I know millions of Lithium-based batteries are in use
You're wrong. Billions are in use. Billions of laptops, tablets, cell phones, smoke detectors, and other assorted gadgets are sold every year with these batteries. There are several within easy reach of my chair right now. I bet if I tracked down every lithium battery in my house, there would be at least a couple dozen accumulated over the years.
Just today, the New York Times said[1] "The Consumer Product Safety Commission has documented more than 350 fires involving lithium-ion batteries since March 2012".
350 fires out of the hundreds of millions of these batteries that must make their way into Americans' hands every year.
Perspective: In 2012, 28 Americans died from lightning strikes[2] (a below-average year, at that). In 2010, over 4,000 pedestrians died being in the US[3]. You don't want to know how many people died in 2011 to tornados.
I can't think of a single death that has been attributed to a lithium-ion battery fire, and only a handful of injuries.
If lithium batteries aren't safe, I don't know what is. Boeing has done something deeply wrong.
So what? The number of Li ion batteries doesn't really mean much.
By analogy: there are at least something 10^34 (10 million billion billion billion) uranium atoms on earth, and they weren't explosive for billions of years, yet somehow they seem to be potentially quite explosive since 1945.
It's a question of critical mass. A small lithium ion battery may be safe, a large one may not be. Just because there are billions of tiny lithium ion batteries on the world that are relatively harmless doesn't mean large ones aren't - the energy capacity rises in the cube of the size, but heat dissipation only quadratically.
In short, because it works safely in the small doesn't mean it's easy to implement safely at scale.
Comments
You're wrong. Billions are in use. Billions of laptops, tablets, cell phones, smoke detectors, and other assorted gadgets are sold every year with these batteries. There are several within easy reach of my chair right now. I bet if I tracked down every lithium battery in my house, there would be at least a couple dozen accumulated over the years.
Just today, the New York Times said[1] "The Consumer Product Safety Commission has documented more than 350 fires involving lithium-ion batteries since March 2012".
350 fires out of the hundreds of millions of these batteries that must make their way into Americans' hands every year.
Perspective: In 2012, 28 Americans died from lightning strikes[2] (a below-average year, at that). In 2010, over 4,000 pedestrians died being in the US[3]. You don't want to know how many people died in 2011 to tornados.
I can't think of a single death that has been attributed to a lithium-ion battery fire, and only a handful of injuries.
If lithium batteries aren't safe, I don't know what is. Boeing has done something deeply wrong.
[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/13/business/lithium-ion-batte...
[2] http://www.nws.noaa.gov/om/hazstats/light12.pdf
[3] http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/money/autos/story/2012-08-02/...
So what? The number of Li ion batteries doesn't really mean much.
By analogy: there are at least something 10^34 (10 million billion billion billion) uranium atoms on earth, and they weren't explosive for billions of years, yet somehow they seem to be potentially quite explosive since 1945.
It's a question of critical mass. A small lithium ion battery may be safe, a large one may not be. Just because there are billions of tiny lithium ion batteries on the world that are relatively harmless doesn't mean large ones aren't - the energy capacity rises in the cube of the size, but heat dissipation only quadratically.
In short, because it works safely in the small doesn't mean it's easy to implement safely at scale.
Why don't you ask robomartin that? It was his generic worries about lithium-ion batteries in everything, not simply planes, that I was replying to.
And just because one bloated monopolistic behemoth was criminally negligent doesn't mean it's hard to do correctly what they screwed up.