Relax: Your gadget’s lithium battery isn’t going to kill you

Published 9:00 pm Saturday, August 19, 2006

Warning: Batteries included.

Dell Inc.’s recall Tuesday of 4.1 million laptop computer batteries at risk of fire raised the specter of the average person unwittingly toting an arsenal of potentially lethal incendiary devices – including cell phones, personal digital assistants and portable music players.

Rest assured, the risk of a cell phone blowing your head off is considerably lower than rear-ending someone while talking on one behind the wheel. But the lithium ion batteries that power Dell laptops and other essentials of life-on-the-go long have been known to burst into flames from time to time.

Physically and chemically, the release of energy that makes your iPod rock is a delicate process. The rise of laptops, BlackBerrys and Game Boys has made lithium ion batteries so ubiquitous – U.S. consumers bought 1.2 billion last year – that it’s almost impossible to go a day without using something that might catch fire for no apparent reason.

So in a world of terrorism alerts and trans fats, what’s the relative danger of self-immolating gadgetry? Something more than getting killed by lightning, but something less than dying of food poisoning.

“The risk of a laptop battery exploding is very, very low,” said James Kapin, chairman of the American Chemical Society’s Division of Chemical Health and Safety in San Diego.

Dell recalled the batteries for 33 laptop models after receiving six reports of overheating. Last year, similar concerns prompted Hewlett-Packard Co. and Apple Computer Inc. to recall hundreds of thousands of batteries.

It’s the downside of better living through chemistry. All batteries produce electricity through chemical reactions. When you turn on a device, the reaction starts by running electrons between the battery’s two oppositely charged electrodes. Those are the little plus and minus signs you see on the battery case.

Lithium ion batteries – named for the lithium hexafluorophosphate inside them – pack large amounts of energy into a small space. That makes them ideal for power-hungry portable devices. They also generate a lot of heat. Even a microscopic defect in the battery’s innards can let the heat get out of control.

Laptops are particularly vulnerable because the other components also generate a lot of heat, but “every consumer device you own – a cell phone, an MP3 player, a PDA – they’re all powered by lithium ion batteries,” said Carmi Levy, a senior research analyst at Info-Tech Research Group in London, Ontario.

After receiving reports of incidents and injuries involving cell-phone batteries, the Cellular Telecommunications &Internet Association joined with the Consumer Product Safety Commission in issuing guidelines last year for proper care and handling of lithium ion batteries.

Don’t drop them, put them on or near a hot surface or get them wet.

“You’ve got electricity, you’ve got heat and you’ve got reactive chemicals, so there’s certainly a potential for something bad to happen,” Kapin said. “A fire, an explosion, something like that.”