What nonsense. LiIon batteries have many cycles of reuse and they almost never get thrown away. As volume get larger literally every large players wants to recycle as that will actually be cheaper at large volume then traditional mining.
As of now, it actually looks more like there are to many recycling company fighting over to few batteries they can recycle. With large players trying to do it themselves in addition to all the startups.
And only less then like 0.0001% burn up in a fire so that really not all that relevant.
You suffer under the illusion that recycling means no toxic waste and no energy cost. Every few thousand cycles, they must be broken down and remade at the cost of thousands more tons of toxins. Those toxins and precursors must also be mined by melting down mountains.
That sludge must be locked away in vaults waiting for containment to fail. It just continues to build with each battery cycle.
Nuclear energy storage is much better.
Nuclear waste is tiny by comparison. All the long term nuclear waste ever produced would fit in the footprint of the toxic waste of any one of those battery factories in a single year. But they even bigger difference is that we will reuse that waste when new nuclear deposits become scarce.
Likewise, if done correctly, gravity and hydro offer much higher output per unit of energy stored while having minimal waste.
Even in the absolute best case, batteries slow the destruction of the planet rather than solve the problem.
First of all, I don't suffer under a nirvana fallacy. Of course recycling uses energy.
Second, I'm a huge fan of nuclear power so you don't have to convince me of that.
Even if you have nuclear power, you still need EV and lots of batteries, so that is not a solution.
Hydro is limited in location and not a scalable solution. Gravity highly depends on what you are talking about, and most of the proposed solution are not capital efficient.
These however also solve partly a different problem then these batteries solve, in terms of respond speed, frequency regulation and efficiency.
Recycling is of course not perfectly efficient, but current generation batteries have 20 year lifetime and with reuse maybe even 30 years. Some of the next generation can push that even further, wont be recycled for 40 years. Maybe they are recycled more often, but maybe simply because the materials inside are more valuable then the battery of that technology level.
So yes, of course it uses some resources and something has to be mined, but that is true for almost anything.
In terms of grid storage, batteries are some of the better solution. Current Nickel based LiIon will be replaced by LFP and pure LiIon will never solve the complete grid battery challenge. Maybe with Sodium batteries. There are also Liquid Metal batteries, or things like Iron-Air batteries. These solutions are scalable in combination.
All that said, I would much prefer to have a bunch of thorium thermal breeders.
> That sludge must be locked away in vaults waiting for containment to fail.
Can you please show exactly what you mean here? Like what exactly this sludge is=
As of now, it actually looks more like there are to many recycling company fighting over to few batteries they can recycle. With large players trying to do it themselves in addition to all the startups.
And only less then like 0.0001% burn up in a fire so that really not all that relevant.