The CATL Naxtra sodium-ion battery will debut in the Changan Nevo A06 sedan, delivering an estimated range of around 400 kilometers (249 miles) on the China Light-Duty Test Cycle.
and
It delivers 175 watt-hours per kilogram of energy density, which is lower than nickel-rich chemistries but roughly on par with LFP
The main benefits are that Sodium is abundant, cheap and stores 30x the energy of Lithium per unit mass. The draw back is that when exposed to water it explodes with 30x the energy of Lithium. The other drawback is that it bursts into flame when exposed to air.
Think of it this way, Sodium metal is abundant and cheap with 30x the energy storage (and energy transfer) of other solutions yet nobody has used it in almost any product ever (including as a coolant). The volatility of Sodium is why. Unless they have a solution to this, then I would be shorting whoever is insuring these batteries.
Sodium ion batteries use sodium ions, like in table salt. They correctly are not named metallic sodium batteries. They are less fire prone than lithium batteries, even in locations containing air.
You should also consider shorting Morton [0]. They sell sodium, combined with chlorine, one of the nastiest elements around! And for products that go in people's homes! On food!
This isn't correct. This is only true when the battery is first manufactured just like with Li-ion. Once the battery starts functioning, it is ionized metallic Sodium. All the volatility of Na but with corrosion too. There is no Chlorine nor any other halogen in there to engage in an ionic bond. In short, once the battery is functioning, the trick used to keep the Na in an ionic bond stops working (by design). After all, the ionic bond would prevent the battery from functioning.
It should be noted that most manufactures aren't doing pure Na-ion. They are mixing in a little Na with the Li to stretch Li supplies and gather data on the impact of the increased volatility on safety. I wouldn't expect their first use to be in cars. I would expect them to be in grid stabilizing batteries.
I was sure you were wrong so I went and did some reading and, you're right. I'm wrong.
I was thinking of the aqueous sodium ion batteries, which do not have the issues described. I thought those were the ones that are commercially available, but that's not the case.
In ancient times, salt developed an extraordinary reputation. Not only was it prized as a preservative, but it was a nutritious seasoning as well. Salt had great value, and much of that nutritional value could be ascribed to the trace minerals which it carried as it was mined or otherwise harvested.
Nowadays, the manufacturers of refined table salt present you with a digusting proposition: sprinkle this worthless elemental sodium-chloride onto your food, because it is "salt" and they are 100% trading on its ancient reputation. Perhaps it is better to simply trample it underfoot?
Unfortunately, all the trace minerals are missing from refined salt. That pure white, homogeneous, translucent quality gives it away. The refining of salt is done purposefully, because the trace minerals are more valuable to supplement vendors.
All those trace minerals are separated out and sold out to companies who will assemble them into expensive dietary supplements. Your magnesium, and selenium, and zinc that you pay $30 a bottle for.
And that is also why sodium has such a nasty reputation in 2026. If you get CVD then you avoid sodium. If you get hypertension then you avoid sodium. Sodium is avoided like the plague. No physician will recommend sodium or table salt for a diet! Why should they? Adding sodium no longer introduces trace minerals or nutrition, it only introduces saltiness.
It is still possible to find unrefined salt. It may be sold as "sea salt" or "kosher salt" but you'll need to find it in transparent packaging. If it contains impurities that look like pepper or dirt, then it is unrefined. If it is imprinted with the obligatory fake warning about iodide, then it may be unrefined. (The mandatory FDA "iodide" warning is not only fake, it's misleading and downright malicious.)
Good luck with your salt! With love from your eponysterical HN noob!
However, the information is false. The amount of nutrients in unrefined salt is negligible. Yes it contains trace minerals but not in any significant quantity.
I have never seen or visited that website ever in my life. Why would I? I wrote my comment completely originally, and your accusation of bad faith is, in itself, bad faith.
In fact, none of the content which I typed into my comment is found in that blog article. How and why did you even find it? Anyone else here can read and confirm that I copied nothing. I quoted nothing. I owe nothing to anyone. My comment is original and copyrighted by myself (c) 2026, all rights reserved.
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CATL has been producing Sodium-ion batteries since 2022. As CATL has continued to produce and introduce new Sodium-ion batteries, it appears they might have a solved the issue with volatility.
If they have not solved the problem, I still wouldn't recommend shorting any companies. Shorting a stock and waiting for years for it to drop is not a great strategy.
Think of it this way, Sodium metal is abundant and cheap with 30x the energy storage (and energy transfer) of other solutions yet nobody has used it in almost any product ever (including as a coolant).
I thought the price differential was not going to happen as there was a serious drop in the price of Lithium over the past year; but I looked it up and the lithium price drop is more a 5 year trend, with the last few months having a sudden surge in the price.
Increased production of Lithium is why. However, that only drains the (very limited) reserves of Lithium more quickly. Currently we have about 75 years left of it at previous extraction rates. More could be found, that is unlikely.
