The Growing Problem of Lithium Battery Hazardous Waste

...but, Lithium can be recycled and (most) spent nuclear cores cannot...not within human lifetimes.

Most lithium, like most nuclear fuel cores, are not recycled, but they both can be...

When used fuel comes out of a light-water reactor, it's in a hard ceramic form, and almost all of it is still just uranium – about 95 percent, along with one percent other long-lived radioactive elements, called actinides. Both of these can be recycled as fuel.Jun 22, 2012

https://www.anl.gov/article/nuclear-fuel-recycling-could-offer-plentiful-energy

..."As of 2017, the recycling of Li-Ion batteries generally does not extract lithium since the many different types of Li-Ion batteries require a different extraction process.^[7] Another reason why it isn't done is because the extraction of lithium from old batteries is 5x more expensive than mined lithium^[8]"...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battery_recycling

https://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffmcmahon/2018/07/01/innovation-is-making-lithium-ion-batteries-harder-to-recycle/#759513dc4e51

..."A key, nearly unique, characteristic of nuclear energy is that used fuel may be reprocessed to recover fissile and fertile materials in order to provide fresh fuel for existing and future nuclear power plants. Several European countries, Russia, China and Japan have policies to reprocess used nuclear fuel, although government policies in many other countries have not yet come round to seeing used fuel as a resource rather than a waste.

Over the last 50 years the principal reason for reprocessing used fuel has been to recover unused plutonium, along with less immediately useful unused uranium, in the used fuel elements and thereby close the fuel cycle, gaining some 25% to 30% more energy from the original uranium in the process. This contributes to national energy security. A secondary reason is to reduce the volume of material to be disposed of as high-level waste to about one-fifth. In addition, the level of radioactivity in the waste from reprocessing is much smaller and after about 100 years falls much more rapidly than in used fuel itself.

These are all considerations based on current power reactors, but moving to fourth-generation fast neutron reactors in the late 2020's changes the outlook dramatically, and means that not only used fuel from today’s reactors but also the large stockpiles of depleted uranium (from enrichment plants, about 1.5 million tonnes in 2015) become a fuel source. Uranium mining will become much less significant."...

http://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fuel-cycle/fuel-recycling/processing-of-used-nuclear-fuel.aspx

..."Lithium-ion battery waste to exceed 100,000 tonnes by 2036(annually in Australia)

Only 2 percent of Australia's annual 3,300 tonnes of lithium-ion battery waste is recycled,"...

https://www.zdnet.com/article/csiro-lithium-ion-battery-waste-to-exceed-100000-tonnes-by-2036/

..."The latest Nuclear Fuel Data Survey data show that a total of 241,468 fuel assemblies, with an initial loading weight of about 70,000 metric tons of uranium (MTU), were discharged from and stored at 118 commercial nuclear reactors operating in the United States from 1968 through June 2013. Illinois, Pennsylvania, and South Carolina have the highest amount of stored nuclear material, with more than 4,000 MTU in each state."...

So over 45 years the total tonnage weight of nuclear "waste" is 70k tons...

https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=24052

I would venture a guess that we are producing more hazardous waste than that on a yearly basis from lithium batteries....and would further guess that that figure, will be dwarfed by future figures...

Mostly wrong.

Most power reactors use a fuel load that is between 5 and 7% active ingredient.

2% of the fuel load is converted to waste products, of which most have commercial value. (Can you believe that in the US, we maintain reactors in Idaho that are maintained solely to produce medical and commercial radioactive isotopes, but are not connected to recover thermal energy?) 1% of the "filler" material, U238 is converted to PU239, which can be used as new active ingredient after recycling.

The remaining "filler" can be reused in a new core after recycling. Less than 1% of a spent reactor fuel load requires storage and/or disposal.

Basically you can reuse everything but the squeal. Thanks to Jimmy Carter, who originally arranged prohibition of recycling spent fuel, for the backlog of unprocessed spent fuel sitting around the country. Perhaps it's time for the fuel processors to arrange a bit of urban mining to recover and reprocess the spent fuel invntory in this country, or at least sell it to England, France or Japan where it can be fed into existing reprocessing programs.

One of the differences is that i can stand next to a spent lithium battery, while wearing shorts and a tee shirt all day on Sunday, but if I tried to do that next to a spent fuel rod, I'd probably be dead in less than a week.

