The article is wrong to say that Tesla only uses battery cells made by Panasonic. Panasonic cells are cylindrical. CATL are probably the pouch type.
The use of CATL batteries sort of makes the claim from their 'Dear Leader' that they are years ahead of everyone else in battery tech. Tesla is having issues scaling up volume production of their new cell type.
The pro EV sites like insideev's, cleantecnica and electrak will confirm that fact.
Yes, I own an EV and am waiting for my second one to be delivered.
For EV battery fires, the use of copious amounts of water is usually the recommended practice.
As other posters have written, this cools down the battery, prevents other ev components from burning by removing the oxygen, and it is a lot easier then burying the whole vehicle is sand (another common way of dealing with a battery fire).
Afterwards, a good way to ensure that a damaged or decomissioned battery is fully discharged, is to submerge the whole battery in a salt-water solution. In both cases, ensure that sufficient ventilation is available to prevent hydrogen buildup.
At some point they will possibly have to start looking at regional battery recycling / disposal facilities, and include the cost in the purchase price of the car. Because if the alternative is hundreds of daily callouts of publicly funded fire engines, each needing thousands of gallons of water and several hours to try and contain the fires, it's not going to be socially acceptable to pass the costs onto the general public to deal with all the flaming bro-mobiles.
I don't know about where you are, but if a fire engine here attends a fire or an auto accident, a bill is sent to the appropriate insurance company or property owner. I am not sure what happens if they attend a home health issue which they often show up before a paramedic ambulance arrives.
In the UK at least, the Fire & Rescue Services Act 2004 only allows a charge to be made for providing non-emergency services. Therefore a charge will only be made for an emergency response where either it is a false alarm, or where the fire has been extinguished before the fire brigade arrive.
Working at a scrap yard, I'd say it's equally likely that some derp tried to "steal it's catalytic converter" and caused the fire, than it being some crash related damage. The guys that go around doing this are beyond comprehension, don't expect they are able to know it's electric or that there's nothing to steal that they could carry off.
Saw a german documentary (ARD) re. electric cars fires a couple of years ago... lots of cars reported catching fire.
The solution, they've ended up with, is having 40 ft. containers on stand-by.
On alarm, drive the container to site, fill it with water and submerge the vehicle. And leave it there for days...
Everything else always failed.
Strange those experiences aren't shared? At least through the manufactures... or they haven't spent any time considering solutions to the more or less unlikely event that any of their vehicles may catch fire?
youtube.com/watch?v=6ZvhE1zGOTs
#delhievparkingfire #delhifire #evparkingfire
Massive fire at EV parking in Delhi, hundreds of vehicles gutted | The Federal
Jun 8, 2022
The Federal
principia-scientific.com /massive-fire-in-delhi-ev-parking-space-guts-nearly-100-vehicles/
Massive Fire In Delhi EV Parking Space Guts Nearly 100 Vehicles
Might have been the heat.
I had an iThing puff up and eject its screen the other day.
Coincided with a particularly hot day, where the temperature peaked at 28c.
Was well over that indoors.
Multiply that by a few thousand and add potentially damaged 18650s or 24650s
and you can see the problem.
I had to tell off some folks at our waste handling site for putting uninsulated pouch
cells and packs in with larger packs, potentially allowing them to be crushed under
the weight.
Only takes one to get shorted internally (they are all puffed!!) and FOOOON!
Note to self: this was an aftermarket battery sent with the phone, yet with an
original connector etc.
Interesting topic. I am member of our local CFA (Country Fire Authority) brigade - a volunteer group. This subject is high on our interest list. In fact last night was a repeat of a previous online presentation on the topic. The session (handled from Melbourne) even attracted the Austrian Fire Brigade Association and a few other people located offshore to Australia. The primary presenter was Fiona Sutcliffe from https://www.evfiresafe.com/
She is also presenting next week on a new topic, concentrating on charging stations. She is a CFA volunteer herself and has started this group to record and analyse E-car fires around the world. She has highlighted the lack of a set criteria for reporting.
Until the battery chemistry improves this will be a real issue. If a car goes up in a garage (as they have in the U.S.) the house goes with it!
Denmark has already been proactive and has a purpose built truck with a grab crane. It is despatched to an e-car fire with the aim of lifting it into the purpose built car swimming pool on its tray. That way it can be removed from a freeway, or the likes. Some incidents of e-car fires on major roads have resulted in road closures from 10 mins (the shortest) to 5 hours. Whilst these events are still rare and are statistically small at present, as e-car take up increases the events will proportionally increase - until a more stable chemistry is rolled out.
If you wnat to see what an e-bus can do in a suburban Paris street -https://youtu.be/5r-yN8SugWM
Exciting learning curves ahead for frontline responders. Also interesting to note differences in approach between the US incident and another incident, in same twitter feed, in India. Sadly the fire fighters in India did not have their breathing kit on BEFORE approaching incident. With these types of fires VERY important.
Header for last nights presentation;
Hi Brent
Below are the joining instructions for Incident Management Tonight, when CFA Commander Justin Dally and Emma Sutcliffe from EV Fire Safe will present Electric Vehicles and the Implications for Emergency Services. Following the presentation, there will be a Q & A with Emma, Justin and ACFO Glenn Probsl
Electrified transport is vital for a sustainable future & the demand for EVs is already outstripping the supply. But what happens when things go wrong?
While the energy-dense lithium-ion batteries powering EVs are inherently safe, when an EV battery fire does occur, it presents dangerous new fire behaviour & explosion risks.
Just add a little impact primer to one of the chambers, which would damage the separation between the chambers, dropping them from a plane would have the same impact as using outlawed phosphor.
