9 ms·

As Batteries Keep Catching Fire, U.S. Safety Agency Prepares For Change

86 points by kawera 10y ago

good_dog 10y ago
So the takeaway is, batteries will continue exploding because Trump won the election. The whole "Trump is responsible for everything bad" thing is getting ridiculous.
- sandworm101 10y ago
  The prez isn't in charge of budgets. They have been cut over the years anyway. So I don't see any great changes there. He could put a crony in charge, someone would apply the science selectively, but there are legal bulwarks against this. They couldn't, for example, place restrictions on only foreign goods. That wouldn't fly constitutionally. And if they just stopped testing anything, then companies that product dangerous products would be hit with lawsuits. Frankly, most would rather have the governments looking at the safety of products that they would jurors. A mandatory recall is always better than a mass class action.
  - hackuser 10y ago
    > He could put a crony in charge, someone would apply the science selectively, but there are legal bulwarks against this There are some, but past Presidents have had great influence over regulatory outcomes. > most [companies] would rather have the governments looking at the safety of products that they would jurors. That would seem rational, but that's not how many companies think. For example, Wall Street, despite recent experience with catastrophic consequences, still actively resists regulation. That's also a good example of the influence of Presidents. Bush deregulated Wall Street; for example, the SEC is supposed to be the consumer advocate but Bush put Wall Street insiders in charge of it (IIRC). Obama restored at least some regulation.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- anigbrowl 10y ago
  Not as ridiculous as your tortured interpretation of the story. Given the GOP's stated hostility to consumer regulation and the fact of significantly lower agency budgets during a previous period when the GOP held both White House and both Houses of Congress, observing that operating budgets may shrink at this agency is entirely rational. See, I was able to construct an argument without even mentioning the President-elect, based solely on past behavior of the soon-to-be majority party.
- jsight 10y ago
  The article barely mentioned Trump at all, and basically just said that things "might change". That is self-evident with a new administration coming in. Regardless of that, the article describing the organization's role and approach was interesting.
  - PhantomGremlin 10y ago
    The article barely mentioned Trump at all Oh come on, the spin in the story was much worse than that. The direct quote from the chairman of the CPSC was: "My hope is now with the election and potential leadership change here, that that work is not scuttled". Using loaded words like "scuttled" makes it quite clear that he's throwing shade at Trump.
    - throwaway729 10y ago
      You're reading a lot into Kaye's comment. I'd imagine he would have made the same remark about pretty much any incoming conservative administration. And maybe even some liberal administrations, since weakening consumer protection laws can certainly cut across party lines when the money lines up.
    - grzm 10y ago
      Does quoting a person relevant to the article who has an opinion spin the story? I'd think that's the journalist doing their job: reporting what those related to the topic said. There can be bias in the choice of story, or the choice of quotes, but sometimes the story is that there are opinions that disagree, which seems relevant in this case. There have been a lot of concerns with changes that Trump might make. He himself has been very clear that he's going to make changes. In particular, Trump has been vocal about reducing regulations, and as I understand it, the CPSC is a regulatory agency. Seems pretty straight up to me.
Slackwise 10y ago
Can we please just bring back removable batteries?
- simplexion 10y ago
  How would this resolve any issues?
  - Slackwise 10y ago
    Well it would have likely solved the Note 7 recall, and any futures battery recalls. It would also allow a user to remove an unsafe battery so that it's not in use while waiting for a replacement.
    - johncolanduoni 10y ago
      Didn't the phones with replacement batteries also catch fire?
    - simplexion 10y ago
      Less than .01% of the phones caught fire. The recall is crazy.
      - nradov 10y ago
