Russian Scientists Upgrade Nuclear Battery Design To Increase Power Output (sciencealert.com) 150
schwit1 shares a report from ScienceAlert: A team of Russian researchers have put a new spin on technology that uses the beta decay of a radioactive element to create differences in voltage. The devices are made of stacks of isotope of nickel-63 sandwiched between a pair of special semiconducting diodes called a Schottky barrier. This barrier keeps a current headed one way, a feature often used to turn alternating currents into direct ones. Finding that the optimal thickness of each layer was just 2 micrometers, the researchers were able to maximize the voltage produced by every gram of isotope.
Nickel-63 has a half-life of just over 100 years, which in an optimized system like this adds up to 3,300 milliwatt-hours of energy per gram: ten times the specific energy of your typical electrochemical cell. It's a significant step up from previous nickel-63 betavoltaic devices, and while it isn't quite enough to power your smart phone, it does bring it into a realm of being useful for a wide variety of tasks.
Nickel-63 has a half-life of just over 100 years, which in an optimized system like this adds up to 3,300 milliwatt-hours of energy per gram: ten times the specific energy of your typical electrochemical cell. It's a significant step up from previous nickel-63 betavoltaic devices, and while it isn't quite enough to power your smart phone, it does bring it into a realm of being useful for a wide variety of tasks.
Just imagine... (Score:3)
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxford_Electric_Bell [wikipedia.org]
Re:Just imagine... (Score:4, Interesting)
Perhaps when Elon Musk bases the flying car off of Tesla's vertical takeoff and landing heliplane, we can see more or his inventions that no-one knows about. Strange that for his last 20 years no patents appear in the public records.
Re:Just imagine... (Score:5, Funny)
That could have been the case if it used NiFe batteries. Ironically, that is...
I see what you did there.
Re:Just imagine... (Score:4, Informative)
A NiFe battery is completely different from a betavoltaic cell, even one based on a Nickel isotope.
Re:Just imagine... (Score:4, Interesting)
Strange that for his last 20 years no patents appear in the public records.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
There ya go.
Don't forget to put on your tinfoil hat while browsing that Wikipedia page or lizard-people will read your mind and steal them patents.
You'll quickly notice that it is all outdated and that most of his later year "inventions" are nothing but junk.
E.g. That "vertical takeoff and landing heliplane" had a single and comparatively tiny propeller - but it had biplane wings, AND they were fixed and in line with the propeller, tilting along with it.
Now... ignoring completely the tiny amount of vertical liftoff that such propeller would be able to provide (think V-22 Osprey [aviation.com])... consider what happens to the angle of those fixed wings and of the entire "heliplane" as it tries to lift off vertically.
I.e. He lacked fundamental understanding of how the wing works and how it lifts the airplane.
Also... from even cursory reading of the patent, it is quite clear he didn't really understand engines or the concept of efficiency of said engines.
He envisions his "APPARATUS FOR AERIAL TRANSPORTATION" being lifted by "turbines" working under "excessive overload"..."with the object of meeting the abnormal power requirements in the starting, landing and other. short operations" - while "motors will be operated at their normal rated capacity" only during "descent and alighting, as well as rising in the manner of a true aeroplane".
I.e. He thought that engines are designed to achieve maximum efficiency while working at lower outputs - while at the same time providing the infrastructure for much higher outputs.
He though that an engine designed for a compact car only needs a bit of hardening and the fuel supply and exhaust system of a truck - and it could produce the same amount of force as the engine of a semi-truck.
But the best part is where he envisions his flying "apparatus" being propelled by a STEAM ENGINE.
"In Figure 3 this apparatus is. diagrammatically indicated by 17, and may be any one of a number of well-known types, producing pressure by internal combustion of a suitable fuel or by external firing of a steam boiler.
Tesla was a genius.
But he also clearly had mental issues and was often way out of his depth outside his narrow area of expertise.
That's why his "death ray" turned out to be hokum just like his "new form of energy violently opposed to Einsteinian physics" or his mind-reading device which would work by photographing the eye.