EV batteries can hardly be recycled in an economical way, using 10000L of water to put out an EV fire leaves one with 10000L chemically polluted water.
Society is literally sitting on a time bomb with the thousands of EV's being pushed by technically ignorant politicians.
Until now, no country announced to build nuclear power plants, implying EV's in many countries run for over 40% on coal, which makes them hardly anymore environmentally friendly as coal operated steamboats from the early 1900's.
It is going to be interesting to see what happens when in 7-9 years from now when those EV's end up on the scrap yard due to swindling battery capacity.
Except from these issues, EV's have anti-social effects. They are big and heavy, taking up lots of parking space. Their additional weight creates hazards for others in case of accidents, do not want to think what happens to the occupants on the rear seats of a Toyota Aygo when an monster like a Mercedes EQ rear ends it with as little as 17 mph. Only war is more expensive and damaging to society than the EV push.
They are big and heavy, taking up lots of parking space.
Our Kangoo ZE is about the same size as its 10 year older diesel version, and maybe 200kg heavier (a little over 100kg when compared to the 2012 ICE version, twice the weight of a full tank).
The BMW I3? Same size. Mini Electric? Again, roughly the same. Big and heavy EVs get noticed because of their size, ones that aren't, aren't. Especially when they're just a variant of the ICE version and don't have prominent markings to show them being EV; the I3 has blue rims around the grilles and the BMW roundels. Quite unremarkable.
I have to say I was curious about the claim that sodium ion batteries would be safer than lithium ion batteries.
Sodium and lithium are both alkali metals along with potassium, rubidium, caesium and francium. As you go down that group starting with Li, through Na, K, Rb and Cs, the metals get progressively more reactive. Nobody has seen francium in the wild, it has quite a short half life of just 22 minutes. Alkali metals are characterised by having just one electron in their outer shell. Atoms like to have 8 so alkali metals give up the electron easily, halogens with 7 electrons in the outer shell pick them up very easily.
The bigger the atom, the more that outer shell is shielded from the nucleus by other electron shells. For lithium with just 1 inner shell that means the nucleus keeps a hold on that electron making it a bit harder to remove, therefore less reactive. At the other end, Fluorine has just the 1 inner shell meaning it is very good at ripping electrons away from other atoms. In other words, the halogens on the right of the periodic table get less reactive as you go down the group while the alkali metals on the left get more reactive.
This increaing reactivity and decreasing electronegativity is a feature of the increasing ease of getting that one outer electron off the atom, the bigger the atom, the easier it is to oxidise (oxidation is the loss of an electron). Li has an electronegativity of 0.98, Na is 0.93.
In a fire, water makes lithium relase hydrogen and burn, it makes sodium release hydrogen and burn it just does it faster.
In a fire, water makes lithium relase hydrogen and burn, it makes sodium release hydrogen and burn it just does it faster.
METALLIC lithium. Li-ion batteries, as the name already implies contain lithium IONS, that have already given up their electrons. Same with sodium and potassium. If you empty your salt shaker into a glass of water, do you get a sudden violent reaction between the sodium and the di-hydrogen monoxide, releasing hydrogen? Nope.
"Last year, Tesla's "Big Battery" in Victoria, Australia, burst into flames and burned for days,"
At an investor briefing in Paris, Neoen CEO Xavier Barbaro stated that it’s too early to determine if the fire on two of the 212 Megapacks in the Victoria site would delay the battery system’s rollout.
The incident was on day 2 of testing.
It was controlled It didn't affect the rollout.
I'm no fan of Flaky Elon and look forward to him being forced to put his outsized mouth where his reduced money is where his mouth is by being forced to buy Twitter for $54 when it's current price is $37
BUT
I despise lazy reporting ... even from El Reg.
seem to recall that for EV's the 'agreed' solution was for scrapyards to have a skip / container of sufficient size available that was filled with water and said burning car could be dropped in there and left for a week or three
same goes for firefighters, they attend the fire, and once under control - for a set amount of control - remove / recover the vehicle to a scrapyard that has the container available for use
again, this is only going to get worse as more and more EV's are on the roads, we need to sort a 'universal' fix for this issue before we got to the scenario of a traffic jam of cars going up in a wildfire, so firefighters will have other worries, and scrappers will only have the one 'dock' to drop the car into ?
the 'agreed' solution was for scrapyards to have a skip / container of sufficient size available that was filled with water and said burning car could be dropped in there and left for a week or three
same goes for firefighters,
You would hope their families would miss them after a day or two...
the 'agreed' solution was for scrapyards to have a skip / container of sufficient size available
20ft shipping containers are plentiful, open-top ones maybe a little less so, but if you're going to use it as a smothering pit that's sitting in a dedicated section of a scrap yard you just need to cut a large enough hole in the top and not really bother with the full transportability requirements of a certified open-top. And if you smother with sand there's no worry of polluted water leaking out; the sand can be reused although it has to be stored in the meantime and probably cleaned occasionally. Neither of those is a big and tough to solve problem.
the scenario of a traffic jam of cars going up in a wildfire
Looking at what's left of a car, EV or not, after a wildfire there's little more to do than shred it and throwing the bits into a blast furnace with the rest of the feed. If you're talking about a mass fire after a motorway pileup you may have a point, but for those the number of EVs involved will likely still be low single digit for the next couple of years.
further to this
India has had a disaster of this issue already
100 EV's caught fire in a charging area in Delhi
although their local Fire Dept say it is already under control ...........................
https://batteriesnews.com/100-vehicles-catch-fire-delhis-electric-vehicle-charging-station-india/
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