I don't see the relevance... Lithium can be just as deadly, it's just the delivery method that may be different...

Sorry I didn't get back to you right away. In my opinion the difference is that lithium can be recycled and waste lithium batteries by themselves are much safer than used, spent or waste nuclear material. You said that components of lithium batteries are land filled and that can lead to ground water contamination. Clearly research needs to be done in that area to create complete recovery methods. I can see that you are a proponent of nuclear energy and nuclear energy could be a good option, if it wasn't so much more poisonous. If it wasn't, then why is nuclear material and its byproducts buried 1000 + feet below ground in salt caverns. I remember reading awhile back where there was to be a sign installed at the site where future humans (or ?) would not disturb the area for some 10,000 years. Its often difficult to comment on these and other topics. Humans are great at creating many different things, but are lousy at cleaning up their messes.

You're still stuck in a nonrecycling mindset. If recycled, less than 1% of the spent nuclear fuel would remain as high level radioactive waste. 99% of the spent fuel would go back into use and the volume of spent fuel in storage would be gone. Of the 1% high level waste, a large percentage of that can be burned to extremely short half-life material in a neutron field. Not Sci-fi, it's been done in the lab.

We'll that 1% must be a pretty large amount. I just saw an article on oakridge that showed cask ,# 184 loaded onto the back of a big rig on its way to Carlsbad.

And that probably wasn't the most recent shipment.

I remember when I went to oakridge the chief engineer telling me about the " witches brew " buried just below our feet.

That's because in the US, nuclear waste is not being reprocessed and/or recycled....just stored....The reason given is fear of proliferation...and cost...that has been shown to be false reasoning by other countries that do recycle nuclear waste...

https://www.forbes.com/sites/realspin/2014/10/01/why-doesnt-u-s-recycle-nuclear-fuel/#e97ae06390f1

Even just storing the nuclear cores generates much less waste than lithium ion batteries...add to that nuclear waste is stored safely on site, and lithium batteries are almost completely landfilled out in the open environment, and the chances of contamination and exposure become much higher...so the overall threat from nuclear waste exposure is almost non-existent, and from lithium battery waste is almost assured...Granted both can be recycled almost completely, but of the two, nuclear is cost effective now, and lithium batteries are not....

The fellow who wrote the very top remark is a uneducated idiot ! Does any one know what the Navy has done with their radioactive waste ? And Lithium batteries are recycled !

..."Without a recycling market, battery owners are left with a disposal cost instead of a recycling incentive. ... "Currently most lithium-ion batteries are land-filled," according to Battery Resourcers."...

https://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffmcmahon/2018/07/01/innovation-is-making-lithium-ion-batteries-harder-to-recycle/#319256ac4e51

..."The Navy operates all nuclear submarines and aircraft carriers. ... The nuclear fuel is removed from the reactor and sent to the Naval Reactors Facility in Idaho for processing. The nuclear reactor compartments are cut out, carefully sealed and taken to an approved disposal site.Aug 7, 2017"...

https://www3.epa.gov/radtown/submarines-aircraft-carriers.html

There are hundreds of barrels of radioactive waste off the Farallon islands in the pacific ocean west of San Francisco dumped by the navy Do some research !!!

and Lithium batteries are recycled one can't believe all that's posted !

Peace

..."From 1946 to 1970, the sea around the Farallones was used as a nuclear dumping site for radioactive waste under the authority of the Atomic Energy Commission at a site known as the Farallon Island Nuclear Waste Dump. Most of the dumping took place before 1960, and all dumping of radioactive wastes by the United States was terminated in 1970. By then, 47,500 containers (55-gallon steel drums) had been dumped in the vicinity, with a total estimated radioactive activity of 14,500 Ci. The materials dumped were mostly laboratory materials containing traces of contamination. Much of the radioactivity had decayed by 1980.^[41] "...

This dumping was done by the Atomic Energy Commission which is or rather was a government agency established after WWII to study nuclear effects, it was dissolved in 1974 by act of congress, some 44 years ago....this was low level materials that were contaminated, not fuel assemblies....has nothing to do with the Navy...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Atomic_Energy_Commission

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farallon_Islands

Since I have thousands of sources that confirm that lithium batteries are not in fact being recycled in any meaningful quantity, suppose you just name a source that you would consider as believable....