Draining lithium reserves isn't that important - batteries don't use up the lithium, once the battery dies you can just suck out all the lithium and re-use it (and battery electrolytes are ~100% lithium, compared to lithium ore/brine being anywhere from 0.1% to 15% lithium - an order of magnitude difference). And since modern batteries are more efficient than old batteries with the same amount of lithium, we effectively increase the circulating lithium capacity over time.
In 75 years we won't need to extract more lithium - except the fraction needed to replace permanently-lost batteries.
Incidentally, you should be very careful when talking about "<resource> reserves", because the definition of a reserve is usually "<resource> that is profitable to extract" - and when we "run out", prices will go up and thus currently-unprofitable sources will become profitable, and POOF! Our <resource> reserves have increased, purely through the power of semantics.
Also, over the decades resource extraction becomes cheaper and thus more sources become profitable.
Personally though, I don't think any of that will matter -IMO the future is proton batteries, AKA Hydrogen batteries (which use an electrolyte of "ionic hydrogen", H+, which has 1 proton and 0 electrons - people claim lithium is the lightest metal, but it has 3x the protons of hydrogen). I think that the recent TABQ batteries, or something like it, will become commercially viable within 75 years (although who even knows what batteries will look like in the year 2101).
Nobody has ever recycled Lithium, just reused the cells that lasted longer than average. We have no idea how to actually recycle Li. We don't even understand the physical mechanism that causes it to exhaust. We think if we just let it sit around for a few decades, it might just come back on it own. We don't know though.
As for reserves, while you understand the economics you are missing the physics. For example, there is Li (and U) in the ocean. We don't extract Uranium from the ocean not only because it isn't economical, it isn't even energy efficient. This is because moving a billion tonnes of water takes more energy than the 3 tonnes of Uranium you would harvest from doing that. For Li, its takes just as much energy (and money) as its just as rare. In other words, there is a floor on that economic extraction argument specified by a positive EROEI (energy returned on energy invested).
Yes, we have. This is a well understood and fairy simple chemical process, you grind up non-working Lithium battery and split up the FOD from the metals then it's just basic chemical metal refining from here on out? When lithium is mined and extracted it goes through the exact same processes.
If you have any other sources or information on why we can't recycle lithium please let me know. As far is battery failure goes it's a mechanical failure on a chemical level
The Li that comes out of the process you describe wouldn't be recycled. It would still be mostly exhausted. Specifically, something we don't understand about the structure of their electrons causes the batteries made with such material to have a far lower capacity than if you used freshly mined Lithium. My source is a Material Engineering class at MIT.
We understand the structure of electrons very clearly in a lithium battery. That is the core operating principle of how a lithium ion battery works.
The lithium ions are the chemical process that actually store the charge, They move from the anode to cathode in charge and discharge. The loss of these ions is what causes the degradation of the battery which is a function of entropy here. It is simply that the concise arrangement that we required for this electro-chemical to take place falls out of balance.
Entropy problem is easily solved by mashing a battery up and reconstituting it
into a new battery.
To put this all simply this is all fairly basic chemistry, even if there was some kind of structure being created that has a high bond enthrall we can still undo that with enough energy.
If you could maybe share some research or other information to back up your claims other than you went to a class at MIT i would really appreciate it also the company i was saying is called Li Cycle
what about the polymetallic nodules on the ocean floor, don't they contain Li? -- setting aside the environmental question, isn't that a vast untapped source?
I thought there were a few massive lithium sources found in the past few years like the one in Thailand which have significantly increased our estimates?
Sure, but by like 2 years. Lithium is rare. It sits between Cobalt and Scandium on the list of abundance in Earth's crust. And the vast majority comes from one place in South America.
They are always revising estimates up and down a bit. But Li demand just keeps rising and rising. And a single grid scale battery takes 10 years of current Li-ion battery production worldwide to build.
So do we have enough Li at current rates, sure. We don't have anywhere near enough to do anything like replacing even a fraction of FFs with renewables. I guess that's the real headline here. That's why people are experimenting with Na-ion. Putting it in a production car today, that seems...what's the word...homicidal. Making a grid stabilization battery (not for backup) with large amounts of space between cabinets to see what happens, that seems more wise.
We have many grid stabilization batteries. There are 0 grid scale backup systems. 1 year of worldwide Li-ion battery production could backup just California for about 90 minutes.
I for one have gotten a piece of land and have begun planting as many edible perennials as I can. Think nuts, fruits and berries. Hopefully it can be a small part in both food security for those near and dear, and also do a tiny tiny bit for the co2 footprint as well.
Depending on how you've done it, you probably doing the local ecosystem a massive favor, especially if you're planting natives, beneficial flowers etc.
While there are many priorities to balance, having plenty of native species is absolutely one of them. There will probably be some kind of small wildflower meadow as well.
