Comment by close04
2 hours ago
Diesel fires are put out much faster than battery fires especially when the battery is huge and fully charged. Battery fires are also much hotter, up to 1000 C (~1800 F), metal fires are no joke.
Diesel damages the asphalt more in different ways. It attacks the binder in the asphalt and softens it up (after all they are both byproducts of the same crude oil precursor and just want to recombine). This process takes even days so if the cleanup is fast there's minimal damage. Most of the fuel that doesn't burn runs to the side of the road anyway.
> especially when the battery is huge and fully charged.
Huh, TIL: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10973-018-7899-y
Lithium battery energy density is much lower than petroleum, so the difference between a fully charged 100kWh battery (which weighs over half a ton) and an empty one is less than 3 gallons of diesel. Most of the energy expended in a battery fire is from the electrolyte reacting with the cathode material.
Over/under-charged batteries are a safety hazard because they can generate hydrogen gas which can initiate a fire, but the energy released from the fire will be pretty much the same.
The energy released during a fire is higher than what is accessible by discharging the battery. Here's one paper describing ratios from 1.25 to 5 depending on access to oxygen during the combustion.
https://cea.hal.science/cea-05234204v1/document
Lithium fires are brutal, they're extremely fast and the toxic gases are just as dangerous as the fire itself:
https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/about-20-bodies-f...
If we're going to count industrial accidents, then oil kills way more people. There are deaths from disasters involving wells, refineries, pipelines, tankers, and gas stations. But because they've been happening for over a century, we accept them as a fact of life. Even correcting for the much smaller install base of EVs and lower number of vehicle miles traveled, fossil fuels are far more deadly.
Which fumes are worse, from EVs or diesel filers?
You don't want to breathe either, but the answer generally is battery fires which can produce extremely toxic gas like hydrogen flouride
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=lADLvwAJs-c
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_fluoride
Yeah, that's on Derek Lowe's list of things he won't work with.
https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/things-i-won-t-tou...
Honestly no idea. But after receiving multiple fire trainings and talking to trained firemen, I have to say that all else being equal (and gun to the head because I actually want neither) I'll take a diesel fire over a battery fire any day.
A lot of dangerous fumes come from the other material burning around the source. And at 1000C plenty of neighboring stuff decides to burn.