..this from wikipedia...

..."As of 2017, the recycling of Li-Ion batteries generally does not extract lithium since the many different types of Li-Ion batteries require a different extraction process.^[7] Another reason why it isn't done is because the extraction of lithium from old batteries is 5x more expensive than mined lithium^[8] but efforts are being made to commercialize an industry in expectation of large quantities of disused batteries to come.^[9][10] "...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battery_recycling#Lithium_ion_batteries

How about a study...?

..." However, even with the continued rise of Li-ion battery development and commercialization, the recycling industry is lagging; approximately 95% of Li-ion batteries are landfilled instead of recycled upon reaching end of life. Industrialized recycling processes are limited and only capable of recovering secondary raw materials, not suitable for direct reuse in new batteries."...

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11837-016-1994-y

How about initiatives being proposed to start recycling programs in countries around the world...

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11837-016-1994-y

You see what people say is going to be done, and what is actually done, can be two different things entirely...

So True !

https://www.latimes.com/business/technology/la-fi-lithium-ion-battery-recycling-20180316-story.html

"We already know the footprint for solar and wind is huge compared to other generating methods."
No we don't ! It isn't if the brain is engaged.
Del

https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/%22Stop_These_Things%22
Totally unreliable source... probably sponsored by the big power companies or Oil/Coal interests.
Del

This is only a valid argument if you dispute the probability that Germany will experience rolling blackouts when its remaining nuclear power plants are shut down.....

https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelshellenberger/2018/10/15/in-wake-of-terrifying-climate-report-german-environmentalists-will-in-a-twist-rally-for-nuclear/#11f19c5749cf

https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/guest-post-germany-faces-a-growing-risk-of-disastrous-power-blackouts#gs.EPIDmgI

Humans will always have a food print on this planet as long as they are there and maybe also long after they are gone.

For today that means we should stop fooling ourselves with climate worries if the solutions that are put forward turning into much more serious problems than what we try to avoid. I am thinking the calls for Geo Engineering are the worst of the worst, but the so called renewable energy generation is not that far off, if it means to turn vast landscapes into bird shredding industry parks. Birds are nature too!

There should be a proper discussion, evaluation and open research on all kinds of energy production types looking at all aspects of their impact on the society and nature. And there should be a proper discussion about storage needs and technology!

What we will find is there is not one fits all solution and we should not have to rely on just one and in case of the wind and solar power on intermittent power generation.

A coal plant where the exhaust fumes are scrubbed is still the better choice than cementing hillsides and fields where no bird will fly and no man wants to live.

I think we are just starting to understand what the full impact of the mining activities for rare earth elements and Lithium will be and how we will actually be devastating more nature.

No more burning wood for power as long as we have coal.

No more brainwashing the masses that solar and wind can achieve what conventional plants do. They can not!

Yes I am for a fair comparison or all power generation, nuclear the same as hydro power, solar, wind, coal, gas you name it.

We will have to use a mix and everything does have its place, but we should not succumb to scaremongering to have an inferior power generation system pushed on society for the benefit of a few.

Holding my breath now on the replys!

"...whoever came up with the idea of integral batteries?"

I agree, Congress should pass a law that all devices imported or manufactured with Lithium batteries should have the batteries removable and the batteries must be disposed of in authorized facilities.

..."I would like to see more attention being given to other forms of energy storage using gravity that are 'free' (pumped storage, tidal, etc)."...

Actually pumped storage is not cheap....it's very expensive, as are tidal energy schemes...

..."Currently, the cost of storing a kilowatt-hour in batteries is about $400. [5] Energy Secretary Steven Chu in 2010 claimed that using pumped water to store electricity would cost less than $100 per kilowatt-hour, much less than the $400 kilowatt-hour cost of batteries. [5,6] But how much does it actually cost? Table 1 shows a list of pumped hydro storage facilities, their work capacities, initial costs and costs adjusted to 2000 dollars. As can be seen from the table, while the initial costs of pumped water storage may have been $100/kW, those estimates are all from the 1970's. Once adjusted for inflation, the capital cost ranges from $353/kW to $2,216/kW (2000 dollars) with median cost of about $615/kW, a 20% premium on the cost of a natural gas turbine. [1] Another study found the capital costs to range between $628.34 and $2,901 (2011 dollars). [8]"....

http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2014/ph240/galvan-lopez2/

Seems that everyone is commenting on lithium batteries, which are hazardous in many ways, but I see no comments on wind generators. As I traveled out west and observed the many wind generating windmills I always thought that the electric generated by these windmills was AC and sent directly into the grid, am I wrong about this?

oilcan13

Generally speaking the windmill capacity goes straight to the grid, which is the problem. Lithium batteries come into the picture when you want to convert the windmills and the solar cells into base load capacity, that is, available when the demand is greatest. To use wind and solar to replace fossil fuel base load capacity you need storage.

