These days fuel cells are not a lot more expensive than batteries.
Simply untrue. Fuel cells are available in small quantities at $10/W and in bulk at as low as $4/W. For a minimal cruising power of ~15kW for a small car, that's $60,000, *plus* the cost of a ~6kWh li-ion battery pack or supercapacitor to buffer your charge (otherwise, you need more like 60kW of fuel cells, at $240k), *plus* the cost of the H2 storage tank. Even the ultra-expensive Tesla Roadster pack is under $20k. There's a reason nobody is selling FCVs today, only offering subsidized leases for them. Only one company is offering an unsubsidized FCV lease: Toyota. Guess how much it costs. Try $7,700 per month. That's not a typo: per *month*.
Remember, to get more range out of a fuel cell, all you need is a bigger tank, to get more range out of batteries, you need more batteries.
Irrelevant unless you're talking of ranges in the upper thousands of miles. The real cost in a FCV is the fuel cell stack.
So an electric car with a 300 mile range is pretty much impossible to build at any price
You mean like the T-Zero, which predates the Tesla Roadster? Or like the upcoming Tesla Model S?
but a hydrogen car with that range is not much more expensive than a hydrogen car with a 1 mile range.
And that 1-mile range hydrogen car costs upper 5 or lower 6 figures for a normal, mundane sedan, and lower 6 figures to mid 6 figures for an SUV. And then factor in that the fuel cells last under 5 five years. Most upcoming EVs have their packs *warrantied* for 10 or so years.
It's just not a competitor. They don't even win in fueling times. The Fuel Cell Equinox takes about 25 minutes to fill; rapid charging EVs can fill in under 10 minutes. The only way to make FCVs competitive with rapid-charge EVs on fueling time is to store the hydrogen at the ridiculous (~5 *tons* per square inch) pressures found in the vehicle, *in bulk at the station*. Which is obscenely dangerous and, not to mention, expensive. Of course, not like there are any relevant number of even *low pressure* stations anywhere around.
Which uses 3-4 times as much power as with electric vehicles. And it's not really about storage capacity (that's just one issue) -- it's about fuel cell prices (ridiculously expensive), longevities (under 5 years, and that's assuming you use super-pure hydrogen), safety, lack of infrastructure, and on and on.
I would love to have an affordable, durable, safe, efficient hydrogen vehicle that I could fill up anywhere across the country. I'd park it next to my unicorn.
Sure -- as soon as he starts building up a background of at least several years passing peer review on climate science like Einstein did with physics, I'm all ears.
Does that mean that when I have a fancy MIT Ph.D. on my resume in a few years, my opinion be given as much impact as someone who's studied climatology? I'd hope not.
You haven't been around here long, have you? You don't even need a degree in a related field to have your opinion be given as much weight as the consensus positions of the world's scientific academies, climatologists, etc. At least by this crowd.
James Hansen has a PhD in Physics, and his astronomy work was on planetary climate models (his first post-dissertation publications were on Venus's atmosphere -- the pioneering work on it, which lead to a much greater understanding of the greenhouse effect -- which then led to his work with GISS since the 1980s). Alan Carlin is an economist who merely has a BS in Physics and hasn't worked in any physics-related field since he graduated college. You don't see the difference?
Now, don't get me wrong -- economists' voices are *very* critical in this debate. However, their voice is not warranted on the science aspect of the field. An economist discussing the field should operate via a Monte Carlo simulation of the scientific consensus positions and their stated confidence intervals, rather than adopting minority positions and/or confidence intervals. Carlin should not be discussing the science. And for that matter, Hansen should not be discussing the economics, either. Neither are in each others' respective fields.
the GP's p.o.v. was that the battery improvements over the years, while real, are less than spectacular.
You don't call a 4.5x-fold increase in energy and a 10x increase in power over 20 years impressive? Geez.
200Wh/kg you say? Wow, that's so impressive! To put things in perspective, the light dino juice has an energy density of about 11000Wh/kg.
Deceptive comparison. One, you only can capture about 20% of that energy, and two, the main part of the weight of a gasoline car is not it's fuel, but it's drivetrain. In an EV, you replace that big heavy ICE drivetrain with a much smaller, lighter electric one of the same output. For example, picture your typical supercar engine capable of pushing the vehicle from 0-60 in 3.9 seconds. Got the image in your mind? Giant thing that you need a strong crane to hoist around? Compare that to the same-power Tesla Roadster motor, which is the size of a watermelon and just over 100 pounds.
