The Seattle area TV station King5 has posted
a story simply attributed to "sources" asserting that Boeing is considering an approach to continuing to use the existing battery system with upgrades to containment and venting. As I doubt that even a profound understanding of just what happened in the JAL and ANA incidents will lead to a change which will have all stakeholders believing there will never be another one, I personally believe that continued use of these batteries requires improvement in precisely these two areas.
The idea here is that thermal runaway lithium cell failures should be rare, but that if one should happen anyway the design should safely contain damage to the battery itself, by adequate thermal and mechanical shielding to adjacent structures and equipment, and safer (which has to mean more constrained) venting of the unavoidable hot byproducts overboard.
I think this is on a correct track--though I certainly hope that improvements driven by real understanding make the cell failures far less common than they seem to be now. A complete redesign using a different chemistry is doubtless entirely possible, but the timeline when one includes all stakeholder approvals, testing, and regulatory hurdles would probably be very long even were the 777 solution "dropped in", and yet longer on a more original design.