cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/37619927
A battery usually hides its nastiest chemistry from view. Inside many rechargeable systems, useful energy moves through liquids that are strongly acidic, alkaline, flammable, corrosive, or difficult to discard. The battery works, until the same chemistry that made it powerful begins to eat away at its parts.
A team in China and Hong Kong has now built a very different kind of battery. Its electrolyte is a neutral water-based solution of magnesium and calcium salts, chemically close to the brines used to coagulate tofu. In tests, the device ran for 120,000 charge cycles, used nonflammable ingredients, and met several disposal safety standards, the researchers in China report.
It is not ready to replace the battery in your phone. But it points toward a cleaner kind of battery for the place where longevity matters most: the electric grid.
Exactly. If this could immediately solve the energy crisis, they’d be publishing the specs on this, and we’d all be making them in our kitchens this minute.
It’s just some sub-interesting science experiment, and the results it produced were unremarkable at best.
Not worth the click
So you’d only be interested in reading an article if it was going to instantly solve all of humanities energy problems overnight? Why bother clicking on any link with such ridiculously high standards?
I don’t think that’s what they are saying at all, but it doesn’t even mention how much power can go in, be sustained, and how much it can discharge. Those are the bare minimum details you’d want out of an article about a battery. The fact it mentions none of that is suspect.
Why would you think that?
In fact, why would you even bother trying to read my mind via a random Internet comment?