FWIW, ran into a retired electrical engineer from a major U.S. electrical
manufacturer (he asked me not to tell the name--but I have known him many years
and consider his information to be accurate).
He said a group at his firm designed some equipment for operation at remote
locations, including rechargeable batteries as an essential part of the design.
They were going with lithium molybdenum sulfide like the UltraLite, but before
the equipment was released for sale, they discovered the explosion
problem--something about its being prohibitively costly to manufacture them to
close enough tolerances to guarantee there would be no possibililty of an
explosion. Of course they switched to different batteries. This was in the
early to mid '80's.
Mark Shields