JAC Motors, a Volkswagen-backed Chinese automaker, unveiled the first mass-produced EV with a sodium-ion battery through its new Yiwei brand. Although sodium-ion battery tech has a lower density than lithium-ion, its lower costs, simpler and more abundant supplies and superior cold-weather performan...
Sodium isn't rare in the slightest. according to Wikipedia, "Sodium is the sixth most abundant element in the Earth's crust and exists in numerous minerals such as feldspars, sodalite, and halite (NaCl)."
We had a shortage in Canada... but after looking into it, it appears to have been caused by a labour strike. LOL
Yes, it's abundant. But it is still a finite resource that needs to be mined/harvested, and what will that look like when the EVs are running off sodium-ion batteries?
Bit better then when we mined coal or lithium since it's so abundant we don't have to fck up whole regions for it to get to the little bit here and there. Desalination makes sense, dried death salt lakes also seems logical etc. Salt is everywhere. People are even building artificial "caves" with salt for others to go breath salty air inside.
A lot of desalinization plants just release the salty brine back out to sea, it's actually an ecological problem, so finding another use for it might convince them to capture and separate that for manufacturing uses.
Bro we will need to do desalination plants to supply people with water, there will be more than enough salt and you can't dump the salt back into the ocean anyway
this is plain stupid. sodium is far far more common in the earth than lithium. if you're worried about sodium not being renewable, then by that logic you should stop using lithium batteries right now.
Yes, I understand. I already posted that I was under the impression that we have shortages of the stuff, since we had shortages in Canada. But it was due to a labour dispute, and not a lack of resources.
And yes, I think we should reduce our use of lithium batteries, or at least only use recycled lithium.