Probably no damage was done by lead electrodes in Fukushima. Lots was probably done by dry-cleaning establishments, hardware stores, machine shops, pesticide inventories (in factories, stores, and farms), paint factories and stores, etc., but metallic lead? Lead is so stable that even bullets inside people's bodies, where they're constantly exposed to hot, salty, corrosive bodily fluids, usually don't cause any toxicity. Even lead sulfate (the mineral anglesite) is somewhat challenging to get a toxic dose of.
Lithium is a relatively abundant element in Earth's crust, about the same abundance as nitrogen, and more abundant than boron, tin, tungsten, or iodine. It's fairly nontoxic: the lethal dose of lithium salts for a person is measured in tens of grams, and it doesn't bioaccumulate. There are a few lithium minerals that can form (lepidolite is a lithium phyllosilicate, spodumene is a lithium aluminum silicate) but probably most lithium ions released would remain soluble, spreading into the environment. But it would take an enormous lithium release to cause problems: there's 230 billion tonnes of it in the sea without causing any toxicity. In the USA, the EPA hasn't established any limit on lithium in drinking water. The usual therapeutic dose of lithium is about a gram a day, a few times lower than the usual intake of sodium or potassium. 7-Up used to be full of lithium.
I don't think you need to worry about arson in China.
There are a lot of ways for me to be wrong given I’m not a chemist; the point, to misuse a famous quote, is that safety requires me to be wrong about every concern and danger only needs you to be wrong once. So far we’ve not got enough stuff for any hazards in any of the components to rise to the level of significance, and indeed they may just be fine even at the level we need to use them; but in the 1930s I think I could say the same of CFCs?
Scale matters, and while I’m optimistic about batteries etc., I want us to solve problems rather than ignore them — we can only do that by being open about them, and I’ve seen enough occasions where others have claimed risks “don’t exist at all” to be more comfortable with a claim of “1% risk” than of “0% risk”.
> I don't think you need to worry about arson in China.
Probably no damage was done by lead electrodes in Fukushima. Lots was probably done by dry-cleaning establishments, hardware stores, machine shops, pesticide inventories (in factories, stores, and farms), paint factories and stores, etc., but metallic lead? Lead is so stable that even bullets inside people's bodies, where they're constantly exposed to hot, salty, corrosive bodily fluids, usually don't cause any toxicity. Even lead sulfate (the mineral anglesite) is somewhat challenging to get a toxic dose of.
Lithium is a relatively abundant element in Earth's crust, about the same abundance as nitrogen, and more abundant than boron, tin, tungsten, or iodine. It's fairly nontoxic: the lethal dose of lithium salts for a person is measured in tens of grams, and it doesn't bioaccumulate. There are a few lithium minerals that can form (lepidolite is a lithium phyllosilicate, spodumene is a lithium aluminum silicate) but probably most lithium ions released would remain soluble, spreading into the environment. But it would take an enormous lithium release to cause problems: there's 230 billion tonnes of it in the sea without causing any toxicity. In the USA, the EPA hasn't established any limit on lithium in drinking water. The usual therapeutic dose of lithium is about a gram a day, a few times lower than the usual intake of sodium or potassium. 7-Up used to be full of lithium.
I don't think you need to worry about arson in China.