        If the Note 7 hadn't been recalled then eventually many more would have probably caught fire. We'll never know what the cumulative failure rate would have been if the devices had been left in the field for years. Eventually people would have been killed.
      - greglindahl 10y ago
        The fraction of phones that caught on fire was similar to the fraction of hoverboards that caught on fire. Normal products with similar batteries have a much lower failure rate.
      - MBCook 10y ago
        Do you have a source for that number?
PhantomGremlin 10y ago
The Galaxy Note 7 recall is reported to cost "at least $5.3 billion"[1]. Even at a chaebol as large as Samsung's, that's big enough to get people to notice. That cost, more than the recent election, will bring about change for the better. [1] http://www.latimes.com/business/technology/la-fi-tn-samsung-recall-20161014-snap-story.html http://www.latimes.com/business/technology/la-fi-tn-samsung-...
- simplexion 10y ago
  Change for something that occurred in less than .01% of the devices? It is incredible the kind of irrationality that is brought about by fear. It's the same reason that, here in Australia, there is talk of culling sharks after a single person is attacked.
  - kharms 10y ago
    Would you fly to Seoul from Australia if there was a .01% chance of your plane catching fire? That's assuming just one phone on your flight. .01% is crazy high.
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
    - Alupis 10y ago
      > Would you fly to Seoul from Australia if there was a .01% chance of your plane catching fire? Given the sheer magnitude of all the other things that may kill you before you even arrive at the airport, let alone the very act of hurdling through the sky at over 650mph in a thin aluminum tube filled with 36,000 gallons of highly flammable/explosive fuel... a phone catching fire is really not much of a factor when deciding to book a flight.
    - morsch 10y ago
      You just went from "the risk for any given Note 7 to catch fire is 0.01%" to "the risk for any given Note 7 to catch fire in the time it takes to fly from Seoul to Australia is 0.01%". Those are very different numbers.
simplexion 10y ago
Failure rates for rechargeable Li-ion batteries are on the order of one in 10 million cells. http://cen.acs.org/articles/91/i6/Assessing-Safety-Lithium-Ion-Batteries.html http://cen.acs.org/articles/91/i6/Assessing-Safety-Lithium-I...
- Retric 10y ago
  How many cells in a laptop? I would assume 3 at the low end, but it can go much higher and many people have multiple laptops, cellphones etc. So, 20 per person on an aircraft is probably a solid round number. How many people in an aircraft say ~200. How many aircraft in the air say ~5,000. Now that 10 million is down to 2-3 per however often those 1 in 10 million chance is supposed to stand for.
  - simplexion 10y ago
    Replace aircraft with car and continue this conversation.
    - greglindahl 10y ago
      Cars typically have battery packages that can easily survive a cell failure without anyone noticing.
    - evan_ 10y ago
      If your phone battery explodes and starts a fire you have better odds surviving a dive out of your car as opposed to an airplane.
      - guax 10y ago
        You must have a pretty big phone to take down an airplane. If you are driving the car you are much more likely to loose control and cause deaths then a phone bursting in an airplane causing anything more then nasty burns.
        10y ago
Pulce 10y ago
Natural selection. Are you wearing an exploding device for being able to do a phone call? You will explode, thanks. More space for me. Stanhope rules.
kumarski 10y ago
The unfortunate reality is that battery and solar panel manufacturing processes are dirty chemical affairs, even with exploding batteries aside. Just look at the process for solar panel manufacturing...... ------------ 1. Solar panels are made in China, Malaysia, the Phllippines, and Taiwan. (I think around 40% comes from China) 2. Solar panels are made from Quartz. 3. Quartz comes from mines, is abundant, can be found everywhere, and causes silicosis for miners. 4. Quartz is turned into silicon. —metallic grade silicon. We use this to harden steel. (requires a lot of heat) output = CO2 and Sulfur Dioxide. — not too bad. ;) 5. To purify the silicon into polysilicon you end up mixing hydrochloric acid with metalic-grade silicon = trichlorosilanes. 6. The trichlorosilanes mix with hydrogen that you add to the process. 7. Then bam, you get your polysilicon, and as well some nasty stuff called silicon tetrachloride. 8. For every 1 pound of polysilicon you make, you make 4 pounds of the nasty stuff-silicon tetrachloride. 