Lithium-ion battery fires are an absolute *itch to put out.
The Japanese are building a new class of non-nuclear submarines using lithium-ion batteries to provide long-term silent running, as an alternative to the fuel cell and other air independent propulsion (AIP) technologies that the Swedes and Germans and French and others (including prior Japanese subs) have been using to power non-nuclear subs almost silently under water for a couple of decades. They are actually quieter than nukes, which still have to run cooling water pumps for their reactors, even when not running their engines. There was a Swedish sub that exercised with the US Pacific Fleet several years ago and recorded several exercise "kills" of USN carriers, without ever being detected by the USN anti-submarine (ASW) forces. They finally figured out that the best way to find it was a computer-aided search for areas that were quieter than ambient ocean water.
Anyway, back to the new Japanese subs, I really wonder about fire hazards with huge lithium-ion batteries undersea. I cannot imagine a more dreadful way to go. The Russians built a class of titanium subs a few decades ago. They got some pretty incredible performance out of them. But one actually caught fire (titanium is flammable under the right conditions) and basically burned up under water. Again, I cannot imagine a more dreadful way to got than to have your submarine burn up around you. I think the USN needs to build some AIP non-nuclear subs for duties such as choke point and littoral patrols, to free the nuke boats up for blue water duties. But I would tend to shy away from lithium-ion.
Wowsers, that could be your car in your garage. Good bye car, good bye house, it would be more expensive than what an electric vehicle costs right now. I feel the same way about hydrogen powered vehicles, too unstable in my book, maybe I'm wrong but why take chances. It would be like the Hindenburg but the car would be flying up instead of crashing down.
(08-31-2022 05:48 PM)solohawks Wrote: Can someone please explain to me why my airline asked me to help the environment by buying carbon offsets for my flight today?
How does me giving the airline more money help with global warming
it's filed under one of those accounting subsidy columns...
(This post was last modified: 08-31-2022 07:12 PM by stinkfist.)
