Na-Ion can be a lot less expensive. But it’s a lot heavier. (Not a problem for grid-storage.)
I’ve never heard natrium before. I guess I could learn. We could also call pineapples ananas.
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Most likely because the news is in English. And why would Natrium be better on an international forum?
It is Sodium in most Latin languages (despite Natrium being Latin), in Hindi and in Arabic. And Chinese has a different root. Among the 10 most spoken languages (according to Wikipedia), only Russian is using Natrium.
As a native English speaker, I don’t think I’ve ever heard someone call NaCl just “Sodium”, it’s always called “Sodium Chloride”.
I’m a PhD candidate in chemistry. I’ve never once seen sodium refer to the salt, sodium chloride. Sodium is the metallic form or the atom.
However, why sodium, tungsten, lead, antimony, tin, silver, gold, mercury, iron, and potassium and not their Latin forms? Natrium, wolfram, plumbum, stibium, stannum, argentum, aurum, hydrargyrum, Ferrum and kalium? I don’t really know. Mostly it’s just fun trivia for me to tell the undergrads.
Can we eat them?
As a flashlight enthusiast, I’d be very interested to see if sodium batteries are any better.
Well I’m all about developing new technology and allowing the very best to sell the most.
Maybe someday in the future there will be an alternative to lithium batteries that really is better. But as you said, Sodium batteries aren’t as good.
They are actually better than Lithium in several ways. Sodium batteries have most of the capacity of Lithium batteries by weight, around 80% if I recall. But what they have to offer is being completely non-flammable, tolerant to wider temperature ranges, and they are made of materials that are cheap and abundant almost everywhere. It’s much better than having to source Lithium and Cobalt.
We could put Sodium batteries everywhere to power the grid since they are super safe, should be fine outdoors even.
Have they eliminated the need for sodium to be molten in sodium batteries? If so, that’s great news!
IIRC sodium is the -cathode- in the battery. No molten (RU thinking of reactors?)
I’m not thinking of reactors, though I am aware that molten sodium is used as a coolant fluid. It seems that I was remembering an off-hand comment in a MinutePhysics video from a few years ago. Molten sodium batteries do exist, but regular sodium batteries also exist.
So the answer to the question about what to do with the excess salt from desalination plants, is make batteries?
