Sodium?
Lithium?
Totally fun elements to play with.
Lithium?
Totally fun elements to play with.
When I was at GE in the late '70s, they were trying to get sodium-sulfur batteries working. These things were made in a long steel pipe. They had to be maintained at a temperature above something like 400°F. Inside they had a bunch of molten sulfur separated from a bunch of molten sodium by a thin-walled cup made of alumina, which (as you may know) is a brittle ceramic. The cup was pretty much the same length as the steel pipe. It had to be think enough for allow ion exchange while keeping the sodium and sulfur separate.
If the alumina cup cracked, the results were violent and smelly and toxic. On one occasion, the resulting blast cut through the lab wall and shot out into the hallway.
They moved that research to a remote facility.
Amazing that this was more than 40 years ago, and even then they had already invested ten or fifteen years on the technology. I guess people are still working on it today. Shows how valuable a good high-capacity, fast-charging electricity storage technology is.