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If you read the patent instead of just looking at the pictures, he explains that
And if you had read the patent OR my entire post you'd notice that the steam engine thing I mention is a QUOTE from the patent.
"External firing of a steam boiler" is a quote from the patent.
As for his turbines "that can operate at much higher speeds than traditional gas turbine engines"... that is not true either.
His turbine HAD higher efficiency vs the axial turbines OF THAT ERA [wikipedia.org] - on account of axial turbines' low efficiency AT THE TIME.
Later test have shown that Tesla's turbine had lower efficiency compar
Quick question (Score:3)
Is "3,300 milliwatt-hours" the same as 3.3 Watt-hours?
Or should we really be measuring this in Libraries of Congress?
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The problem for consumer applications of course is that the full 129mWh/g in a lithium ion battery can easily be delivered in an hour or two, while it takes a literal eternity to extract the 3300mWh/g from their nuclear battery (though you'll get about half of it in the first century). That translates to less than 3.3mWh/g in a year, and less than 4uW/g in a day.
So, totally useless as a phone battery, where a lithium battery's daily power delivery is 32,000x greater.
>Does a battery that produces energy
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So it would be better to strap it to a lithium ion battery as a built in trickle charger?
When you are not using your phone, aka asleep, it charges it self. Sound good to me lol
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Yep, and it only takes a century to recharge it... That's going to be a heck of a nap.
Shielding [Re:Quick question] (Score:2)
How much shielding does such a battery need?
Betas don't penetrate very far. You need a few hundred microns of shielding-- the thickness of the case is going to be fine.
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I'm not so sure. Last bullet point in the Science Direct highlight list:
- The battery power density of 10W/cm3 and specific energy of 3300mWh/g were achieved due to cell thickness decreasing.
Reporters probably aren't going to introduce a mistake specifying uW, especially not using the proper letter mu instead of u. And with nickel at about 9g/cm^3, and diamond at 3.5g/cm^3 that's probably somewhere in the neighborhood of 6g/cm^3, or 2uW/g. What's the lifetime output of an 100y half-life expontential deca
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correction - 10uW/cm^3. Forgot that Slashdot doesn't support unicode.
Micro or milli or whatever [Re:Quick question] (Score:2)
Reporters probably aren't going to introduce a mistake specifying uW, especially not using the proper letter mu instead of u.
correction - 10uW/cm^3. Forgot that Slashdot doesn't support unicode.
And the correction shows why the assumption in the first point is not a good one to make. Errors can be introduced in formatting and editing even if the original article as written was correct.
Also worth watching for, a mu (micron symbol) will turn into the letter m if the original text used a symbol font for mu, and at any point in the process the font gets changed from the reporter's font choice to some standard used by the publication. This happens.
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I don't see it. Yes, it's easy for a mu to accidentally disappear or be changed the a normal character. But that's my point: the article involved a proper mu character in the energy content output - what are the odds that it would be accidentally *inserted*?
Be skeptical of the weasel wording (Score:2)
The answer to that question is always: they don't want to tell us the actual performance because it is so incredibly bad.
Always be skeptical when you see great numbers for "theoretical" performance but not a single mention of real device performance.
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Buying a 100-year-old Tesla and having to replace the original battery.
100 years is the half-life, so you wouldn't have to replace it, it's just that insane mode becomes mundane mode.
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Buying a 100-year-old Tesla and having to replace the original battery.
You'd only have to replace half of the battery...
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Unfortunately the half that needs replacing is uniformly distributed within the half that doesn't, which makes the project slightly more challenging.
Plus the fact that you'd need something the size of a small moon to deliver the power a Tesla needs. To deliver 320kW to the motors at 10uW/cm^3 you'd need 32,000 cubic meters of battery
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"That is no moon. That is a battery."
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No, it just expends half of its maximum energy capacity.
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Not just half it's capacity. It also loses half it's maximum discharge rate.
For most uses I think you'd need to pair this with a capacitor bank to store the charge from when you weren't drawing power for when you are.
