breveSodium-ion EV battery breakthrough delivers 11-min charging and 450 km range
https://electrek.co/2026/03/25/sodium-ion-ev-battery-delivers-11-min-charging-450-km-range/
I don't know what chemistry exactly these cells are using, but in sodium-ion batteries, prussian blue analogs as they are called are common anode materials. Overcharging these cells can lead to a release of hydrogen cyanide gas, notoriously known as Zyklon B.
It has damped my enthusiasm for perusing it as a potential future home energy storage solution.
Just wait until you find out about hydrogen sulfide from overcharged car batteries.
Also, I think HCN can be scrubbed by adding a special absorptive cap onto the battery.
hydrogen sulfide is not anywhere in the same category. When you consider failure you have to consider what is the most catastrophic possibility and if that is “this battery silently kills people” then you dont make it.
Or you could just have the batteries in a separate enclosure away from your house. I think I would be inclined to do this anyway, certainly for Lithium batteries given the possibility of fire.
Its metallic sodium. Its about 30 times more volatile than Lithium. We don't use metallic sodium for almost anything industrial because of this volatility. I assumed there would be some mixed Li-Na-ion batteries. A pure Na-ion battery is an explosive waiting to go off. Putting these in a car...seems rather like a poor choice unless you are a personal injury lawyer.
I doubt that it is metallic sodium, for the same reason why the rechargeable lithium batteries do not use metallic lithium electrodes like the non-rechargeable batteries.
During charge-recharge cycles, a metallic electrode is likely to be degraded quickly.
So it is more likely that the reduced sodium atoms are intercalated in some porous electrode, e.g. of carbon, while at the other electrode the sodium ions are intercalated in some substance similar to Prussian blue.
The volatility of sodium does not matter, because it is not in contact with air or another gas, but only with electrolyte.
This is incredibly misleading. It's not like there's a bunch of metallic sodium sitting in the battery waiting to react. It's a lot closer to a solid solution. Do you have a personal injury lawyer on speed dial for your table salt?
Your response is even more misleading than the misconception you're trying to correct. The complexes formed in (charged) lithium batteries are unstable and reactive in ways quite similar to the base metal. The salt molecule, in contrast, is pretty unreactive. Salt shakers don't catch fire if dropped.
Which complexes are reactive?
The substances similar with Prussian blue are very stable. During charge and discharge, the ionic charge of iron ions varies between +2 and +3 and the structure of the electrode has spaces that are empty when the charge of the iron ions is +3 and they are filled with sodium ions when the charge of the iron ions is +2.
Both states of the electrode are very stable, being neutral salts. The composition of the electrolyte does not vary depending on the state of charge of the battery and it is also stable.
The only part of the battery that can be unstable is the other electrode, which stores neutral atoms of sodium intercalated in some porous material. If you take a fully charged battery, you cut it and you extract the electrode with sodium atoms, that electrode would react with water, but at a lower speed than pure sodium, so it is not clear how dangerous such an electrode would be in comparison with the similar lithium electrodes.
Fine, now show a video of what happens if you pierce the Na-ion cell with something metallic. Because explosion doesn't even begin to cover what happens next in that situation. And you are suggesting that everyone should be 2 ft from such a cell, traveling at 60 mph, in all weather conditions. These things should be restricted to grid stabilization batteries and nothing else and you know it. Don't mislead people on such things.
Piercing a Na-ion cell is not good, but the effect is pretty much the same like piercing a Li-ion cell.
In both cells the electrode that stores alkaline metal atoms has high reactivity, but in both cases the reactivity is much smaller than for a compact piece of metal, so the reaction with substances like water would proceed much more slowly than in the movies when someone throws an alkaline metal in water.
If you pierce the cell, but the electrode does not come in contact with something like water or like your hand, nothing much happens, the air would oxidize the metal, but that cannot lead to explosions or other violent reactions.
Do you have any link for the claim that overcharging can produce cyanide?
I have never heard such a thing and all the articles that I have seen about overcharging concluded that such batteries are much safer during overcharging than other kinds of batteries, the worst case effect being battery swelling.
In normal conditions, even during overcharging there are no obvious chemical reactions that could produce hydrogen cyanide.
For instance, at
https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acsenergylett.4c02915
it is said that cyanide release can happen only at temperatures above 300 Celsius degrees. Such temperatures cannot be reached in normal conditions.
> Such temperatures cannot be reached in normal conditions
Thank you for the reasonable chuckle I got from this understatement of the day.