For storage, many methods are available. One is to pump water to a high elevation and use it as hydroelectric capacity when needed. There is molten salt, where the electricity is used to melt salt, which is stored and is later used to make steam for a turbogenerator when needed. Batteries can be charged. There are some high capacity capacitors being developed that show potential.

Batteries are useable for a limited number of charge/discharge cycles and then need either rehabilitation or replacement. The rehab or replacement usually means waste products, which is the problem.

So what you are saying is that among these wind farms there is a building loaded with lithium batteries that take the extra power from wind generation. If this is so then what happens when extra power is produced and batteries are charged? Does the extra power go to a heating coil of some sort and then blown out into the atmosphere? I'm not being a smart ass just would like to know a little more about this. Seems to me that with all of the strides made in controlling electric that the power companies building these wind turbines would have thought of simple ways to control the power output.

oilcan13

..."power companies building these wind turbines would have thought of simple ways to control the power output."..

Yeah they shut them off when that happens....

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/earth/energy/windpower/8573885/Wind-turbines-switched-off-on-38-days-every-year.html

Wind turbines typically have around a 33% capacity factor...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacity_factor#Wind_farm

Yes it is AC but what you need to keep in mind is that wind turbines generate power only when the wind speed is within a certain range, meaning that put simply sometimes they will be generating power and other times they will not. Same goes with solar.

The problem comes about when they are not generating power but the load on the grid still requires power to be provided, hence the need for base load generation (like coal, nuclear, hydro, etc) or when this cannot provide the shortfall because the load exceeds the base load generation then energy storage (such as batteries) which are DC and converted to AC to match the grid frequency.

Most wind turbines are direct AC devices. Note they all rotate at a constant speed regardless of the wind speed due to the frequency of the grid. To speed up they would need to be able to accelerate all the rotating machines connected to the grid. Good luck with that.

Wind turbines on yachts and charging battery banks are different, they do change rotational speed with windspeed.

Most wind turbines are direct AC devices. Note they all rotate at a constant speed regardless of the wind speed due to the frequency of the grid. To speed up they would need to be able to accelerate all the rotating machines connected to the grid. Good luck with that.

Wind turbines on yachts and charging battery banks are different, they do change rotational speed with windspeed.

Perfectly correct and very well put.

Over the years, I have had "discussions" with Engineers that could not understand most of that!!!

I think all technologies/systems produce some form of waste. We all are guilty of seeing the benefits and not all of the costs (unintended consequences). Once a benefit/system has been adopted, it's hard to abandon it (regardless of the consequences)(after all, won't any new system just introduce new unintended consequences that we can't deal with?).

We benefited a lot from far-out ideas from Science-fiction. So, I'll take a chance on another far-out idea. Let's develop a waste-disposal system that involves dumping it on the planet Mercury, with a one-way disposable space-vehicle. That way, it will keep Earth inhabitable until we can develop a suitable recycling/reusing/re-purposing program that actually works.

Our biggest rockets have a limited payload capacity....

The Falcon Heavy rocket, with reusable side boosters, costs$90 million. For a fully expendable variant of the rocket, which can lift a theoretical maximum of 64 tons to low-Earth orbit, the price is $150 million.Feb 14, 2018

Do the math...

Cheaper just to incinerate....

..."In the U.S more than 3.1 millions tons of hazardous waste were disposed of through combustion in 2005. This figure represents 7.2 percent of the approximately 44 million tons of hazardous waste generated "...

..."Incineration costs about $125,000 per ton"...

http://ocw.jhsph.edu/courses/EnvironmentalHealth/PDFs/Lecture15.pdf

Incineration cost for all 44 million tons of hazardous waste, would be $5.5 trillion with a "T" dollars...annually

This comes up frequently over the years and has been analysed and discussed and it is just too expensive and dangerous.

