Quote:
Originally Posted by 344a
I was saying lighter, not smaller. What I was trying to say is, I wish we would have some new technologies to make the batteries lighter and more eco-friendly in the near future. It would be better if people invent something new to replace the batteries, since the batteries are so toxic to the earth.
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Lithium-ion batteries are actually much less toxic than NiCad ever were. Heavy metal chemistry is horribly toxic, but heavy metals don't make very good batteries because they're, well, heavy. Lithium is sufficiently non-toxic that it's used as a
long-term pharmaceutical. (It does have that little burst into flames problem, but that doesn't make it harmful to the environment per se, or sodium metal would be far worse -- it's much more reactive than lithium and much heavier.)
All the advances I see coming down the pipeline in the next decade involve much reduced charging time (things now in the lab can fully charge in a few seconds, if you can jam enough power in) or much increased charge/discharge lifespan (now in the lab: on the order of millions of charges). There is very little progress being made on energy density; certainly nothing greater than an order of magnitude seems to be on the cards. This is unsurprising: in the absence of a wholesale rethinking of electrochemical charge storage, all we can do to up the energy density is to use something lighter than lithium, but hydrogen doesn't seem very amenable to making batteries out of, and even that would only give a factor-of-three improvement.