In short, the *net system mass* isn't anywhere close to that different between gasoline and electric vehicles -- about 3-4 fold (and that's using some older numbers in that link that are now out of date, esp. the LFP numbers; the comparison is closer nowadays). At the rapid rate batteries are improving and the slow rate ICEs are improving, that difference will disappear over the next 20 years.
That's not an explosion. That's a deflagration, combined with a minor pressure release. And that's not a typical failure mode, either -- they deliberately overcharged it, instead of the typical failure concern, which involves defective membranes.
Likewise, if you have x amount of a lithium compound it will only store so much power
Not "lithium compound". Lithium, period. The amount of lithium intercalated in each electrode solely determines its Ah -- everything else is dead mass. And lithium is a small fraction of the mass of a li-ion battery, even today. 1-2 kg lithium carbonate, of which only 17% is lithium, go into making a 5kg 1kWh li-ion battery. And much of that lithium is incapacitated, unusable within the cell.
What you're looking for is the "usable intercalation density" of the lithium. Maximizing it means approaching the maximum theoretical energy density of the chemistry. And we're nowhere near it, and will continue to be nowhere near it until lithium makes up a large portion of the mass of the cell.
Your basic claim was simply wrong. Batteries, including lithium ion batteries, have continued to make radical power and energy density gains, and by all signs will continue to do so for at least the next decade or two.
I was actually using the chemical symbol for Lithium ion hence the space
Obviously. But you were still wrong. "Li- cell" or "Lithium cell" means a lithium primary. "Li-ion" or "Lithium ion" is a completely different technology.
Again, the actual tech isn't changing significantly, the biggest changes are in the casing
What part of the graph of cathode energy density that I posted were you confused about? Every part of li-ion batteries has been decreasing significantly in both mass and volume -- electrolyte, separator, cathode, anode, and casing. Even the chemistries of the cobalt/graphite li-ions -- the old-school, traditional type -- are no longer the same as they used to be. They now tend to include nickel in the cathode, and the anode is increasingly likely to be amorphous carbon instead of graphite.
Why would gasoline remain unburned with plenty of oxygen around? Why would hydrogen peroxide not instantly decompose? Every reaction requires activation energy. The environment in which a reaction occurs can favor certain reaction chains over others (catalysis), even if they don't lead to the lowest possible energy state. All batteries are designed to promote certain desired reactions and not others (side reactions).
Come now, mods, that wasn't a troll. It's hard for people to admit mistakes in a discussion (I myself fall into that same trap from time to time). Don't discourage it by calling them trolls for doing so.
If you put aluminum in a dust form and then aerosol it, it'll be much worse;
Irrelevant. That *block of aluminum* has more energy density than TNT. *So does aerosolized aluminum*, but so does the block. And it has more energy than gasoline per kilogram, too.
Just because something has high energy density does *not* mean it has a realistic way to release that energy rapidly. And the amount of energy contained within the chemicals that make up a battery (releasable by burning) are often way more than the amount of electrical energy stored in the battery, so saying that because the electricity stored went up 10fold means somehow that the chemical energy that would be released in a fire went up 10fold is just wrong.
If I added a resistor to the inside of a battery so as to waste most of the power of the battery, causing the energy density of the cell to decrease tenfold, would it somehow suddenly become ten times less flammable? If I took the resistor away, would it suddenly become ten times more flammable? Don't act like that's far-fetched, because that's very similar to how a lot of battery improvements work -- lowering the internal resistance, making sure that more of the material within can take part in the desired electricity-storage reactions, and so forth.
There are some incredibly flammable low-energy density batteries, and incredibly fire-resistant high energy density batteries out there. Heck, the Zebra battery has almost the energy density of the lower-end li-ions, and it operates at temperatures of hundreds of degrees in *typical usage*. The amount of electricity stored is simply not inherently correlated with the energy density.