10. Okay, so some green fanatics might tell you that you can just recycle this silicon tetrachloride stuff into new polysilicon because it requires less energy, but that’s unlikely because it costs a lot to do so. 11. If you’re a prudent manufacturer, you say “Fuck it.” and you just dump the silicon tetrachloride in an oil well. 12. It acidifies the soil and demolishes any water nearby. 13. Maybe one day we’ll manufacture the solar panels with ethanol instead of chlorine-compounds. — this would forego the nasty stuff — silicon tetrachloride. 14. That’s just the process to get polysilicon, there’s still a ton more to do and a ton of risks afterwards. But anyhow, let’s progress. 15. There’s got to be a better way, right? 16. Well there is, or so the hippies will proclaim. 17. There’s thin-film solar cells. 18. Most thin film cells are made from cadmium telluride and copper indium gallium selenide — often called CIGS 19. Usually you’ll layer these and splice in some cadmium sulfide. 20. Cadmium is carcinogenic. 21. You don’t want to be dumping cadmium all over junk yards, but that’s what happens to post-consumer waste. ----------- I'd even go as far as to say the nuclear disposal waste risks are an order of magnitude safer than a Solar future marked by silicon tetrachloride toxicity. If there are any ChemE's in here, I'd love to hear their take on it. I'm polymer & Systems engr, so I don't go deep enough into the mfg process.
- beefield 10y ago
  Would you have a source (book or webpage) to recommend if I wanted to get a better grasp on the current solar panel manufacturing process and its environmental hazards?
Animats 10y ago
We need to convert over to lithium iron phosphate (LiFePO4) battery technology. Stores slightly less energy. More recharge cycles. Slightly more expensive. No thermal runaway problems. Does not blow up or catch fire even if a nail is driven through it. Anything bigger than a phone should go this route. Boosted skateboards and the new generation of UL-approved hoverboards already have. Electric bicycles, which have a tendency to catch fire, need to.
- B1FF_PSUVM 10y ago
  That's a good heads up, thanks. Went in and read the intros in a couple of Wikipedia pages: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium_iron_phosphate_battery https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium_iron_phosphate_battery - has the numbers specific to LiFePO4 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium-ion_battery https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium-ion_battery - discusses the various variations of Li batteries. Mentions that "Handheld electronics mostly use LIBs based on lithium cobalt oxide (LiCoO2), which offers high energy density, but presents safety risks, especially when damaged." and goes on about the alternatives.
  - Animats 10y ago
    Many Black and Decker and DeWalt pro power tools use lithium iron phosphate batteries, and have since about 2008. Neither manufacturer advertises this. We're not seeing reports of power drill fires, which are devices that get hard use and many recharge cycles. DeWalt had a recall about back in 2000 due to battery fires triggered by a charger that didn't turn off properly [1]. They apparently decided to switch to lithium iron phosphate, and no further problems were reported. If power tools were still catching fire, there would be Youtube videos. There are some videos of fires of early DeWalt models.[2] [1] http://www.dewalt.com/support/safety-notices-and-recalls/2016/04/08/14/45/2000-cpsc-dewalt-industrial-tool-co-announce-recall-of-battery-chargers http://www.dewalt.com/support/safety-notices-and-recalls/201... [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8JJZfjzwuvM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8JJZfjzwuvM
- ferongr 10y ago
  The state of the art when it comes to LiFePO4 cells that you can find on the market right now has 2 to 3 times lower energy density by volume and weight (depending on form-factor). Personally, I would prefer the increased energy capacity of traditional Li-ion packs, and when properly designed they are extremely safe too.
burfog 10y ago
This (the CPSC) is the agency that should focus on lead painted baby toys and BPA-tainted toothbrushes, but instead mostly takes away well-loved toys like lawn darts and little magnet balls. Things have gotten to the point that I reflexively feel the urge to quickly buy anything they ban. The batteries might be worth banning, but I sure don't trust the CPSC to determine this.

