If you managed to create batteries that can last for a century, will charging be redundant?

Submitted ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩ by ⁨Shadow79@piefed.social⁩ to ⁨[deleted]⁩

You managed to create lithium batteries lasting for 100 years (meaning an iPhone user can scroll with unlimited time until the individual dies of old age without stressing if the phone will run out of battery). To put it into perspective: Nuclear Submarines can go on without refuelling for at least 50 years, so if you double that lifespan on a lithium battery: how would it shape modern electronics? What would it be like having a battery that can last an entire century?

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markz@suppo.fi ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
I do not want to be in the same room as a lithium battery containing a century’s worth of enwrgy.

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- neidu3@sh.itjust.works ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
  “Now over to Australia where a Note 7 battery exploded this morning. This means that another country has been added to the growing list of regions completely obliterated by a thermonuclear explosion”
  
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MurrayL@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
Given the pace of technological progress, I doubt a phone bought today will be all that useful (except as a retro novelty) in 25 years time, let alone 100.

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- Rhynoplaz@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
  I don’t know if you knew this or not, but the KRZRs actually WERE known for having terrible batteries. Every time somebody brought one in with battery issues, we’d pop the battery out, set it down and give it a spin. More times than not, a cell had burst inside and that battery would be swollen to hell.
  
  I thought it was funny that you just happened to pick a phone that people actually DID get rid of just because of the battery!
  
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  - MurrayL@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
    I did not! I actually had one back in the day and never had battery issues, but pretty funny to hear it was a common complaint.
    
    (Still, I think the broader point stands.)
    
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- naught101@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
  I have a friend who had an iPhone 3 until 3g got shut down 18 months ago. You don’t need to buy into the constant update cycle.
  
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  - cecilkorik@piefed.ca ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
    That also kind of proves OP’s point though. 3G was shut down, making an iPhone 3 pretty much useless at this point. You can use these things a lot longer than they want or expect you to, sure, but 20 years is a stretch, and 100 years is untenable.
    
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HobbitFoot@thelemmy.club ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
It depends on the power density. A battery with the current power density but increased longevity isn’t going to be as useful as you’d think.

A battery that is able to have the same power output as current batteries but last a century is going to be a weapon of mass destruction.

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- AA5B@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
  
  A battery with the current power density but increased longevity
  
  …. Is exactly what we need. People bitch and moan about how difficult it is to replace phone batteries, but this would make it unnecessary. More importantly, all those people who replace their phones every 2-3 years as the battery stops lasting a full day, would no longer have that excuse. If we had increased longevity, there’d be less electronic waste as people keep their devices longer
  
  Or think about things like grid storage - a lot of the high cost is how long they last, so increased longevity is critical for that investment to pay off.
  
  Or v2g. People are finally coming around to trust that EV batteries will last longer than they will own an EV, ut most of us still don’t trust vehicle to grid connections to not unnecessarily age our vehicle battery
  
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  - HobbitFoot@thelemmy.club ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
    But less electronics waste is less profit. If everyone who bought a 2 year phone bought them every 4 years instead, that’s a 50% drop in sales.
    
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Steve@communick.news ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
There a a few reasons why this is a bad idea. But disregarding those, I don’t think it would change all that much. So you don’t have to charge your phone. It’s not like that’s a big inconvenience anyway.

It would have a bigger impact on vehicles transportation and shipping. Long range trucks don’t need to stop for fuel. Neither do cargo ships. Maybe battery electric airliner become viable.

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Lasherz12@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
Doesn’t really make sense even to users. They would shrink the battery to a small fraction of its original side, market it as the world’s lightest and thinnest phone, with 4x the battery life of a normal phone. Then they’d have some other products of a bigger battery version for emergency red phones.

Beyond just companies wanting to turn a buck, there’s other more obvious limitations. The bands to communicate with the tower require physical antennas inside the phone and those frequencies are recycled over time to different protocols or sometimes different uses entirely. It would be useless as a phone before it’s dead.

Also the whole thing about energy density. Current lithium ballpark density is 250 Wh per kg. Taking a modern galaxy 5000mah (19.4wh) battery and multiplying it by your chosen ratio of 10 hours vs a hypothetical 876000 makes it 21,900,000Wh per Kg, still less dense than fusion energy, which is around 24,000,000,000Wh per kg but very close to fission energy density, which is around 24,000,000 Wh. Of the Uranium that actually fissioned during the Little Boy bomb explosion, it only amounted to about 0.8763kg, less energy than a kilogram of your hypothetical battery. I guess luckily batteries only weigh about 50 grams? The factory making them would have more bomb potential than the Beirut explosion if they had more than 47.5 kg of batteries, or enough to make 950 phones.

As an aside, I can’t believe how big the Beirut explosion was, 1GWh. Insane and horrifying.

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Lasherz12@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
I think unfortunately this would open the door for bad actors too. Taking old outdated phone batteries and combining them would allow for some crazy things that could do mass harm. Even smoke detectors with Americium can be gathered and dissected to radiate a small neighborhood or inact terrorism. Additional reading: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Hahn

The whole story of why we use Americium in detectors is an interesting one in itself. youtu.be/DuAeaIcAXtg one of my favorite long form nerdy youtube channels.

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