The wireless world — and the electric cars that are expected sooner than later — arrive with one major drawback: long charge times.

There have been battery revolutions in the recent past.  While growing up with digital technology, NiMH and Lithium Ion rechargeable batteries began allowing my devices to run for longer than it took to charge them.

First generation rechargeable devices needed to be charged for 8 to 12 hours minimum and ran for minutes, or a couple of hours at most.  New technologies allowed a useful amount of charge to be infused in a reasonable amount of time.  I frequently grab a 10 minute cellphone charge to tide me over for a few hours of standby time with today’s technology.

Now, thanks to research conducted by the vaunted American Institute at MIT, the next generation of Lithium Ion batteries will last for hours and will charge in minutes or even seconds.  By studying the way lithium ions move in the cells, they were able to design a better battery.  A way better battery.

This is the kind of technlogy revolution that arguably comes along once in a lifetime.  Sure, it still relies on complex Lithium Ion cells, which are costly to build, implicated in a few dangerous incidents, and are almost impossible to recycle, but it addresses the exact issue that most people have with electric cars: charge times.

Once deployed, the final remaining “stumbling block” to electric vehicles will unfortunately become a more severe issue.  Hundreds of thousands of cars, once plugged into the grid, will require a good deal more power than is currently being generated.  While some places like Israel are preparing massive solar farms in the otherwise useless desert, places like Ontario, Canada are instead considering more nuclear fission capacity.  In fact, we’re still planning to generate over 50 percent of our power using dirty nuclear fission.

In the face of this possible revolution presented by the new MIT battery, you’d think we’d know better.