Don't forget, ignoring the costs involved, just one rocket failure could cause a massive ecological disaster. Best to safely store the waste on the ground and recycle and minimise waste where possible.

Incineration isn't a very attractive option for obvious air pollution reasons, but for some things it is the best option (assuming safeguards on air quality are employed where possible).

Disposal of materials by throwing in a volcano has also been discussed, with similar points against making it non-viable.

Nickle is relatively easy to recycle from batteries and it is financially viable to do so as there is a market for nickle iron compounds so they do not need to be separated. All but 3 countries in the EU have meet the 2012 25% targets for toxic portable battery waste, principally cadmium, nickle and lithium but most are struggling to meet the 2016 target of 45%. The recycling rates are expected to increase dramatically when electric vehicle and static power bank¹ batteries start to be recycled in bigger numbers as they are larger units and the financial returns of recycling are much greater. (¹In the EU the first statistics for "industrial batteries" were collected in 2012) The US recycles 99.3% of lead acid batteries (about 78% in the EU) so extending this performance to other battery types is not impossible. US statistics for cadmium, lithium and nickle recycling are much harder to find as the US Gov.t regards these as strategic materials and appears to restrict access to the figures. Recovering rare earths from batteries has become viable since the Chinese restricted exports. New plants are under construction in Belgium and Ohio. I was unable to locate any published statistics from the US EPA on these materials.

It is currently not easy to recycle depleted nuclear fuels (with the exception of using depleted uranium in armor piercing shells, a practice that should be treated as a war crime). The economics do not stack up. Most depleted nuclear fuel is stored under water in secure facilities awaiting new, more efficient and cheaper ways of recycling. Research is being carried out but news of progress, if there is any, is not in the public domain.

So you don't have any sources for these claims? I don't believe your stated statistics are correct....The price of recycling lithium batteries will have to be added to the cost of the batteries...Now if the batteries are being supplied by China, and consumed elsewhere....what does that tell you...?

What a can of worms !

Great, interesting and very worrying topic.

Just last week a car transporter caught fire on the A5 here in Germany, 5 of the cars were "conventional" and were quickly put out.

2 were electric, and after fighting the battery fires for 5 hours, the fire brigade had to get a company to transport a huge container of water and to then dump each car in turn, to finally put each one out!!

Its a really bad problem, roads closed for 12 hours or more! They were lucky that they just burned and not exploded!!

I am not buying an electric car, at worst, a hybrid with a smaller battery and a big fire extinguisher, to "hopefully" give us time to get out!!!

I've always thought that the electric auto will lead to more and better car fires.

https://www.sciencealert.com/a-bill-gates-backed-energy-company-is-developing-what-could-be-a-game-changing-nuclear-reactor

This liquid chloride design was used in a fast breeder reactor at Dounreay in Scotland. I worked there in the early 1970s, on the electrical power side not the nuclear reactors. A spin off from the design was the creation of weapons grade plutonium but I would like to think that the market for this byproduct has collapsed. The chloride coolant is very corrosive and it etched leaks into the welds of the containment piping. During it's working life the plant spent more time offline being fixed than it did producing electricity and is currently being decommissioned at a cost of £millions. Welding techniques have improved dramatically since then with the advent of automatic laser welders that produce more consistent results but given the experience of the Dounreay plant I think that the timescale quoted to solve the corrosion problem is highly optimistic. New alloys need to be developed, tested and deployed to make this design safe.

Bottom Line No reactors are Safe as well as the waste issue ! till we employ Helium 3 !

Wake Up World !!!

Fusion reactors, if they ever become reality, are not much different from Gen IV reactors as far as waste goes...

"Nuclear fusion reactors produce no high activity, long-lived nuclear waste. The activation of components in a fusion reactor is low enough for the materials to be recycled or reused within 100 years."...

In fact about the same as our present day reactors if we were to reprocess and recycle the spent fuel assemblies....I don't know why people tend to think that fusion reactors produce no waste products...I might also add that these fusion reactors use Lithium as a fuel source and will compete with batteries...

https://www.iter.org/sci/Fusion

Doesn't a fusion reactor need a fission reactor to get going?

I think you're thinking of a hydrogen bomb....haha