86 points by kawera 10y ago

So the takeaway is, batteries will continue exploding because Trump won the election. The whole "Trump is responsible for everything bad" thing is getting ridiculous.

sandworm101 10y ago
The prez isn't in charge of budgets. They have been cut over the years anyway. So I don't see any great changes there. He could put a crony in charge, someone would apply the science selectively, but there are legal bulwarks against this. They couldn't, for example, place restrictions on only foreign goods. That wouldn't fly constitutionally. And if they just stopped testing anything, then companies that product dangerous products would be hit with lawsuits. Frankly, most would rather have the governments looking at the safety of products that they would jurors. A mandatory recall is always better than a mass class action.
- hackuser 10y ago
  > He could put a crony in charge, someone would apply the science selectively, but there are legal bulwarks against this There are some, but past Presidents have had great influence over regulatory outcomes. > most [companies] would rather have the governments looking at the safety of products that they would jurors. That would seem rational, but that's not how many companies think. For example, Wall Street, despite recent experience with catastrophic consequences, still actively resists regulation. That's also a good example of the influence of Presidents. Bush deregulated Wall Street; for example, the SEC is supposed to be the consumer advocate but Bush put Wall Street insiders in charge of it (IIRC). Obama restored at least some regulation.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
anigbrowl 10y ago
Not as ridiculous as your tortured interpretation of the story. Given the GOP's stated hostility to consumer regulation and the fact of significantly lower agency budgets during a previous period when the GOP held both White House and both Houses of Congress, observing that operating budgets may shrink at this agency is entirely rational. See, I was able to construct an argument without even mentioning the President-elect, based solely on past behavior of the soon-to-be majority party.
jsight 10y ago
The article barely mentioned Trump at all, and basically just said that things "might change". That is self-evident with a new administration coming in. Regardless of that, the article describing the organization's role and approach was interesting.
- PhantomGremlin 10y ago
  The article barely mentioned Trump at all Oh come on, the spin in the story was much worse than that. The direct quote from the chairman of the CPSC was: "My hope is now with the election and potential leadership change here, that that work is not scuttled". Using loaded words like "scuttled" makes it quite clear that he's throwing shade at Trump.
  - throwaway729 10y ago
    You're reading a lot into Kaye's comment. I'd imagine he would have made the same remark about pretty much any incoming conservative administration. And maybe even some liberal administrations, since weakening consumer protection laws can certainly cut across party lines when the money lines up.
  - grzm 10y ago
    Does quoting a person relevant to the article who has an opinion spin the story? I'd think that's the journalist doing their job: reporting what those related to the topic said. There can be bias in the choice of story, or the choice of quotes, but sometimes the story is that there are opinions that disagree, which seems relevant in this case. There have been a lot of concerns with changes that Trump might make. He himself has been very clear that he's going to make changes. In particular, Trump has been vocal about reducing regulations, and as I understand it, the CPSC is a regulatory agency. Seems pretty straight up to me.

Slackwise 10y ago

Can we please just bring back removable batteries?

simplexion 10y ago
How would this resolve any issues?
- Slackwise 10y ago
  Well it would have likely solved the Note 7 recall, and any futures battery recalls. It would also allow a user to remove an unsafe battery so that it's not in use while waiting for a replacement.
  - johncolanduoni 10y ago
    Didn't the phones with replacement batteries also catch fire?
  - simplexion 10y ago
    Less than .01% of the phones caught fire. The recall is crazy.
    - nradov 10y ago
      If the Note 7 hadn't been recalled then eventually many more would have probably caught fire. We'll never know what the cumulative failure rate would have been if the devices had been left in the field for years. Eventually people would have been killed.
    - greglindahl 10y ago
      The fraction of phones that caught on fire was similar to the fraction of hoverboards that caught on fire. Normal products with similar batteries have a much lower failure rate.
    - MBCook 10y ago
      Do you have a source for that number?