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Is that the British or the US "Table". In procedural actions I'm told they have opposite meaning.
what's more scary (Score:5, Insightful)
I'd rather have a nuclear battery in a pacemaker that lasts a lifetime than having to deal with surgery every 10 years to replace a conventional one, risking infection and other complications.
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Nuclear battery pacemakers used to be a thing. It seems doctors feel that having a newer, modern device every decade outweighs the disadvantage of surgery. Replacing a pacemaker is a relatively minor operation, they are implanted in an accessible location and the new device typically reuses the original leads.
http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2015/ph241/degraw2/ [stanford.edu]
Re:what's more scary (Score:5, Interesting)
It's a minor operation, but the foreign materials such as the leads, make for good hiding places for bacteria. The old scar tissue surrounding them also hinders the immune system from getting good access.
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Whatever happened to biomimicry for implants? It was found that the reason skin is able to form closely around antlers and make a seal there is their texture, which is complex and has vast surface area. Weren't we supposed to be able to do that for implants by now?
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I was with you up to that last line. Your body is always full of dangerous pathogens being hunted down by your immune system. A foreign object within your body can easily provide a safe harbor for such pathogens if not carefully constructed - allowing them to replicate until they have sufficient numbers to overwhelm your immune system, or just fester locally.
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Well, how big a deal is it if these get cremated? Because that will happen regularly.
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Reminds me of the opening line the Crow Road by Iain Banks:
'It was the day my grandmother exploded. I sat in the crematorium, listening to my Uncle Hamish quietly snoring in harmony to Bach's Mass in B Minor, and I reflected that it always seemed to be death that drew me back to Gallanach.'
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No need for air quotes. Beta decay is radiation. Idiots not knowing what radiation actually is, and assuming everything has penetration of gamma and energy of alpha isn't going to be helped by pretending beta isn't radiation.
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How do we make sure there's actually *just* beta decay going on, though?
How do we make sure there's actually *just* beta decay going on, though?
Because, according to Wikipedia (if I'm reading it correctly), Nickel-63 [wikipedia.org] is a synthetic isotope and its only type of decay [wikipedia.org] is beta decay [wikipedia.org] and it decays into Copper-63 [wikipedia.org], which is stable.
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Interesting, thanks
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You almost got it right. The daughter product of the nuclear reaction, Cobalt-59, is stable
According to the Wikipedia page for Nickel Isotopes (I linked to), Nickel-63 decays into Copper-63 and Nickel-59 decays into Cobolt-59. I believe the article was about the former (Nickel-63).
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Nuclear physics
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If it gets in to sensitive areas, sure. The point though is that you can work alongside a beta emitter all day long, it mostly can't even penetrate your skin. Sure, it'll ionize the outer layer of your skin if it's not encased in... pretty much anything really, but so will rubbing against wool. Just don't eat it - living tissue is a lot less resilient to ionization than dead skin cells.
An alpha emitter you'd want encased in a foil shell. Easy to add to any implant or other device. You don't want to cu
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I thought you were joking, what with the Simpson's reference, but double checked and it's true!
I hadn't realized that. Sounds like Beryllium-9 is a better candidate than aluminum, and that typically you'll mix powders of your target light isotope and alpha emitter rather than just wrapping it in foil, and that even then you're looking at a 1000-to-1 chance of an alpha particle triggering a fusion reaction and then neutron emitting decay...but criminy. It seems like every elementary discussion of nuclear r
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I'd rather have a nuclear battery in a pacemaker that lasts a lifetime than having to deal with surgery every 10 years to replace a conventional one, risking infection and other complications.
Right... and there there are many other technologies with relatively low-energy needs that could benefit from a very long lasting battery. Space applications (satellites, probes, etc.) or long-term monitors/sensors in remote areas, oceans, power plants, building structures, etc., or independent power sources critical parts of a larger systems (power grid infrastructure, interfaces, etc.)
Thermodynamics (Score:1)
That would require a temperature gradient.
Re:what's more scary (Score:5, Funny)
It's a shame they can't make one that's powered by body heat.
That won't work until Congress repeals the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics.