First off, "li-cell" != "li-ion". A "li-cell" is a "lithium battery", which is a type of primary cell, and which predates lithium-ion to the market. Secondly, you're absolutely wrong in your assertion. Even traditional cobalt cathodes alone have gone from ~1200mAh in 1994 to almost 3000mAh in 2008. In the past year and a half alone, li-ion batteries on the market have gone from 160Wh/kg to 200Wh/kg. For God's sake, research a topic before you start spouting off about it.
Have you seriously not noticed how battery life keeps going up at the same time the batteries keep getting smaller? And if so, how did you get net access to make that post from your cave?
In a traditional li-air secondary cell, the reaction is actually 2 Li + O2 -> Li2O2 and Li2O2 -> 2Li + O2. That is, the intermediary is lithium peroxide, not lithium oxide.
But there's probably no practical way to extract it.
Of course there is. There are dozens of ways. Here's one -- $22-$32/kg. Given that 1kWh of automotive li-ion batteries takes 1-2kg of lithium carbonate and costs about $500, that's a pretty minor cost. More expensive than the surface-mined stuff, mind you (which runs $5-8/kg), but eminently affordable.
The only people who make this argument are those who haven't paid attention to battery energy density over time. If you don't know what I'm talking about, compare your cell phone with one from the early 90s, or your laptop battery. Battery energy density has increased 4.5x in the past 20 years, and power density 10x. And it only seems to be speeding up.
Yes, there was a long time (the first 2/3rds to 3/4s of this century) where battery technology was mostly stagnated. Then the consumer electronics industry came into its own, and people actually started putting serious money into battery research. And our modern understanding of chemistry and nanoscale structures certainly doesn't hurt.
Or a halogen flashlight could SHINE for that long. But no, they're always still the same sucky thing as in the 1800s
Um, do you realize where the term "flashlight" comes from? Flashlights in the 1800s (actually, the very end of the 1800s) were these big, massive things with huge, heavy batteries -- and despite this, they had so little energy density that you couldn't leave them on all the time. You had to "flash" them when you wanted to see something.
Having ten times the energy density just means the difference between a scorched desktop and a burned down house.
No, it does not.
Think of it this way: if I put an internal resistor in a lithium-ion cell that dumps 90% of the power to heat, the official energy density rating for that battery is now 1/10th of what it would have been otherwise. Will lighting that cell on fire produce a flame any less intense because that resistor is in there?
Aluminum has a higher energy density than gasoline. Which would you rather be standing on when someone throws a match?
That's simply not true. TNT is less energy dense than aluminum. Which one would you rather be standing next to when a blasting cap is fired on them?
In this case, the energy density of the lithium has nothing to do with how fast it can react. The rate the lithium can burn is exactly the same as the rate in which it can burn in much less energy dense lithium primary cells. And furthermore, while this may be a fundamental problem in "small" devices like cell phones and laptops, large devices, such as electric car battery packs, have ample room for fire prevention, isolation, suppression, and venting systems.
Funny is a good mod rating for that. It's always funny when someone makes fun of someone for their use of words without taking the time to look up what the words actually mean. Do a google search for "functionalize" and "carbon". You'll find 563,000 hits. Most of the prominent ones are peer-reviewed scientific papers. Functionalization, in a chemistry context, means to add a functional group to a compound.
Your pessimism is misplaced. Don't you remember cell phones from the early 90s? Those giant bricks? When the then top-of-the-line NiMH battery was introduced in 1989, it boasted 45Wh/kg energy density. Now we have li-ions widely available at 200Wh/kg (4.5x the energy density) and 10x the power density.
For any given tech advance, the odds of it making it to market are low. But there are so many tech advances, many of which you never hear about, that the tech continues to advance at a good clip.
That said, I'm not a really big fan of any X-air batteries. They tend to be inefficient, low power, expensive, and have poor cycle life. There are literally dozens of li-ion advances working toward commercialization that can each 1.5 to 8x the density of either the anode or cathode, so regular li-ion still looks to have a lot of life in it. Also, I'm particularly interested in the recent advancements in lithium-sulfur. Practical lithium sulfur cells are 3-4x the energy density of current li-ion and are efficient and with reasonable power (excepting the unimpressive "stabilized" ones), but they tend to have very short cycle lifes. The University of Waterloo came up with a really interesting approach of wicking the sulfur into the pores of mesoporous carbon, baking it off the outside, and then functionalizing the carbon surface with PEG to repel the hydrophobic sulfur and keep it trapped in the pores so it can't migrate across the membrane and precipitate useless lithium polysulfates (the normal means of capacity loss in LiS). Their results were pretty astounding. In one experiment, they deliberately used an electrolyte known for dissolving polysulfates, thus facilitating capacity loss -- and compared their electrode with a traditional one. In a couple dozen cycles, the traditional electrode lost something like 96% of its capacity. Theirs lost only about a quarter of its capacity.
