'30 Year Laptop Battery' is Unscientific Myth 322
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.. (Score:5, Funny)
Re:I think.. (Score:5, Funny)
Back in my day... (Score:4, Funny)
Get off my lawn!
*shakes cane*
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Re:Back in my day... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Back in my day... (Score:5, Funny)
Laptop? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Laptop? (Score:5, Informative)
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? (Score:4, Funny)
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? (Score:5, Informative)
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).
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Re:Laptop? (Score:4, Informative)
On a side note, our first CF bulbs didn't seem to last. They were kept inside of glass fixtures. We got another batch, and new fixtures (the old ones were a fire hazard anyway). These are open fixtures, and so I assume the bulbs stay a lot cooler. We have yet to burn up a single CF, after 3.5 years...and these new ones seem brighter than the old ones. Also, make sure they are not on a dimmer. That can make them die early I believe.
Re:Laptop? (Score:5, Informative)
You really have to take an extremely biased view for CFLs to come out worse than incandescents.
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The incandescent will fail after roughly the specified number hours no matter how you use it*. The fluorescent will fail after a number of starts equivalent to moderate usage over that specified number of hours. If you conserve starts, they should last for far longer than the indicated time. If you flip them on&off
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That's more quality control than anything else. As demand for CFLs has increased, more and more no-name manufacturers are trying to get in on the action. Increasingly, they are skimping on quality control to try to appeal to price conscious consumers.
Re:Laptop? (Score:5, Interesting)
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In addition, with the CF, there's a non-zero probability of the mercury remaining sequestered in the glass tube. Even better, we COULD set up a recycling program. Burning coal disperses 100% of the mercury into the environment with little hope of recovery unless you count bioaccumulation in human beings as recovery.
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I have read credible reports that the mercury in a CFL is less than mercury vented from a coal plant powering a incandescent bulb, it is important to realize that most of the mercury in the coal is captured and properly disposed of, not vented to the atmosphere.
Interesting aside, a leading contributor to atmospheric mercury emissions is crematoriums (who typically don't have scrubbers) cremating people with mercury containing amalgam
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Figured released by NEMA were used for the graph at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Mercury_emissions_by_light_source_(en).svg [wikipedia.org]; this assumes bare compliance with NEMA's current voluntary standards, while some manufacturers are producing bulbs using significantly less mercury than those.
Also available is a statement by the EPA on the subject quoted at http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2007/05/070518-cfls-bulbs_2.html [nationalgeographic.com]
Finding docs describing coal-fired power plants as the single largest cause
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You might find the snopes article on the subject [snopes.com] useful.
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Municipal waste landfill: 3.2%
Recycling: 3%
Municipal waste incineration: 17.55%
Hazardous waste disposal: 0.2%.
Interesting to note that recycling is barely better than landfill disposal. However, landfill disposal entombs the mercury, while recycling reuses it, which is obviously a be
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The same goes double for tritium, because tritium is relatively innocuous as far as radioactive materials go. Tritium is a hydrogen isotope...That means if its out in the environment it's probably either going to be a gas or a liquid, and that gas is going to be chemically very similar to hydrogen gas(it'll have 1 extra proton and be a we
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Still, I must strongly disagree with the author's pessimism. Offhand, I can already think of a system that wouldn't suffer degradation, something like a dusty fission fragment reactor [aiaa.org]. Basically, your "fuel" is a nanoscale powder (say, a tritium polyethylene), which is inherently self-ionizing because of the beta emission. You have them in a core with
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I really wish I had mod points. There should be a "+1, you referred to sharks with laser beams."
:-)
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Generally the really nasty stuff from a biological point of view is the rare elements that the body concentrates.
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Tritium is commonly used in a lot of places. If your wristwatch glows in the dark, it's probably tritium.
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That would seem to make it a lot less likely that you'd have any significant amount of tritium released by accident, and breathing vapor off a burning battery is harmful regardless of whether its an atomic battery or just a metal laden lithium battery.
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That's not true. Tritium is a weak beta emitter that is easily blocked by skin. Other beta emitters like [32]P are much stronger and can be dangerous.
Eh. (Score:3, Interesting)
Beta emitters (especially like [32]P) are bad news if consumed, but as long as there is something in between you and it, you're probably fine.
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If you are going to generate large quantities of energy from radioactive decay, then ideally you want a sample wh
Embrace Change (Score:5, Funny)
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.
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Somehow (Score:2)
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Sounds like a Star Trek Episode (Score:5, Funny)
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.
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It doesn't.
However, the 3rd Doctor was oft fond of "reversing the polarity of the neutron flow".
Target market (Score:2, Insightful)
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Sub != Laptop (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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Ok. (Score:3, Insightful)
That's generally true anyway.
Up with Tritium! (Score:2)
Cons and wishful thinking (Score:3, Insightful)
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Well it wasn't great at the start, but then we hooked the tubes up in series.
10X improvement (Score:2)
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...um.... (Score:5, Funny)
don
Duh! (Score:2)
Also, if it had a 30 year charge already built in, I would have to wonder what they would have sold it for?!