Much better is a biobattery [wikipedia.org] that is powered by glucose extracted from the blood.
If you have a diabetic roommate, you could use a large biobattery to power your laptop.
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That won't work until Congress repeals the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics.
Hmm, let me see, does it have anything to do with global warming? Yes? Then...
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It's a shame they can't make one that's powered by body heat.
That won't work until Congress repeals the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics.
So... Just ignoring it isn't good enough?
Re: what's more scary (Score:2)
Ignoring it only works until you get caught ... and mother nature keeps a pretty close eye on that shit.
Re:what's more scary (Score:4, Funny)
That won't work until Congress repeals the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics.
Would a Presidential Pardon be enough . . . ? I hear Presidential Pardons will be the Next Big Thing.
If you have a diabetic roommate, you could use a large biobattery to power your laptop.
What do you do with your roommates when they are empty . . . ? Are they rechargeable, or do you need to dispose them at special environmental recycling center?
Is there a danger that roommates will spontaneously burst into flames, like Samsung batteries?
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It's a shame they can't make one that's powered by body heat.
Why would you think of such a thing, Neo?
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why not just wireless charge it... sure.. eh.. just make sure it doesn't interfere with the pacemakers operation itself.
Why do we care about lifetime output over 100 yrs? (Score:4, Interesting)
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But after 25 years it'll only produce 70.7% of the output, which may not be enough
That's better than most conventional batteries after 25 years.
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A major difference between decay and conventional batteries are that decay batteries run continuously. For all that we know we can't affect the rate at which nuclear decay happens. It just happens. Therefore such a device will produce those (ideal) 3.3Wh whether you need it or not. On the other hand they can't produce more than that whether you need it or not. A conventional battery may run dry pretty quickly, but it does so by providing a relatively high electrical current, whic
Re:Why do we care about lifetime output over 100 y (Score:5, Informative)
But after 25 years it'll only produce 70.7% of the output
The fraction of remaining power = exp(-t * ln(2)/100)
So after 25 years, it will be a 84%. It will be at 70.7% after 50 years. If that isn't enough, then just make the battery 40% bigger.
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Yup, thanks for the correction!
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Every decay works like that ...
The coolest part is it's not Radioactive to us. (Score:5, Informative)
Nickel-63 is an artificial isotope, which means it has to be made; But, it only decays by beta decay, so a piece of foil (or a deposited schottky barrier) will prevent that from escaping.
Pu RTG's put out everything from alphas to heavy fission gammas and neutrons, so this is a gogolplex better from any radioactivity standpoint.
I hope this takes off; it all depends on what it costs to make a gram. A 3300mAh lithium battery is about $1 in quantity, but has a very limited lifetime.
Not only that, we make it in the USA. (Score:2)
http://oakridgetoday.com/2018/... [oakridgetoday.com]
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It will only ever be used for very specialized applications and will always be expensive, because most of the time there are better alternatives like solar panels or RF energy harvesting.
I actually evaluated some nuclear batteries years ago for sensors attached to underground pipes. Down there you obviously don't get any sunshine, RF is heavily attenuated and things like turbines are invasive and being mechanical probably won't last 100 years.
In the end the best solution turned out to be thermal gradient.
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Pu RTG's put out everything from alphas to heavy fission gammas and neutrons
What? The Pu-238 decay chain is almost perfect because it's mostly alpha particles which are easier to shield against than betas.
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Pu RTG's put out everything from alphas to heavy fission gammas and neutrons
What? The Pu-238 decay chain is almost perfect because it's mostly alpha particles which are easier to shield against than betas.