I find that if I can't code, it's best to write in plain English what needs to be done in very general terms. Not even in the code -- just on a scratchpad. Then break down those steps in blank english into smaller steps. And again and again. Keep on writing in plain English until you have the steps small enough that your mind goes, "Oh, well, that's trivial to code...". And then you're back in the game.
1. your password isn't long enough including special characters, upper-case, and numbers.
First off, "Isn't"? This was twelve years ago. I was in high school/college. Secondly, it included both letters and numbers. Yes, it could have been a stronger password, but I wasn't exactly counting on a "friend" monitoring my typing and stealing it.
2. you didn't type your password fast enough
I wasn't exactly counting on a "friend" monitoring my typing and stealing it.
bonus 3. you let a moron (sorry a Mormon) watch you type your password
I wasn't exactly counting on a "friend" monitoring my typing and stealing it.
And on that subject: how much attention do *you* pay, on average, to other activities when someone is talking to you? Certainly one *can* carry on a conversation while paying attention to others, but in practice, people often don't. That's a common tactic to rob people -- distract them in conversation while someone takes their stuff.
For what it's worth, I've had a password compromised before by someone looking over my shoulder at what *keys* I typed. I'd rather not make it even easier for people by letting them just look at the screen, thanks. As you note, you never know whether your environment is secure. In my case, back in TAMS, I had a "friend" who was chatting with me as an excuse to stand close enough / above me to see the keyboard; he then set up a porn site on my university account as a prank.
Strangely enough, the last I heard from him, he was becoming a Mormon missionary...
Slashdot Mirror
These days fuel cells are not a lot more expensive than batteries.
Simply untrue. Fuel cells are available in small quantities at $10/W and in bulk at as low as $4/W. For a minimal cruising power of ~15kW for a small car, that's $60,000, *plus* the cost of a ~6kWh li-ion battery pack or supercapacitor to buffer your charge (otherwise, you need more like 60kW of fuel cells, at $240k), *plus* the cost of the H2 storage tank. Even the ultra-expensive Tesla Roadster pack is under $20k. There's a reason nobody is selling FCVs today, only offering subsidized leases for them. Only one company is offering an unsubsidized FCV lease: Toyota. Guess how much it costs. Try $7,700 per month. That's not a typo: per *month*.
Remember, to get more range out of a fuel cell, all you need is a bigger tank, to get more range out of batteries, you need more batteries.
Irrelevant unless you're talking of ranges in the upper thousands of miles. The real cost in a FCV is the fuel cell stack.
So an electric car with a 300 mile range is pretty much impossible to build at any price
You mean like the T-Zero, which predates the Tesla Roadster? Or like the upcoming Tesla Model S?
but a hydrogen car with that range is not much more expensive than a hydrogen car with a 1 mile range.
And that 1-mile range hydrogen car costs upper 5 or lower 6 figures for a normal, mundane sedan, and lower 6 figures to mid 6 figures for an SUV. And then factor in that the fuel cells last under 5 five years. Most upcoming EVs have their packs *warrantied* for 10 or so years.
It's just not a competitor. They don't even win in fueling times. The Fuel Cell Equinox takes about 25 minutes to fill; rapid charging EVs can fill in under 10 minutes. The only way to make FCVs competitive with rapid-charge EVs on fueling time is to store the hydrogen at the ridiculous (~5 *tons* per square inch) pressures found in the vehicle, *in bulk at the station*. Which is obscenely dangerous and, not to mention, expensive. Of course, not like there are any relevant number of even *low pressure* stations anywhere around.
Which uses 3-4 times as much power as with electric vehicles. And it's not really about storage capacity (that's just one issue) -- it's about fuel cell prices (ridiculously expensive), longevities (under 5 years, and that's assuming you use super-pure hydrogen), safety, lack of infrastructure, and on and on.