PhantomGremlin 10y ago

The Galaxy Note 7 recall is reported to cost "at least $5.3 billion"[1]. Even at a chaebol as large as Samsung's, that's big enough to get people to notice. That cost, more than the recent election, will bring about change for the better. [1] http://www.latimes.com/business/technology/la-fi-tn-samsung-recall-20161014-snap-story.html http://www.latimes.com/business/technology/la-fi-tn-samsung-...

simplexion 10y ago
Change for something that occurred in less than .01% of the devices? It is incredible the kind of irrationality that is brought about by fear. It's the same reason that, here in Australia, there is talk of culling sharks after a single person is attacked.
- kharms 10y ago
  Would you fly to Seoul from Australia if there was a .01% chance of your plane catching fire? That's assuming just one phone on your flight. .01% is crazy high.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - Alupis 10y ago
    > Would you fly to Seoul from Australia if there was a .01% chance of your plane catching fire? Given the sheer magnitude of all the other things that may kill you before you even arrive at the airport, let alone the very act of hurdling through the sky at over 650mph in a thin aluminum tube filled with 36,000 gallons of highly flammable/explosive fuel... a phone catching fire is really not much of a factor when deciding to book a flight.
  - morsch 10y ago
    You just went from "the risk for any given Note 7 to catch fire is 0.01%" to "the risk for any given Note 7 to catch fire in the time it takes to fly from Seoul to Australia is 0.01%". Those are very different numbers.

simplexion 10y ago

Failure rates for rechargeable Li-ion batteries are on the order of one in 10 million cells. http://cen.acs.org/articles/91/i6/Assessing-Safety-Lithium-Ion-Batteries.html http://cen.acs.org/articles/91/i6/Assessing-Safety-Lithium-I...

Retric 10y ago
How many cells in a laptop? I would assume 3 at the low end, but it can go much higher and many people have multiple laptops, cellphones etc. So, 20 per person on an aircraft is probably a solid round number. How many people in an aircraft say ~200. How many aircraft in the air say ~5,000. Now that 10 million is down to 2-3 per however often those 1 in 10 million chance is supposed to stand for.
- simplexion 10y ago
  Replace aircraft with car and continue this conversation.
  - greglindahl 10y ago
    Cars typically have battery packages that can easily survive a cell failure without anyone noticing.
  - evan_ 10y ago
    If your phone battery explodes and starts a fire you have better odds surviving a dive out of your car as opposed to an airplane.
    - guax 10y ago
      You must have a pretty big phone to take down an airplane. If you are driving the car you are much more likely to loose control and cause deaths then a phone bursting in an airplane causing anything more then nasty burns.
      - 10y ago

Pulce 10y ago

Natural selection. Are you wearing an exploding device for being able to do a phone call? You will explode, thanks. More space for me. Stanhope rules.

