'30 Year Laptop Battery' is Unscientific Myth

An anonymous reader wrote to mention the wonderful news: "A research group funded by U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory is developing a battery which can provide continuous power to your laptop for 30 years! Betavoltaic power cells are constructed from semiconductors and use radioisotopes as the energy source..." Except, not so much. ZDNet's Mixed Signals blog with Rupert Goodwins explains why (as always) if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is: "The sort of atomic structures that generate power when bombarded with high energy electrons are the sort that tend to fall apart when bombarded with high energy electrons. While solar cells have the same problem, it's to a much lesser extent. There's a lot of research into making materials that don't suffer so much, but it remains a serious issue ... while it's true that a tritium-powered battery will eventually turn into an inert, safe lump of nothing much, and while it's also true that a modest amount of shielding will keep the radioactivity within the the battery the while, there's the small problem that if you break the battery during its life the nasties come out."

I think..

the nastiest came out and broke your grammar checker.

Re:I think..

and my preview button.

Back in my day...

When I was young, before the first war, we didn't have them fancy grammar checkers or spelling checkers. When we had a paper due for our teacher, we had to look up the ASCII codes manually (most of us memorized like our multiplication tables) while punching holes in cards to feed into our mechanical computer. The grammar and spelling checker was YOU! We didn't have batteries. We had to power our computers by connecting them to mills near powerful dams. And we liked it! Then we had to manually ink our ribbon before printing. And when we went to school, we often lost our papers because it was so cold. And the roads were uphill both ways!

Get off my lawn!

*shakes cane*

Re:Back in my day...

Pfft. Infant! In MY day we didn't even have days yet. We had to wait for nucleosynthesis and super-novae so we had Oxygen to begin with, and we were *GRATEFUL*.

Re:Back in my day...

OXYGEN? Lucky. Back in MY day there was simply nothing, and after a while it blew up.

Laptop?

Yeah, my lap is exactly where I want to put something radioactive.

Re:Laptop?

Meh. It's a beta emitter; beta radiation is completely harmless to humans as long as you have a nice layer of skin between you and it.

However, when it gets into the body it is EXTREMELY harmful, so the worry is that people will break the batteries open and release toxic crap into the environment where it can be inhaled/ingested.

Re:Laptop?

> "Meh. It's a beta emitter; beta radiation is completely harmless to humans as long as you have a nice layer of skin between you and it.

However, when it gets into the body it is EXTREMELY harmful, so the worry is that people will break the batteries open and release toxic crap into the environment where it can be inhaled/ingested.

So if you thought laptop battery fires were dangerous before, these are a terrorist wet dream made to order ...

Re:Laptop?

It's not significant really. The amount of tritium in this, even concentrated, is pretty low, and would make a really poor weapon...On the order of throwing florescent bulbs at someone to try to poison them with Mercury vapor. It also disperses pretty quickly, so the lasting effect is minimal in the area.

Tritium is available in the environment already; it's a naturally occurring isotope of hydrogen, and it's half life is pretty low (~12 years).

Re:Laptop?

Actually, the mercury in CF bulbs is going to be a significant problem.

Overblown. A CFL powered by a coal-burning power plant results in a significant net reduction in mercury put into the environment -- that from the bulb itself is far more than offset by the mercury not released by the plant.

Re:Laptop?

How is this "bringing more problems"? Businesses have used fluorescent lighting for years. You're only hearing about this issue now because it's a change in peoples' homes. When was the last time you saw people in such a panic about mercury thermometers or thermostats? Yet they contain *hundreds* of times more mercury than a standard CFL with its 5 *milligrams* of mercury. And the amount of mercury is dropping; Phillips is down to 2 milligrams [wikipedia.org]. Even going with 5mg, a CFL releases less mercury even if you were to take after it died, smash it, and aerosolize all of its contents, than if you used a normal incandescent for that time; A coal plant will release 10-15mg of mercury over the lifespan of an incandescent, and only 2.5-4 for the CFL. Coal produces over half of our electricity. And we're only talking about mercury here. As for all other pollutants, CFLs are way, way ahead because of their lower energy consumption. And this all assumes that all of the mercury from a CFL ends up in the environment.