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Hold the phone... (Score:4, Funny)
Cue the porcine aviators...
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Use the heat (Score:2)
Anyway, I don't think civilians will ever see these, but the military will find uses.
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The Einstein rule (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:The Einstein rule (Score:5, Funny)
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Conversely, as we charge the battery it will shoot forwards in time.
Something's bound to assplode!
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I would say more generally, that any time someone references that equation, there's something wrong with the claim/argument they're making.
Of course, it's not really true. Every once in a blue moon, it makes sense to actually cite that "E=mc^2". But it's so rare that the equation is actually applicable, and even when it is the equation itself is so rarely helpful. I mean, ok, you're talking about a nuclear reaction, but do we actually need to know the ratio of energy to mass? Are we going to be doing c
What pissed me off on that was this assumption: (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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i'd imagine a lot of the chemicals that end up in consumer products while not radioactive are considerablly more dangerous to living things.
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12.5 years not 1200. this isn't an unreasonable number when you consider people can use the battery long after the device it was originally in is in the local city dump. especially if there is a bit of a cost to them, which there likely is. if they do throw it away, the radiation will decrease by nearly 300 fold in less than 100 years. we can make containers good enough to survive at least that long in a dump
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Re:What pissed me off on that was this assumption: (Score:5, Insightful)
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Think of it - Americium-241 (the radiation source in smoke detectors) has a half-life of 432.7 years. It gets tossed into the land fill after just a few years.
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not the only nuclear battery (Score:5, Interesting)
Think about it... (Score:2, Insightful)
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Voyager satellites (Score:2)
It's Tritium (Score:3, Informative)
Where's the original press release? (Score:2)
A couple things... (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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Nah... Don't really need to know an old scientist to get it. Just have to have enough of a background in science. A High School education should be enough to realize that science changes over time, but the people practicing it don't always. So somebody who studied
Blue-sky defense contractors (Score:5, Informative)
"...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
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]
Slashdot fail (Score:3)
The article is actually better than the slashdot headline -- it gives reasons why nuclear laptop batteries seem to be commercially impractical (though I can imagine military applications), but doesn't call them an unscientific myth.
Betavoltaics = pseudoscience (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Radioactive waste disposal is no problem... (Score:3, Interesting)
They just needed to keep the waste in an onsite holding pool for a few years, and then the government would take over. He explained that the U. S. Government made a firm commitment (he may even have mentioned a contract) to accept the plant's waste starting in 1998, when the Yucca Flats facility would begin operating.
So, what's the problem? All we need to do is make it easy for consumers to mail their dead radioactive batteries to the Yucca Flats facility.
Oh, wait...
(If he were still alive consumers could also mail them to Ronald Reagan, who stated at one point that if properly processed a year's worth of nuclear waste from a nuclear power plant could be stored under a desk...)
OK, time to smack down some mythconceptions. (Score:4, Interesting)
Let's go hog wild and do the math! (Score:4, Interesting)
Kinda impractical to stuff your laptop with several million gallons of radioactive waste.
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It might only take one hundredth of Hanford's waste...
Re:Let's go hog wild and do the math! (Score:4, Interesting)
This guy doesn't know much about nuclear batteries (Score:3, Informative)
The author makes a point of stating "only 25 watts per kilo". Of course, a laptop draws about 10 watts with good power management. So the nuclear battery, according to his stats, would weigh less than a pound. (I suspect however, that a nuclear battery could not be that light, because tritium simply doesn't emit that much energy. For something more radioactive like Am-241 I could believe it. But you'd need a *lot* of tritium to generate 10 watts, and it would be very expensive. Even condensed as tritiated water under pressure, I'm not sure it'd fit into a practical volume, or be cost-effective.)
Further, stating there's a danger of release of radioactivity is just more typically ignorant anti-nuclear FUD. The battery would be likely sealed and constructed in such a way that it would be almost impossible to break. This isn't difficult; my USB flash drive can handle a semi truck driving over it.
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The obvious answer is the lifetime of the laptop. For me, that would be about three-four years. A lot less than thirty. Even that is a bit long though. I may use a laptop for three years, but I don't use it away from mains power for three years. Most days, I sleep somewhere with mains power so I could easily charge it overnight. If I sleep 8 hours a day, then 16 hours of battery life would be enough. This doesn't count travelling, howeve
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From a danger standpoint, anything with an energy density that high is risky. Car fires are bad now, imagine what they would be like if available energy were 1000 times greater. (On the other hand, unaccelerated nuclear
Not that crap again... (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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Tritium is chemically indistinguishable from the hydrogen in water. Now because water molecules exchange hydrogen atoms all the time a sample of tritium in water will be rapidly diluted
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Ecapsulation doesn't work very well anyway - paticularly in some form of glass (the glass structure not specificly silicon dioxide). Incorporation such as Synrock seems to work well so far however the real world solution applied is to shove the stuff in drums and get minimum wage guys to move it about and stack it up until you've got enough of it to form a radioactive pile in a waterlogged room in Yucca Mou