Maybe. But anyone who has worked with sodium is likely to be skeptical of that.

Ask your local fire department about putting fires out in battery-powered cars versus gasoline cars. Yes, there is a qualitative difference and it's not in favor of the battery-powered cars.

That's not to say that it's a stopper for them; it's just part of the cost/benefits analysis. The idea of technologies that are better on all parts of the cost/benefit analysis at once is a science fiction or video game concept. In the real world there's always a mixture of positives and negatives between two different technologies.

If I'm not mistaken, a lithium battery grid-level energy storage firefighting protocol is "evacuate people and let it burn."

Same protocol for a burning pile of tires at your favorite bumrocks exurban service station, amusingly. Yet no one loses their shit on HN about that horrifyingly dangerous technology.

I give up. This is a proxy war for something else. No one seriously is scared of batteries in the way people here keep trying to justify.

Why so sensitive? There are other battery chemistries (say, VRFB) that are less dangerous and that are less like tire fire.

It's not just vehicles. Battery fires from electric bikes and scooters have also caused issues. And currently you can't put a battery pack into plane hold luggage because of fire risks.

Electric bikes and scooters are also vehicles, right?

How much more likely are you to be injured on an eBike vs. getting run over on a Schwinn, though? Have you ever been afraid of the bike?

The presence of a different failure mode isn't the question at issue. Yes, they're new tech and require new techniques. Duh, as it were.

It's your abject and frankly irrational paranoia that I'm calling out. Chill the fuck out, as it were. Moving things have always been dangerous, and if you believe this represents a change in aggregate risk you are simply wrong.

>How much more likely are you to be injured on an eBike vs. getting run over on a Schwinn, though? Have you ever been afraid of the bike?

Many rightly are.

>And gasoline fires and high speed collisions aren't?

Gasoline car fires are quite rarer in modern cars (don't know about the 1950s), and easier to put off than battery car fires.

And people are already afraid of high speed collisions, plus they are orthogonal of the energy technology used.

>Personal vehicles are by far the most dangerous apparatus with which we interact, already.

And under what framing does it make sense to use the above to argue in favor of adding a dangerous battery tech to them is thus not problematic?

You seem to be turning this into a discussion of vehicles, but the post you're replying to was purely about batteries. I get it - ICE cars suck. But speaking for myself, I waited until I could get LFP batteries before adding a lot of lithium to my house. I deemed the fire risk of NMC not worth the benefits. I now have about 15kWh of LFP and I'm happy as a clam.

Are sodium fires less scary?

In some sodium-ion chemistries they release hydrogen cyanide gas.

Yeah. Still absolutely a bad day but less rapid and dramatic

Actually, yes

sodium fires don't make their own oxygen, so I would presume they are less scary