Re: battery fire

On 18/01/2025 10:37, Liz Tuddenham wrote:

Jeff Layman <Jeff@invalid.invalid> wrote:
 

On 17/01/2025 21:42, Martin Brown wrote:
>

Lithium ion battery fires are virtually impossible to put out - you have
to let them burn out and use boundary cooling on the neighbouring
modules with copious amounts of water. Looks like this one managed to
get away from the fire fighters (which isn't supposed to happen).

>
We have no problem building large windmills at sea. Why not build the
lithium storage facilities off the coast too? The capital cost would be
higher, but once built they could be maintained in a similar way to
those on land. And if one caught fire, there's plenty of water around to
put the fire out, or at least keep it under control. For even greater
safety - and expense - they could be built as submerged facilities,
where any fire could be dealt with in seconds by opening a valve and
letting sea water flood the building.

 I seem to remember from my chemistry lessons that lithium reacts
violently with water.  Containing lithium pollution of large areas of
the sea in stormy conditions (which is when catastrophic failure is most
likely to occur) might be quite difficult.

Lithium metal reacts vigorously with water, although much less so than metallic sodium or potassium. But there is basically /no/ lithium metal in the batteries - note the name is lithium *ion* battery.
There are quite a few different Li-ion battery chemistries (see <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium-ion_battery#Electrochemistry>), but the problem they all have in relation to fire is not the lithium metal, but that lithium reacts with water, so the liquid substrate in which the reactions take place is an organic solvent - usually an organic carbonate. That is the fire problem!
I think that any pollution problem would also be due to the organic solvent and other materials rather than the lithium. The main issue at present seems to be toxic gas emission from the burning batteries. Perhaps dousing the fire with sea water would give the lesser of two pollution evils, but until tested we won't know.
--
Jeff