cross-posted from: lemmy.ml/post/17558715
The draw-back with sodium batteries needs to be known, because they won’t replace lithium anytime soon.
The density is lower, which is a great problem in EVs.
Not trying to be negative, but for an EV, or anything handheld, you get more weight for less power. Which is essential in a car, that uses more power the heavier it is.
What sodium IS the best at, are use cases where weight and size doesn’t matter. Like with battery farms.
In this case they are much better than lithium.
Gormadt@lemmy.blahaj.zone 4 months ago
Hell yeah
I can’t wait to see this headline again but about a bigger battery somewhere else
DarkDarkHouse@lemmy.sdf.org 4 months ago
Nice. This seems to be the future that solves a lot of problems. Right now in Australia, we’re seriously entertaining building nuclear power plants for the first time ever, to provide base load power that renewables allegedly can’t. Large sodium batteries could help us avoid that.
noevidenz@infosec.pub 4 months ago
The LNP doesn’t have a legitimate interest in transitioning to nuclear power or they would’ve begun over the last decade or so that they were in power.
Instead they’ve proposed - now that they’re in opposition - a technology which is banned at the Federal level and individually at the state level, because they know that gives them years of lead time before they ever have to begin the project.
On top of that, all of the proposed sites are owned by companies who’ve already begun transitioning to renewable generation or renewable storage, and most of them are in states in which the state Premiers have publicly stated that they will not consider overturning their bans on nuclear power.
Hugin@lemmy.world 4 months ago
It’s not just base load, turbines also provide grid stability. All the quick fluctuations as people turn things on and off are hard to load balance with solar, wind, or battery. A big spinning turbine has a lot of inertia. That helps keep thr grid at a constant frequency. As solar gets bigger and bigger we might need big solar powdered flywheel generators just to stabilize the grid.
stoy@lemmy.zip 4 months ago
Nuclear power should be expanded, but a lot, it is the only realistic way to replace fossil plats for base demand.
And before anyone starts whining about “radiation scary”, nuclear waste is a solved problem.
You dig a hole deep into the bedrock, put the waste in dry casks, put the full drycasks in the hole, and backfill it with clay.
Done, solved!
A bigger radiation hazard is coal ash, from cosl power stations, they produce insane ammounts of ash which is radioactive.
scientificamerican.com/…/coal-ash-is-more-radioac…
Storing coal ash is also a big problem:
www.southeastcoalash.org/…/coal-ash-storage/
Here is an interesting documentary about our fear of radiation, it is called Nuclear Nightmares, and was made by Horizon on BBC:
www.dailymotion.com/video/x7pqwo8
Wanderer@lemm.ee 4 months ago
Sounds like a way to waste loads of money and keep people on fossil fuels.
Must be way cheaper to build more batteries and build out inertia. (Would still need backup power at this point though).