The National Transportation Safety Board says California firefighters had to douse a flaming battery in a Tesla Semi with about 50,000 gallons of water to put out flames after a crash.

California firefighters had to douse a flaming battery in a Tesla Semi with about 50,000 gallons (190,000 liters) of water to extinguish flames after a crash, the National Transportation Safety Board said Thursday.

In addition to the huge amount of water, firefighters used an aircraft to drop fire retardant on the “immediate area” of the electric truck as a precautionary measure, the agency said in a preliminary report.

Firefighters said previously that the battery reached temperatures of 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit (540 Celsius) while it was in flames.

The NTSB sent investigators to the Aug. 19 crash along Interstate 80 near Emigrant Gap, about 70 miles (113 kilometers) northeast of Sacramento. The agency said it would look into fire risks posed by the truck’s large lithium-ion battery.

  • reddig33@lemmy.world
    17·
    2 months ago
    1. A great deal of electricity is produced by renewables these days, and that percentage increases every day.

    https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=48896

    https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/products-eurostat-news/w/ddn-20240221-1

    1. There’s plenty of lithium. Lithium batteries are also recyclable, unlike fossil fuels.

    https://www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/p/lithium-electric-vehicles

    1. Sodium ion batteries are also a thing.
    • raspberriesareyummy@lemmy.world
      1·
      2 months ago

      As I was saying in my first comment: If energy is produced by renewable sources, then they can be clean, so there’s no argument here.

      Re:

      https://www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/p/lithium-electric-vehicles

      1. the article focuses on lithium, which is not the only problematic material used in electric batteries
      2. the first source I checked (on total lithium in the world) was offline, so I could not confirm my suspicion that the author was talking about the total amounts including those inaccessible in the Earth’s mantle
      3. the author admits herself that we have “enough lithium for decades to come”, which is in-fucking-credibly stupid, because this planet has been around for billions of years, and one of the biggest flaws of mankind has been to empty a natural resource over a few decades “coz profits”. Creating a demand for a resource that would only make it last a few decades would create another clusterfuck like all the wars and blood shed over crude oil. As a matter of fact, for mining conditions, we already have this clusterfuck, if you look at e.g. how cobalt is mined in the “democratic” republic of Congo

      Finally, like I asked another commenter: could you provide a source on EV batteries made without rare earths?

      By the way - sodium requires salt, and that’s also limited on Earth. Knowing mankind, we’d extract locally (desalinification hurts the ecosystem there) and dump waste locally in another location (again, hurting the ecosystem).

      My overall point is: the world’s car market is just too big and we need to shrink it, but mankind as a whole is too fucking selfish and stupid and short-sighted to accomplish that, and I WISH time will prove me wrong on that.