I would love to have an affordable, durable, safe, efficient hydrogen vehicle that I could fill up anywhere across the country. I'd park it next to my unicorn.
Sure -- as soon as he starts building up a background of at least several years passing peer review on climate science like Einstein did with physics, I'm all ears.
Does that mean that when I have a fancy MIT Ph.D. on my resume in a few years, my opinion be given as much impact as someone who's studied climatology? I'd hope not.
You haven't been around here long, have you? You don't even need a degree in a related field to have your opinion be given as much weight as the consensus positions of the world's scientific academies, climatologists, etc. At least by this crowd.
James Hansen has a PhD in Physics, and his astronomy work was on planetary climate models (his first post-dissertation publications were on Venus's atmosphere -- the pioneering work on it, which lead to a much greater understanding of the greenhouse effect -- which then led to his work with GISS since the 1980s). Alan Carlin is an economist who merely has a BS in Physics and hasn't worked in any physics-related field since he graduated college. You don't see the difference?
Now, don't get me wrong -- economists' voices are *very* critical in this debate. However, their voice is not warranted on the science aspect of the field. An economist discussing the field should operate via a Monte Carlo simulation of the scientific consensus positions and their stated confidence intervals, rather than adopting minority positions and/or confidence intervals. Carlin should not be discussing the science. And for that matter, Hansen should not be discussing the economics, either. Neither are in each others' respective fields.
the GP's p.o.v. was that the battery improvements over the years, while real, are less than spectacular.
You don't call a 4.5x-fold increase in energy and a 10x increase in power over 20 years impressive? Geez.
200Wh/kg you say? Wow, that's so impressive! To put things in perspective, the light dino juice has an energy density of about 11000Wh/kg.
Deceptive comparison. One, you only can capture about 20% of that energy, and two, the main part of the weight of a gasoline car is not it's fuel, but it's drivetrain. In an EV, you replace that big heavy ICE drivetrain with a much smaller, lighter electric one of the same output. For example, picture your typical supercar engine capable of pushing the vehicle from 0-60 in 3.9 seconds. Got the image in your mind? Giant thing that you need a strong crane to hoist around? Compare that to the same-power Tesla Roadster motor, which is the size of a watermelon and just over 100 pounds.
In short, the *net system mass* isn't anywhere close to that different between gasoline and electric vehicles -- about 3-4 fold (and that's using some older numbers in that link that are now out of date, esp. the LFP numbers; the comparison is closer nowadays). At the rapid rate batteries are improving and the slow rate ICEs are improving, that difference will disappear over the next 20 years.
That's not an explosion. That's a deflagration, combined with a minor pressure release. And that's not a typical failure mode, either -- they deliberately overcharged it, instead of the typical failure concern, which involves defective membranes.
Likewise, if you have x amount of a lithium compound it will only store so much power
Not "lithium compound". Lithium, period. The amount of lithium intercalated in each electrode solely determines its Ah -- everything else is dead mass. And lithium is a small fraction of the mass of a li-ion battery, even today. 1-2 kg lithium carbonate, of which only 17% is lithium, go into making a 5kg 1kWh li-ion battery. And much of that lithium is incapacitated, unusable within the cell.
What you're looking for is the "usable intercalation density" of the lithium. Maximizing it means approaching the maximum theoretical energy density of the chemistry. And we're nowhere near it, and will continue to be nowhere near it until lithium makes up a large portion of the mass of the cell.
Your basic claim was simply wrong. Batteries, including lithium ion batteries, have continued to make radical power and energy density gains, and by all signs will continue to do so for at least the next decade or two.
I was actually using the chemical symbol for Lithium ion hence the space
Obviously. But you were still wrong. "Li- cell" or "Lithium cell" means a lithium primary. "Li-ion" or "Lithium ion" is a completely different technology.
Again, the actual tech isn't changing significantly, the biggest changes are in the casing
What part of the graph of cathode energy density that I posted were you confused about? Every part of li-ion batteries has been decreasing significantly in both mass and volume -- electrolyte, separator, cathode, anode, and casing. Even the chemistries of the cobalt/graphite li-ions -- the old-school, traditional type -- are no longer the same as they used to be. They now tend to include nickel in the cathode, and the anode is increasingly likely to be amorphous carbon instead of graphite.
