With all due respect to Planet Money, batteries don’t “suck”, you just don’t know why/how they work. Inherent to all batteries is a mix of (super duper) interesting and competing tradeoffs that are exceptionally sensitive to the application at hand. It is a testament to 150 years of careful research and engineering that they work at all. //

But there are at least two major factors in batteries not addressed by this plot, and one is hidden in plain sight. We’ll start with that.
The Ragone plot shows energy vs. power; dimensional analysis shows that the diagonal lines must in the units of time, specifically charge or discharge duration. Point 3 tells us that for a given application duration at a given power drain we need a certain size of battery. In a perfect world we multiply power by time to figure out what the battery size should be, in an imperfect world Ragone corrects for this.

So hidden in the Ragone plot is the tradeoff of Safety vs. Power, or at least part of it. We want a battery with a near unlimited power density, but this must be tempered against the mediocrity of the bomb we’d like to carry around.