Yes, but there are several challenges:
1. It gives off a lot of heat when i decays, which is what is used to power spacecraft wit Pu-238.
2. Manufacturing and disposing of batteries with it would be problematic due to ingestion dangers
3. It's created as a by product of bomb making or power production and thus is expensive and difficult to produce.
I was thinking of the soviets: (Score:2)
From Wiki:
December 2001 â" Three lumberjacks in the nation of Georgia found two warm canisters near their camp and spent the night beside them. The canisters were discarded, unshielded heat sources from Soviet radioisotope thermoelectric generators, each containing 30 kCi (1.1 PBq) of 90Sr.[47] The lumberjacks started showing symptoms of radiation sickness within hours, and were subsequently hospitalized with severe radiation burns.[48] The disposal team consisted of 25 men who were restricted to 40 se
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The key point though is that while it has a relatively high energy density, it delivers almost no power. It takes about a century to half-drain that 3300mWh nuclear battery, which means you're averaging less than 0.05mWh per day (per cm^3 of battery). In comparison you can completely drain a lithium battery within hours.
Physics is not your strong point. (Score:2)
It will deliver 3.3W at any point in time; if you draw more, the voltage will sag.
Combining 10000 of these will power a house.
A watt is Joules per second:
Wiki:
In the International System of Units (SI) it is defined as a derived unit of 1 joule per second,[1] and is used to quantify the rate of energy transfer.
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No, read more carefully: it doesn't deliver 3.3Watts per gram, it delivers 3.3Watt-hours per gram. That's energy, not power. Energy that is delivered spread across it's multi-century lifespan. The article even specifies the power - initially 10uW/cm^3. And assuming its density is about the average of its nickel and diamond layers(9 and 3.5 g/cm^3, respectively), one cubic centimeter masses about 6 grams.
It's also a nuclear battery, not chemical - the rules are completely different. Its power delivery
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At that power level, it's not anywhere near the existing power levels of a 'normal' RTG.
A 1kg battery that supplies 1.6mW is useless for space. And most other things.
Also, if you don't load a beta-driven battery, it will overvoltage and blow any diodes involved.
Add enough electrons to a plate, and they'll go somewhere. :)
The biggest surprise I ever found with electrons was that you CAN flow electrons Out of a dynode, against expectations and all the existing literature.
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Absolutely. If this is a new high water mark, then beta driven batteries would seem to currently only be useful in areas where the radiation or waste heat from an RTG would be unacceptable. Though using something with a 1-year half life instead should deliver 100x the power, which might be useful in some applications. I imagine it'd be harder to get grad students willing to work with the stuff though, so perhaps it's not surprising that exploratory work is being done with relatively useless materials.
Wit
The 3300mWh/g figure is over the 100 years lifetim (Score:2, Informative)
If you read the https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0925963517307495 you find that the actual power density is 10uW/cm^3, which is really very very poor compared to batteries. Yes, it will run for many years without charging, but it won't run a very big load.
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Yeah I noticed that they were measuring the output in microAmps. I don't have anything that can run on something like 60 uA. Load capacity is always the problem with betavoltaics. I wonder how hard it would be to put a million of these in parallel though. That could make for a very interesting battery depending on the size and weight involved.
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I certainly do have applications that can run on 60uA amortized. Charge a capacitor while drawing 100nA, to use during the short periods where you need to consume a few mA.
A million in parallel is a metric ton, right?
I am confused! (Score:2)
that is 3.3 watt/hours per gram. According to my calculations, you can use a 80 kg battery can easily power a Tesla for the next 100 years. A Model S can do 320kw/hour. No supercharger needed. Another option is to use a 16Kg battery which will charge the battery packs. Only in extreme use, long trips, etc. you may need an outside charge.
Re:I am confused! (Score:4, Informative)
that is 3.3 watt/hours per gram. According to my calculations, you can use a 80 kg battery can easily power a Tesla for the next 100 years. A Model S can do 320kw/hour. No supercharger needed. Another option is to use a 16Kg battery which will charge the battery packs. Only in extreme use, long trips, etc. you may need an outside charge.
But this isn't like a Li-Ion battery that you can extract energy from at a variable rate... it's a generator that produces ~38uW (micro-watts) continuously for 100 years. So you just need ~66kg to produce a standard 0.5 amp USB charger worth of current at 5V. But on the up side... that 66kg "battery" will charge your phone for 100 years. ... and if you want to red line that tesla for 100 years straight you just need an... 8,430 metric ton battery - no problem, just buy a Model X with a tow hitch!