Not explosive -- just flammable.
Why would gasoline remain unburned with plenty of oxygen around? Why would hydrogen peroxide not instantly decompose? Every reaction requires activation energy. The environment in which a reaction occurs can favor certain reaction chains over others (catalysis), even if they don't lead to the lowest possible energy state. All batteries are designed to promote certain desired reactions and not others (side reactions).
Come now, mods, that wasn't a troll. It's hard for people to admit mistakes in a discussion (I myself fall into that same trap from time to time). Don't discourage it by calling them trolls for doing so.
If you put aluminum in a dust form and then aerosol it, it'll be much worse;
Irrelevant. That *block of aluminum* has more energy density than TNT. *So does aerosolized aluminum*, but so does the block. And it has more energy than gasoline per kilogram, too.
Just because something has high energy density does *not* mean it has a realistic way to release that energy rapidly. And the amount of energy contained within the chemicals that make up a battery (releasable by burning) are often way more than the amount of electrical energy stored in the battery, so saying that because the electricity stored went up 10fold means somehow that the chemical energy that would be released in a fire went up 10fold is just wrong.
If I added a resistor to the inside of a battery so as to waste most of the power of the battery, causing the energy density of the cell to decrease tenfold, would it somehow suddenly become ten times less flammable? If I took the resistor away, would it suddenly become ten times more flammable? Don't act like that's far-fetched, because that's very similar to how a lot of battery improvements work -- lowering the internal resistance, making sure that more of the material within can take part in the desired electricity-storage reactions, and so forth.
There are some incredibly flammable low-energy density batteries, and incredibly fire-resistant high energy density batteries out there. Heck, the Zebra battery has almost the energy density of the lower-end li-ions, and it operates at temperatures of hundreds of degrees in *typical usage*. The amount of electricity stored is simply not inherently correlated with the energy density.
False again!
First off, "li-cell" != "li-ion". A "li-cell" is a "lithium battery", which is a type of primary cell, and which predates lithium-ion to the market. Secondly, you're absolutely wrong in your assertion. Even traditional cobalt cathodes alone have gone from ~1200mAh in 1994 to almost 3000mAh in 2008. In the past year and a half alone, li-ion batteries on the market have gone from 160Wh/kg to 200Wh/kg. For God's sake, research a topic before you start spouting off about it.
Have you seriously not noticed how battery life keeps going up at the same time the batteries keep getting smaller? And if so, how did you get net access to make that post from your cave?
In a traditional li-air secondary cell, the reaction is actually 2 Li + O2 -> Li2O2 and Li2O2 -> 2Li + O2. That is, the intermediary is lithium peroxide, not lithium oxide.
However, the big catch is that we can't really produce enough Lithium to make all those batteries.
God, that myth just won't die, will it?
But there's probably no practical way to extract it.
Of course there is. There are dozens of ways. Here's one -- $22-$32/kg. Given that 1kWh of automotive li-ion batteries takes 1-2kg of lithium carbonate and costs about $500, that's a pretty minor cost. More expensive than the surface-mined stuff, mind you (which runs $5-8/kg), but eminently affordable.
The only people who make this argument are those who haven't paid attention to battery energy density over time. If you don't know what I'm talking about, compare your cell phone with one from the early 90s, or your laptop battery. Battery energy density has increased 4.5x in the past 20 years, and power density 10x. And it only seems to be speeding up.
Yes, there was a long time (the first 2/3rds to 3/4s of this century) where battery technology was mostly stagnated. Then the consumer electronics industry came into its own, and people actually started putting serious money into battery research. And our modern understanding of chemistry and nanoscale structures certainly doesn't hurt.
Or a halogen flashlight could SHINE for that long. But no, they're always still the same sucky thing as in the 1800s
Um, do you realize where the term "flashlight" comes from? Flashlights in the 1800s (actually, the very end of the 1800s) were these big, massive things with huge, heavy batteries -- and despite this, they had so little energy density that you couldn't leave them on all the time. You had to "flash" them when you wanted to see something.
Having ten times the energy density just means the difference between a scorched desktop and a burned down house.
No, it does not.
Think of it this way: if I put an internal resistor in a lithium-ion cell that dumps 90% of the power to heat, the official energy density rating for that battery is now 1/10th of what it would have been otherwise. Will lighting that cell on fire produce a flame any less intense because that resistor is in there?
