THE WONDERS OF LITHIUM AND THE BLEATERSHIP OF CALIFORNIA
So many of you sent me this story that I have to blog about it, and I know why you did: gee, surprise surprise, lithium burns... dramatically so. But this story is a whopper doozy. It is either a case of the stupendous and nearly bottomless incompetence and stupidity that we've come to expect from California and its bleatership, or it's a case of in-your-face conspiracy by some truly vile, evil, and utterly diabolical people, or both. Hence, I've filed this one under the "You Tell Me" tab, rather than the "Call it Conspiracy" tab. Here's the story in the version that VT shared, with thanks to all the rest of you who shared different versions:
"This Is A Disaster": Fire Erupts At California Battery Storage Plant
Now, in case you missed it, ponder the colossal ineptitude, or criminal intent (or both), that lurks in the following lines:
If the raging wildfires across Los Angeles County weren't enough, California faced another crisis overnight as one of the world's largest battery storage facilities, situated about 100 miles south of San Francisco, caught fire, triggering area-wide evacuations.
AP News reported that a fire broke out Thursday at the Moss Landing Power Plant, a natural gas-fired generation plant with thousands of lithium batteries for energy storage. Fires involving lithium batteries, as seen with electric vehicles, are notoriously difficult to extinguish and could burn uncontrollably for days.
"There's no way to sugarcoat it. This is a disaster, is what it is," Monterey County Supervisor Glenn Church told local media outlet KSBW-TV. However, Church did not expect the fire to spread outside the perimeter of the plant.
Local media outlet The Mercury News noted that fires at the Vistra plant, which Vistra Energy owns, and one of the largest battery storage facilities in the world boasting a capacity of 750 megawatts and 3,000 megawatt-hours, experienced fires in 2021 and 2022. The energy storage facility plays a massive role in stabilizing California's power grid.
Honestly, it requires an almost Bidenesque scale of stupidity, incompetence, amorality, and evil to store lithium batteries at a natural gas power plant. For those who are victims of the Amairikuhn edgykayshun system, this is because (1) natural gas burns, and (2) lithium burns. It's sort of like storing nitroglycerine next to a .... oh nevermind. I forgot. Analogies are probably too difficult, too.
But regarding the lithium, the article points out the obvious non-green non-environmentally-friendly nature of the element: "Fires involving lithium batteries, as seen with electric vehicles, are notoriously difficult to extinguish and could burn uncontrollably for days." Perhaps this is because lithium can go from room temperature to a few thousands of degrees in a matter of mere seconds.
I'm reminded of what I wrote in my book The Grid of the Gods about the infamous Castle Bravo hydrogen bomb test. For those who may not know that story, the Castle Bravo H-bomb test was supposed to be of a "device" (why are nuclear bombs always a "device"?) of about 5-7 megatons yield.
When the bomb - pardon me - when the device was fired off, the yield ran away to about 15 megatons in the biggest thermonuclear "oops we made a tiny mistake" of the early Cold War. Now what most people do not know about hydrogen bombs of that era is that the fuel for the burn is not simply pure hydrogen. It's an isotope of hydrogen, most often deuterium, and, if they're really not paying any attention to budgets, tritium, isotopes of hydrogen with one and two neutrons in the nucleus respectively. But this isotopic hydrogen is usually in compound form with lithium, which also provides fuel for the burn. Thus a hydrogen bomb is really a lithium-deuteride bomb.
And when Castle Bravo ran away to 15 megatons of miscalculation, it was because (we were told) that the scientists who had designed the bomb did not know that the lithium-7 in the compound fuel would enter the fusion reaction and burn. They were only thinking that lithium-6 would burn. I go into all this nonsensical story (and my own reconstruction of what I think may have been the real story lurking in the background) in Grid of the Gods.
But the bottom line is, scientific sorts have known for some time about lithium's propensity to burn, and to burn hotly. Imagining trying to snuff out a hydrogen bomb with a fire hose gives you the idea, and that indeed is why I raise the point. And then, to store energy from a natural gas power plant in nearby lithium batteries is, well, inviting another sort of Castle Bravo-in-miniature style of disaster.
One might want to think twice, even thrice, before plopping down a lot of money for that electric vehicle and its lithium batteries. Lithium, once ignited, reaches its maximum burn temperature very quickly, and probably faster than one can stop a vehicle and safely exit. Perhaps it's because someone, somewhere, does not want to "drill baby drill" but to "burn baby burn." And if the bleatership of Nuttyfornia has their way, they're forging an example for the whole country: why not have lithium battery storage facilities at all power plants, natural gas, oil, coal, and nuclear! Just add a little lithium to your Chernobyl or Fukushima disasters, stir and mix well and voila, one can have a kind of "boosted fission meltdowns"!
See you on the flip side...
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