You really have to take an extremely biased view for CFLs to come out worse than incandescents.

Embrace Change

Don't be so afraid of radiation.

A larger pool of mutants means more chance of a favorable adaptation, right?

We can't be so selfish - think of the children.

Everyone talks about evolution but nobody does anything about it.

Sounds like a Star Trek Episode

Mr. LaForge: We're trapped by the aliens!

Wesley Crusher: Wait! We only need to realize that the sort of atomic structures that generate power when bombarded with high energy electrons are the sort that tend to fall apart when bombarded with high energy electrons.

Mr. LaForge: That.... could.... destabilize the aliens death ray....!

Wesley: Yeah, just like in the academy.

Picard: Make it so.

...um....

I don't know about you ... but for ANYTHING radioactive that I'm going to be sticking on my lap I want more than a "modest" amount of shielding thank you very much.

don

Hold the phone...

Did an editor ACTUALLY CHECK on the facts of a story before posting?

Cue the porcine aviators...

The Einstein rule

Anytime you see a reference to Einstein, or the e=mc^2 equation [nextenergynews.com], there's a good chance that the exciting new technology is bunk.

. The reason the battery lasts so long is that neutron beta-decay into protons is the world's most concentrated source of electricity, truly demonstrating Einstein's theory E=MC2.

Can we formalize this rule? It could be as important as Godwin's for understanding internet discourse.

Re:The Einstein rule

Yes, let's call it lawpoop's law. That sounds really good.

What pissed me off on that was this assumption:

That in sending radioactive products into the marketplace you could assume consumers would then take responsibility to make sure the products were disposed of properly.
        That part was what really disgusted me when I saw that story yesterday. If the serious plastic waste problems in the oceans don't provide ample evidence that you can't control where products end up then there are hundreds of other examples including groundwater contamination in countries across the globe from selenium and other fun stuff that are essential in consumer electronics yet toxic when dispersed into the environment at the end of their useful lives which tend to be numbered in months rather than years with defective by design components like capacitors that have shelf lives like groceries.
        I googled it a bit and I read that the half life in these things was like twelve hundred years. Maybe I was missing the dot in there and it was only twelve years but even so that's far longer than the life of a consumer electronics device.

Re:What pissed me off on that was this assumption:

On the other hand, the Lithium in your current battery will remain deadly forever.

not the only nuclear battery

the article is correct that radiation destroys semiconductor efficiency although not all "nuclear battery" designs involve semiconductors. space probes sometimes use a chunk of radioactive material that has shielding around it while the energy released is in the form of heat. this heat [temperature gradient] is harnessed by a thermoelectric materal- basically it consists of several layers of different metals that produce a voltage potential in response to a temperature gradient. the advantage in this is that you can use metal as shielding and not relatively fragile semiconductor material. although you need a radioisotope that can generate enough heat from decay to be useful- tritium's half-life is about 12 years so it might qualify, although a better solution might be a solid unless they use T2O, ditritium monoxide, which is "superheavy water"

A couple things...

When an old scientist says something is possible, he is probably right. When an old scientist says something is impossible he is probably wrong. (I'll let you ponder the seeming paradox, but you'd have to know some old scientists to really get it.)

We already have "dirty" nuclear materials in the hands of consumers: some types of smoke detectors, lead paint detectors, x-ray machines, and some other things.

If someone wanted to make a dirty bomb, a few thousand dollars worth of the right smoke detectors would do perfectly.

Blue-sky defense contractors

Defense contractors are always coming up with wonderful sounding ideas that are completely impractical. For example, in 1999 a company called Stavatti presented the DoD a design for a portable laser rifle suitable for use by common infantry. The device was to be powered by...wait for it... polonium (PO-210). An excerpt from the proposal:

"...To increase the energy level of the CO2 N2 He gas mixture, a Zirconium-Nickel fuel rod approximately 40cm long and 1.8 cm in diameter containing approximately 740 grams (78cc) of Polonium-210 (Po-210) is contained within, and located down the centerline of, the cylindrical gas reservoir. The Po-210 provides a thermal energy source of approximately 141 watts/gram through the emission of alpha particles via the process of nuclear decay. This energy source provides a significant power density while alleviating the shielding requirements and apparent health risks associated with gamma ray emitting radionuclides. The presence of the Po-210 in the reservoir chamber will result in the delivery of approximately 104.34 kW to the CO2 N2 He gas mixture, thereby raising the gas to a state of thermal equilibrium corresponding to an internal reservoir pressure of approximately 272.1 atm, temperature of 2173.16 K and gas density of 44 kg/m3..."

