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Lithium-free sodium batteries exit the lab and enter US production (newatlas.com)

submitted 4 months ago by mox@lemmy.sdf.org to c/technology@lemmy.world

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[–] Harbinger01173430@lemmy.world 37 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Now, we'll scorch it for salt.

[–] sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 140 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Well, we have nearly an endless supply of salt here on the Internet, should be an easy transition.

[–] LordKitsuna@lemmy.world 44 points 4 months ago (3 children)

Desalination of water is basically an endless supply of salt, we can't just push it back into the ocean because that increases the salt concentration in the ocean which is actually not great and when done at scale. But we didn't really have anywhere else to put the salt because there's already an abundance of it for use elsewhere but if we start using salt for Batteries it would be a great place for salt from desalination to go

[–] roguetrick@lemmy.world 18 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

can’t just push it back into the ocean because that increases the salt concentration in the ocean which is actually not great and when done at scale

Only locally, it's absolutely not a problem globally. That water will go back into the ocean soon enough. We're not generally putting wastewater in aquifers. The same is true of lithium. Both sodium and lithium form salts that dissolve in water, so over time their biggest concentration is in the water and that's why we refine it from salt flats.

I don't consider the refining of lithium to be a huge problem, other than the fact that it usually just means they're trucking a bunch of water to the desert for concentration and evaporation ponds (or worse, using the local groundwater in the desert instead of trucking in desalinated water like they should be).

To put it into perspective, high lithium brine and ore reserves contain about 14 million tons of lithium. Seawater contains over 2 trillion tons. We currently have a yearly consumption somewhere under 200 thousand tons. We won't be hitting a lithium resource crunch anytime soon, it'll just get more expensive. If we ever get hydrogen fusion running, we'd have to separate a bunch of lithium-6 which makes up under 5 percent of lithium.

[–] JohnDClay@sh.itjust.works 9 points 4 months ago

Desalination is also a good way of getting lithium right now, it's just a bit less cost effective than surface mining dried oceans currently. Maybe if sodium demand also goes up, it'll be effective to capture desalination salts for both lithium and sodium.

[–] afraid_of_zombies@lemmy.world 1 points 4 months ago

that increases the salt concentration in the ocean which is actually not great and when done at scale.

I dealt with CaSO4 (calcium-sulfur salt) dumping before. It is considered fine (by DNV) as long as it not in brackish waters or too close to the shore or in most of the North Sea. It's just adding salt to salt water, salt is supposed to go there.

I guess if you were doing it at insane scales it would be best to run a pipeline out, run your seapumps harder, or have ships do the dumping. Not sure.