Aluminum has a higher energy density than gasoline. Which would you rather be standing on when someone throws a match?
Incorrect. The lithium oxidizes to lithium peroxide, which can be reversibly transformed to lithium metal and free oxygen.
That's simply not true. TNT is less energy dense than aluminum. Which one would you rather be standing next to when a blasting cap is fired on them?
In this case, the energy density of the lithium has nothing to do with how fast it can react. The rate the lithium can burn is exactly the same as the rate in which it can burn in much less energy dense lithium primary cells. And furthermore, while this may be a fundamental problem in "small" devices like cell phones and laptops, large devices, such as electric car battery packs, have ample room for fire prevention, isolation, suppression, and venting systems.
Funny is a good mod rating for that. It's always funny when someone makes fun of someone for their use of words without taking the time to look up what the words actually mean. Do a google search for "functionalize" and "carbon". You'll find 563,000 hits. Most of the prominent ones are peer-reviewed scientific papers. Functionalization, in a chemistry context, means to add a functional group to a compound.
Your pessimism is misplaced. Don't you remember cell phones from the early 90s? Those giant bricks? When the then top-of-the-line NiMH battery was introduced in 1989, it boasted 45Wh/kg energy density. Now we have li-ions widely available at 200Wh/kg (4.5x the energy density) and 10x the power density.
For any given tech advance, the odds of it making it to market are low. But there are so many tech advances, many of which you never hear about, that the tech continues to advance at a good clip.
That said, I'm not a really big fan of any X-air batteries. They tend to be inefficient, low power, expensive, and have poor cycle life. There are literally dozens of li-ion advances working toward commercialization that can each 1.5 to 8x the density of either the anode or cathode, so regular li-ion still looks to have a lot of life in it. Also, I'm particularly interested in the recent advancements in lithium-sulfur. Practical lithium sulfur cells are 3-4x the energy density of current li-ion and are efficient and with reasonable power (excepting the unimpressive "stabilized" ones), but they tend to have very short cycle lifes. The University of Waterloo came up with a really interesting approach of wicking the sulfur into the pores of mesoporous carbon, baking it off the outside, and then functionalizing the carbon surface with PEG to repel the hydrophobic sulfur and keep it trapped in the pores so it can't migrate across the membrane and precipitate useless lithium polysulfates (the normal means of capacity loss in LiS). Their results were pretty astounding. In one experiment, they deliberately used an electrolyte known for dissolving polysulfates, thus facilitating capacity loss -- and compared their electrode with a traditional one. In a couple dozen cycles, the traditional electrode lost something like 96% of its capacity. Theirs lost only about a quarter of its capacity.
I find that if I can't code, it's best to write in plain English what needs to be done in very general terms. Not even in the code -- just on a scratchpad. Then break down those steps in blank english into smaller steps. And again and again. Keep on writing in plain English until you have the steps small enough that your mind goes, "Oh, well, that's trivial to code...". And then you're back in the game.
1. your password isn't long enough including special characters, upper-case, and numbers.
First off, "Isn't"? This was twelve years ago. I was in high school/college. Secondly, it included both letters and numbers. Yes, it could have been a stronger password, but I wasn't exactly counting on a "friend" monitoring my typing and stealing it.
2. you didn't type your password fast enough
I wasn't exactly counting on a "friend" monitoring my typing and stealing it.
bonus 3. you let a moron (sorry a Mormon) watch you type your password
I wasn't exactly counting on a "friend" monitoring my typing and stealing it.
And on that subject: how much attention do *you* pay, on average, to other activities when someone is talking to you? Certainly one *can* carry on a conversation while paying attention to others, but in practice, people often don't. That's a common tactic to rob people -- distract them in conversation while someone takes their stuff.
For what it's worth, I've had a password compromised before by someone looking over my shoulder at what *keys* I typed. I'd rather not make it even easier for people by letting them just look at the screen, thanks. As you note, you never know whether your environment is secure. In my case, back in TAMS, I had a "friend" who was chatting with me as an excuse to stand close enough / above me to see the keyboard; he then set up a porn site on my university account as a prank.
Strangely enough, the last I heard from him, he was becoming a Mormon missionary...