In this particular location, the ecosystem is currently in a reasonably good state, in contrast to say a heavily tilled farm soil, so I get a pretty decent start.
I was looking at a big tech company recently. They list well over a 100 open positions. I reach out to a friend who works there. He says some very nice things about me to his manager, who asks for my CV. Been six weeks and I haven't heard a word. I might apply again through the regular formal channels, but I would have thought that a strong recommendation was worth more.
I'm not really complaining, I'm in a fairly good spot myself, but for others out there in this situation, you're not alone.
Same. Family friend is in high up position. Passed my CV on to the data team. They said positive encouraging things, and he said that he'd soon be in contact for the next steps.
It's been over a month. I can believe that family friend would be forced to say something positive about my CV, but not that he'd give me false hope.
My interpretation: companies aren't hiring, they're covertly laying off staff whilst projecting growth to the market. Or, they are hiring, but the current teams are worried about the security of their own jobs as AI is now making everyone worried.
I'm not saying your family friend has done this, but I've seen people "refer" others to their company, then deliberately tank the candidacy because they didn't believe in the candidate's skills.
I would buy this, and even take it as a valid criticism, if he left with a lie like "... but there aren't any open spots right now" or "...it's out of my hands".
But he left with the promise of a reply. It just seems heartless, especially since I will see him again soon at another family function.
I recently ran a hiring pipeline for a senior/staff SWE. There were around a thousand applicants. What you have to understand is that there is a strong timing component to these pipelines: Hiring managers and recruiters screen hundreds of resumes to find people they want to talk to, resulting in maybe dozens of phones screens, followed by additional interview rounds for a handful of people who did really well.
So what happens if you send in your resume when we're already evaluating a bunch of people? Well, we may not have the bandwidth to interview you while we see if our current batch of candidates pan out. But also if your resume is good we probably won't reject you, either, while we wait to see if we can actually close a candidate.
It's entirely possible that we DO reach out to you after 2 months if we fail to make a hire on the current batch of candidates, or if our offers are rejected. Believe it or not, your resume is still right there in the tracker, and if there's no response yet, it could just be because it takes a really long time to go through this hiring process for everyone involved and there's no reason to reject you outright.
Also it has been pointed out elsewhere, that previous alcoholics will likely show up as non-drinkers in a study like this, but will already have done significant damage to their health.
The result being that not drinking looks worse than it is.
I would add that even if they recovered, drinkers increase their risk for a few cancer, so you probably can't just assess their past health issues to correct the life expectancy.
I didn't fully understand it either, but my take is this:
1. Twilio (or someone else) sends a text message for OTP.
2. This message needs to pass through my carrier (MNO, in the article) for delivery, and my carrier charges Twilio and/or their carrier, for the service. This is the revenue mentioned.
3. I have an agreement with my carrier, or simply form my own, that we split revenue.
This seems to go hand in hand with the idea, suggested by Jason Fung and others, that one should fast when sick.
If we stop eating, then there's less nutrients available for invaders, who have a large need to grow and replicate so they can spread to the next host. The human body doesn't need to rapidly grow though, so it can go without much food for a few days.
And the body can focus on fighting the disease and not digestion, which is work, too. I am currently sick and I just don't want to eat (much), so I won't. That's why we have fat reserves.
Anecdotally, several people have told that they lost a few pounds of fat while suffering from mild COVID-19 symptoms despite still eating during the course of the disease. And this was real fat loss, not just dehydration. Fighting the infection seems to burn a lot of calories.
Yes, but it stresses metabolism even more. When your immune system is using energy, stressing it with food if you are not suffering from malnutrition may not help.
Instead of eating, try resting and laying still. Don't even watch movies. Maybe listen only music or listen podcasts if you must.
This is just anecdotal and personal, but if I just have patience to stay still and lay down, I usually get better faster.
The presumed point is to have fewer nutrients. Reduced appetite accomplishes this, as do less efficient digestive processes. Both together should compliment each other.
I tried finding the articles I learned this from originally, but he appears to have migrated to a new blog and I can no longer find the sources, but IIRC Fung claims that this is the bodies way of solving precisely the "no-nutrients-for-the-invader" problem. Just dial down hunger as low as possible, to avoid eating.
Have you read anything from SMTM? Their work has been on HN a few times and they dive deep into the rabbit hole of what causes obesity. Fascinating stuff. https://slimemoldtimemold.com/
A series of mysteries as to different features of the obesity epidemic, that could possibly narrow down the causative factors. For example, people in higher elevations tend to be thinner than those in lower elevations, so perhaps the bad chemical is flowing downriver and accumulating at lower elevations.
Natural Selection is close to what you're after, my friends used to play it a lot.
One of the players is the RTS "Commander", the rest are soldiers on the ground. The commanders role is to distribute both resources and information as necessary to the soldiers.
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