kumarski 10y ago

The unfortunate reality is that battery and solar panel manufacturing processes are dirty chemical affairs, even with exploding batteries aside. Just look at the process for solar panel manufacturing...... ------------ 1. Solar panels are made in China, Malaysia, the Phllippines, and Taiwan. (I think around 40% comes from China) 2. Solar panels are made from Quartz. 3. Quartz comes from mines, is abundant, can be found everywhere, and causes silicosis for miners. 4. Quartz is turned into silicon. —metallic grade silicon. We use this to harden steel. (requires a lot of heat) output = CO2 and Sulfur Dioxide. — not too bad. ;) 5. To purify the silicon into polysilicon you end up mixing hydrochloric acid with metalic-grade silicon = trichlorosilanes. 6. The trichlorosilanes mix with hydrogen that you add to the process. 7. Then bam, you get your polysilicon, and as well some nasty stuff called silicon tetrachloride. 8. For every 1 pound of polysilicon you make, you make 4 pounds of the nasty stuff-silicon tetrachloride. 10. Okay, so some green fanatics might tell you that you can just recycle this silicon tetrachloride stuff into new polysilicon because it requires less energy, but that’s unlikely because it costs a lot to do so. 11. If you’re a prudent manufacturer, you say “Fuck it.” and you just dump the silicon tetrachloride in an oil well. 12. It acidifies the soil and demolishes any water nearby. 13. Maybe one day we’ll manufacture the solar panels with ethanol instead of chlorine-compounds. — this would forego the nasty stuff — silicon tetrachloride. 14. That’s just the process to get polysilicon, there’s still a ton more to do and a ton of risks afterwards. But anyhow, let’s progress. 15. There’s got to be a better way, right? 16. Well there is, or so the hippies will proclaim. 17. There’s thin-film solar cells. 18. Most thin film cells are made from cadmium telluride and copper indium gallium selenide — often called CIGS 19. Usually you’ll layer these and splice in some cadmium sulfide. 20. Cadmium is carcinogenic. 21. You don’t want to be dumping cadmium all over junk yards, but that’s what happens to post-consumer waste. ----------- I'd even go as far as to say the nuclear disposal waste risks are an order of magnitude safer than a Solar future marked by silicon tetrachloride toxicity. If there are any ChemE's in here, I'd love to hear their take on it. I'm polymer & Systems engr, so I don't go deep enough into the mfg process.

beefield 10y ago
Would you have a source (book or webpage) to recommend if I wanted to get a better grasp on the current solar panel manufacturing process and its environmental hazards?

Animats 10y ago

We need to convert over to lithium iron phosphate (LiFePO4) battery technology. Stores slightly less energy. More recharge cycles. Slightly more expensive. No thermal runaway problems. Does not blow up or catch fire even if a nail is driven through it. Anything bigger than a phone should go this route. Boosted skateboards and the new generation of UL-approved hoverboards already have. Electric bicycles, which have a tendency to catch fire, need to.

B1FF_PSUVM 10y ago
That's a good heads up, thanks. Went in and read the intros in a couple of Wikipedia pages: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium_iron_phosphate_battery https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium_iron_phosphate_battery - has the numbers specific to LiFePO4 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium-ion_battery https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium-ion_battery - discusses the various variations of Li batteries. Mentions that "Handheld electronics mostly use LIBs based on lithium cobalt oxide (LiCoO2), which offers high energy density, but presents safety risks, especially when damaged." and goes on about the alternatives.
- Animats 10y ago
  Many Black and Decker and DeWalt pro power tools use lithium iron phosphate batteries, and have since about 2008. Neither manufacturer advertises this. We're not seeing reports of power drill fires, which are devices that get hard use and many recharge cycles. DeWalt had a recall about back in 2000 due to battery fires triggered by a charger that didn't turn off properly [1]. They apparently decided to switch to lithium iron phosphate, and no further problems were reported. If power tools were still catching fire, there would be Youtube videos. There are some videos of fires of early DeWalt models.[2] [1] http://www.dewalt.com/support/safety-notices-and-recalls/2016/04/08/14/45/2000-cpsc-dewalt-industrial-tool-co-announce-recall-of-battery-chargers http://www.dewalt.com/support/safety-notices-and-recalls/201... [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8JJZfjzwuvM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8JJZfjzwuvM
ferongr 10y ago
The state of the art when it comes to LiFePO4 cells that you can find on the market right now has 2 to 3 times lower energy density by volume and weight (depending on form-factor). Personally, I would prefer the increased energy capacity of traditional Li-ion packs, and when properly designed they are extremely safe too.

burfog 10y ago

This (the CPSC) is the agency that should focus on lead painted baby toys and BPA-tainted toothbrushes, but instead mostly takes away well-loved toys like lawn darts and little magnet balls. Things have gotten to the point that I reflexively feel the urge to quickly buy anything they ban. The batteries might be worth banning, but I sure don't trust the CPSC to determine this.