>I think the "same metal at the cathode" might be an artifact of putting the springy foam block in to keep the boulders intact. You couldn't switch the anode an

>I think the "same metal at the cathode" might be an artifact of putting the springy foam block in to keep the boulders intact. You couldn't switch the anode and the cathode any more easily than you could swap the elevations of the ridges and the valley. That is, it takes as much energy to do the physical rearrangement as it would to charge the system electrically. That is the case in normal batteries, but in this battery the start and end product are both just lithium metal- not intercalated into graphite or bound to sulfur, literally just solid lithium. There's no (obvious) place for the energy to be hiding. It would appear that you could just scrape it off and receive free energy.