When using ferrocyanide, also consider that while this salt is relatively safe in its unaltered state, subjecting it to electrochemical abuse WILL generate free cyanide and it’s likely to pose a significant danger to you and others. For this reason, I would recommend to stay away from testing ferrocyanides in symmetric systems entirely, unless you are a trained professional and professionally well equipped to handle both the potential operational hazards and wastes generated from its decomposition products.
After all, people painted the walls and enhanced their gas with cyanide in large quantities for years before even realizing it had to be carefully handled so they are basically the same risk in the typical mind.
The problem is free cyanide is extraordinarily dangerous in the air and you'd likely kill a lot of people before someone realized what was going on with the battery, not just that people eat batteries. Even lithium batteries honestly get pretty close to not being worth the risk for consumers, cyanide is still a bit of a step after that yet.
Somewhat true, but consumers are buying vast quantities of lithium batteries and carrying them in their pockets. Those things are eager to catch fire and emit hydrofluoric acid.
You can have safe battery chemistry or useful battery chemistry. (Not an expert, open to correction.)
Well they sell that liquid explosive terrorists use to make molotov cocktail firebombs, at every fuel station without particular volume limits at all. It's also sufficiently toxic that care is taken at salespoint to limit customer exposure to the vapours.
(these things are "all relative, if the value, measured in "convenience to the customer", is high enough,
ways will be found to permit sale)
The public is not going to buy a flow battery anyway.
Or perhaps they will, but only when public is taken in the context as in public utility or public city. But individuals are not going to buy a flow battery, it is a chemical plant.
If we're going to do chemical-plant scale utility batteries, why not just lead-acid? It's well understood, simple, and the ingredients are cheap. Yes lead is toxic but it's easily contained and recyclable.
I think the very fact that PbS and for that matter NiFe have been around for decades and aren't widely deployed for utility scale probably counts against it. I suspect the answer may be that weight matters enough just in the cost of delivery to the site. Where utility scale storage is being deployed it's lithium; may switch to sodium as that crosses over in cost.
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To give the answer its the cyanide part... which I knew already when looking at the title, without having much clue about underlying chemistry.
Good luck selling batteries full of some variant of cyanide to general public, i can almost imagine it working till people hear that keyword.
That's pretty much what the article states:
Yeah, just like no one would ever buy a lead-acid battery.
I don't think many people are concerned about their batteries being safe for ingestion.
After all, people painted the walls and enhanced their gas with cyanide in large quantities for years before even realizing it had to be carefully handled so they are basically the same risk in the typical mind.
The problem is free cyanide is extraordinarily dangerous in the air and you'd likely kill a lot of people before someone realized what was going on with the battery, not just that people eat batteries. Even lithium batteries honestly get pretty close to not being worth the risk for consumers, cyanide is still a bit of a step after that yet.
But toddlers could swallow it! Just like they swallow lead-acid batteries.
Somewhat true, but consumers are buying vast quantities of lithium batteries and carrying them in their pockets. Those things are eager to catch fire and emit hydrofluoric acid.
You can have safe battery chemistry or useful battery chemistry. (Not an expert, open to correction.)
Well they sell that liquid explosive terrorists use to make molotov cocktail firebombs, at every fuel station without particular volume limits at all. It's also sufficiently toxic that care is taken at salespoint to limit customer exposure to the vapours.
(these things are "all relative, if the value, measured in "convenience to the customer", is high enough, ways will be found to permit sale)
Vapor recovery requirements vary by locality. Where I live, none of the gas pumps have it.
well, if money were to be spent, in that case better build electrical charging infrastructure than upgrading the gas pumps ...
The public is not going to buy a flow battery anyway.
Or perhaps they will, but only when public is taken in the context as in public utility or public city. But individuals are not going to buy a flow battery, it is a chemical plant.
If we're going to do chemical-plant scale utility batteries, why not just lead-acid? It's well understood, simple, and the ingredients are cheap. Yes lead is toxic but it's easily contained and recyclable.
I think the very fact that PbS and for that matter NiFe have been around for decades and aren't widely deployed for utility scale probably counts against it. I suspect the answer may be that weight matters enough just in the cost of delivery to the site. Where utility scale storage is being deployed it's lithium; may switch to sodium as that crosses over in cost.
Have to abbreviate it as FCN. Cyanide is ~320 times more toxic than ferrocyanide.
There are plenty of battery customers besides the usual suspects