You may recall that a few micrograms of PO-210 were used to kill that guy in London about a year ago, and this company has proposed putting .75 kg in a rifle that would be subject to damage, destruction and dispersal on the battlefield.

The paper describing the laser rifle can be found here:

http://209.85.165.104/search?q=cache:SEji6Jn6-4AJ:www.defensereview.com/352003/TIS1.pdf+pumped+polonium+laser+rifle&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=1&gl=us [209.85.165.104]

Betavoltaics = pseudoscience

The betavoltaic battery is nothing more than pseudoscience. It's higher quality pseudoscience than junk such as zero-point free energy generators or gravity wheel generators, but it is pseudoscience nonetheless. Every few years you see these sorts of claims about betavoltaic devices pop up again, then fade away.

Despite years of claims, no one has ever come close to demonstrating a device with the sort of power densities claimed in the article. Furthermore, the biggest proponent of betavoltaic technology is Ruggero Santilli, an infamous pseudoscientist with a litany of nutty claims and bizarre theories of physics.

If you look at the web pages of the companies that are involved in betavoltaics (e.g. betavoltaic.com or nuclearsolutions.com), you'll find that they have no physical facilities outside of a rented post office box or the home of one of the principals. None of them have any product to sell or even demo. I don't expect that will ever change.

Sub != Laptop

The power demands are wildly different between a fricking SUB and a fricking LAPTOP. The power generation is also far different; subs have active fission piles, they're literally mobile nuke reactors.

Atomic batteries, on the other hand, are just storage for existing nuclear material. They generate electricity as part of the radioactive decay process, either by using the heat generated by the decay, or by harvesting the incident energy of the decay process.

Types of radioisotope batteries (like RTG's [wikipedia.org]) have been used in the space program forever.

Not that crap again...

From a danger standpoint, anything with an energy density that high is risky.

This is another of those hard to die myths that will have to be debunked over and over again. Consider:

a)Butter has a higher energy density than a laptop battery
b)The hydrogen in a cup of water, if fusioned all the way to iron, would release enough energy to flatten a city ( or power it for our entire lifetime).
c)A lithium battery holding 0 charge is just as flamable and dangerous as a fully charged one.

I think this myth came about because people figured nuclear = dangerous, and Li-ion = dangerous. In reality things are far from that simple. It is not the energy density of Li-ion batteries that cause them to explode, as an example, it is the fact that they contain lithium, which is a very reactive alkali metal. As I already mentioned, a completely depleted Li-ion battery could still catch fire, and if you pulverised it and poured water on it, it would literarely explode as the liberated hydrogen ignited.

For a car, you could vitrify an isotope like Plutonium-238, forming a very inert ceramic rod which would produce heat at a perfectly predictable rate. It would also be very safe since even if the ZOMG terrorists tried to use it in a dirty bomb, the inert nature of the ceramic would keep the plutonium contained, and as a pure alpha-emitter enclosed in a ceramic, there would be virtually no mentionable radiation release. To give you an idea of how safe such a device could be. They have been used to power pacemakers.

It would also be absolutely useless for a nuclear weapon, even if the pure Pu-238 could be recovered, since weapons need very pure Pu-239. Just the heat generated from Pu-238 would make a fission weapon virtually impossible, and the neutronic properties make it absolutely useless.

The only reasonable risk I could see from such a device would be if it was left in a very enclosed space so that the heat generated would start a fire. This is however a fairly limited engineering problem which is not unique to RTGs. Similar precautions are needed for electric heaters and engines.

Main disadvantage is the ( at present ) fairly high price of Pu-238. Producing it in quantity is a fairly complex process, and it would probably be a lot cheaper to just use regular battery electric vehicles.