Maybe I’ve just watched too many Hollywood blockbusters, but I kind of love stories about things blowing up. (As long as no-one gets hurt, obviously.) So the ongoing story about the Sony laptop batteries which had something wrong with them that caused them to explode entirely captured my imagination. But the joke’s worn a bit thin because the problem with lithium-ion batteries hasn’t gone away, even though that one faulty batch should really have been sorted out and disposed of by now.

Japanese scientists are now saying that there’s something fundamentally wrong with the way lithium ion batteries are manufactured; that the safety standards batteries have to conform to simply aren’t stringent enough.

At the moment, electrodes within lithium-ion batteries are submerged in an organic solvent which acts as an electrolyte, and separates them with a layer of film. That system obviously allows for faults to occur, as in the case of the Sony batteries. But the experts in Tokyo reckon there is an alternative and safer way of making batteries, involving a solid polymer electrolyte. The problem now will be convincing factories that their current methods aren’t good enough, and that the risk is great enough that they really need to do things differently.

It all sounds so clinical and far-off when you talk about it like that, but… these are the batteries inside our laptops and mobile phones we’re talking about. Can we really afford to use potentially dangerous technology in our everyday lives? Something tells me the explosions wouldn’t be nearly so exciting if they were happening in my house.