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Interesting calculations. I guess an RTG would be a lot more practical in comparison when betavoltaics are scaled up. If someone can even scale them up. I don't know if that is practical.
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Model S can do about 300 Wh per mile. A 80 kg battery, at 3.3 Wh/gram, can deliver 264 kWh, so about 880 miles total. But the problem is that this battery can only deliver this power gradually over 100+ years, so you would have to drive very slowly.
Re: I am confused! (Score:2)
880 miles over 100 years is about 127 feet per day. I guess you could pull out of your driveway and park beside the neighbours house, then walk the rest of the way.
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That is 3.3Wh per g, _distributed_ over some centuries...
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Watch your units. Watt-hours (energy), are not watts. One watt-hour is the total amount of energy delivered by 1 watt operating for 1 hour. Or in this case, something closer to 1uW operating for 1,000,000 hours (over 100 years).
Re: I am confused! (Score:2)
And spend billions on cleanup. Great tradeoff if you're a fucking aspie.
Look at the effort involved in making Nickel 63 (Score:4, Informative)
These look like good things for deep space missions, but where else would you find a good use for them, that solar couldn't do more effectively?
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Considering the efficiency of solar, pretty much everywhere. These two aren't even in the same ballpark in terms of power per size.
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The output of these things is in the microwatt range. Maybe you are thinking of the much larger ones they use on spacecraft.
The only time you would use these is if you need a very small amount of power in a very small space with no light or temperature gradient available. Pacemakers, monitoring underground infrastructure like pipes, that sort of thing. You aren't going to see nuclear powered garden lights.
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Low-observability surveillance satellites? Low Earth orbit synthetic aperture radar satellite? Low Earth orbit near infrared telescope satellite? Solar panels make them far more visible, and hence easier to find/track. Improvements in betavoltaics are very interesting for spy satellites and other military applications.
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They make nickel carbonyl by the train-car load, and that's a lot more toxic to live with than nickel-63 will ever be. Of course, there's demand.
A bit of math says that a 25-lb box of this stuff could power my house for a hundred years or so. With some pessimistic assumptions about density, that's smaller than a window air-conditioner. Think about a sailboat or an RV or just living off the grid somewhere...
AC
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Really? You only use half a Watt-hour per day?
25lb ~= 11,000g ~= 37,000Wh total capacity
Probably about half of that is delivered in the first century, which works out to an average of ~190Wh per year, or 0.5Wh/day
Alpha decay (Score:2)
Sorry I'm not interested in lame beta decay batteries at this time, but do call me when they legalize Plutonium RTGs.
Too weak. (Score:4, Informative)
Half life is 100 years.
So, half, that is 5 times the chemical batteries is available over 100 years. Right?
So, on average, 1/20 of the energy is available per year .
That works out to 1/7300 per day. But the decay is exponential, so we need a correction from mean to peak. Let us be generous and round up e (=2.7182818) to 3. So you are looking at 1/2500 of chemical battery energy per day. Divide by another 86400 to get per second. That is the max power out put of this device. Looks like you would be better off harvesting the power from local WiFi signals.
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True. This is a special-purpose power supply, e.g. for very long therm loggers, locators, beacons, safety interlocks and the like, running on ultra low-power MCUs. No general usage scenario.
A Schottky-Diode is nothing special (Score:2)
There are several "cluelessness markers in this article, this is just one of them. This indicated that the whole article may be complete nonsense or at least give a very skewed picture ow what was actually found here.
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I said it before and I will say it again: I want my nuclear powered car! I must have my nuclear car.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
It's only the overweening government regulation that means we don't have these now.
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Re: Nuclear power (Score:2)
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How does the inevitable high levels of environmental radiation play out in your imaginary world? Because cars, cargo boat and plane crashes all occur on a regular basis, and in a fission powered world those crashes would often mean nasty highly radioactive waste products getting spread around.
The problem is not the fear of radioactive contamination - the danger is real. The problem is that we don't have any technology safe enough to reduce that danger to something tolerable outside a well-regulated power p
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Kills the semiconductor pretty fast by creating defects.