Re:HH70, the first high-temperature superconducting Tokamak ...
by ak217 on Saturday June 22, 2024 @10:45PM
(#40764323)
That's not a useful comparison. The power of the explosion at Chernobyl, while deadly to the one person immediately next to it, was not the problem that made Chernobyl the catastrophe that it was. That was the radionuclide contamination that it spread and the remaining latent power in the fuel that, if released uncontrollably, would have spread it even further.
A grid scale lithium ion battery, even completely burned up and vaporized into the atmosphere, is not dangerous in a comparable way.
Re:HH70, the first high-temperature superconducting Tokamak ...
by chii on Sunday June 23, 2024 @01:54AM
(#40765085)
not to mention that battery fires don't release all of their stored energy at once, unlike explosives. Granted, they might burn uncontrollably for a long time, and difficult to extinguish.
A 10MWh battery storage facility, if it were to release its energy all at once would be something on the order of the Chernobyl explosion (sans radioactivity) so certainly capable of destroying a building and killing people nearby. I'm not sure what is "normal" for a utility scale storage facility but 100 times[0] that doesn't seem out of the question
(From Wikipedia[1], the explosion "was estimated ... to be at 40 billion joules" and from unitconverters.net, 40 billion Joules is about 11 MWh[2].)
[0] https://www.energystoragejournal.com/worlds-largest-utility-...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_disaster
[2] https://www.unitconverters.net/energy/joule-to-megawatt-hour...