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upstart writes in with an IRC submission for RandomFactor:

Replacing lithium with sodium in batteries:

An international team of scientists from NUST MISIS, Russian Academy of Science and the Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf has found that instead of lithium (Li), sodium (Na) "stacked" in a special way can be used for battery production.

[...] They found that if the atoms inside the sample are "stacked" in a certain way, then alkali metals other than lithium also demonstrate high energy intensity. The most promising replacement for lithium is sodium (Na), since a two-layer arrangement of sodium atoms in bigraphen sandwich demonstrates anode capacity comparable to the capacity of a conventional graphite anode in Li-ion batteries—about 335 mA*h/g against 372 mA*h/g for lithium. However, sodium is much more common than lithium, and therefore cheaper and more easily obtained.

Journal Reference:
Ilya V. Chepkasov, Mahdi Ghorbani-Asl, Zakhar I. Popov, et al. Alkali metals inside bi-layer graphene and MoS2: Insights from first-principles calculations [open], Nano Energy (DOI: 10.1016/j.nanoen.2020.104927)

Original Submission