Can This Company Build Self-Charging Batteries From Radioactive Nuclear Waste? (newatlas.com) 92
Heart44 writes:
There is a lot of C-14 radioactive waste from graphite rods that is expensive to store. This graphite can be converted to C-14 diamonds covered in C-12 diamonds. C-14 has a half-life of 5,700 years, so such batteries would last a long time and are supposedly safe. Sounds like an April fool but...
New Atlas considers the possibilities: ...what you get is a tiny miniature power generator in the shape of a battery that never needs charging — and that NDB says will be cost-competitive with, and sometimes significantly less expensive than — current lithium batteries. That equation is helped along by the fact that some of the suppliers of the original nuclear waste will pay NDB to take it off their hands. Radiation levels from a cell, NDB tells us, will be less than the radiation levels produced by the human body itself, making it totally safe for use in a variety of applications... The company claims to have completed a proof of concept, and is ready to begin building its commercial prototype once its labs reopen after COVID shutdown. A low-powered commercial version is expected to hit the market in less than two years, and the high-powered version is projected for five years' time...
NDB speaks of low- and high-power versions of the cell in development, but until we see some output figures the claims are still hazy, and until we see some proof, they're just claims, and we're still waiting to hear back from the company. We'll keep you updated.
New Atlas considers the possibilities: ...what you get is a tiny miniature power generator in the shape of a battery that never needs charging — and that NDB says will be cost-competitive with, and sometimes significantly less expensive than — current lithium batteries. That equation is helped along by the fact that some of the suppliers of the original nuclear waste will pay NDB to take it off their hands. Radiation levels from a cell, NDB tells us, will be less than the radiation levels produced by the human body itself, making it totally safe for use in a variety of applications... The company claims to have completed a proof of concept, and is ready to begin building its commercial prototype once its labs reopen after COVID shutdown. A low-powered commercial version is expected to hit the market in less than two years, and the high-powered version is projected for five years' time...
NDB speaks of low- and high-power versions of the cell in development, but until we see some output figures the claims are still hazy, and until we see some proof, they're just claims, and we're still waiting to hear back from the company. We'll keep you updated.
Use it for space probes. (Score:3, Insightful)
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bravo.
we have more than a crap ton of nuclear waste on this planet.
and now someone with some insight has figured out a way to make a battery from it.
lets get down to the basics.
what is the voltage.
and what are the watt hours
Re: Use it for space probes. (Score:4, Informative)
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it's a chip which magically "harvests" the source and converts the energy to electricity
It is not magic. C14 decays by beta (electron) emission at 156kV. The energy doesn't need to be converted to electricity, it IS electricity.
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raspberry pi users need to know this so as to build a proper hat
Re: Use it for space probes. (Score:1)
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And with a "shielding" shell off C12 it is just: heat.
Oops, that was clear from the subtitle of the article.
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Apparently it's a chip which magically "harvests" the source and converts the energy to electricity...
Beta sources are the holy grail of nuclear: no heat, no coolant, no turbine generator. It's a solid-state source that just directly emits electrons as it decays. Because a 14C source would take 5700 years to lose half its generating capacity, it would be a good fit for any device that just has to sit there reliably operating unattended for long periods of time. The most questionable part of the claim may be the energy density. All of the accounts of this tech I have seen so far cite diamond 14C batteries as
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There is a lot of good stuff we could have, were it not for idiots. Idiots and radioactive batteries what could go wrong, add YouTube and it could go wrong in public. A lot of stuff has to be heavily regulated to keep it out of the hands of idiots or to try to make it idiot-proof.
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Righhhhttt. (Score:2)
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Terrorists could buy them by the thousand and do naughty things!
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Why? Simple: If there was some method for disenfranchising citizens for any reason, they would likely be the first to jump on that bandwagon and disenfranchise millions of non-Christians, non-whites. Any possibility of disenfranchisement favours bigots.
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A very simple query will show you this is not something to be concerned about:
C14 is a beta emitter, not a gamma emitter. Beta particles don't travel far (8.6" in air) and are stopped by something as insubstantial as a layer of dead skin cells. You'd have to grind it up and inhale it i
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bUt RaDiAtIoN!
The ignorant masses will protest this out of existence, so so much for a cheap, somewhat clean, long lasting battery.
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Re: Righhhhttt. (Score:2)
Except that unfortunately if you have Beta emitters you have gamma radiation. Itâ(TM)s a little quirk that every once in a while a beta emission will cause a gamma emission. This is why a tritium keychain will set off a gamma detector.
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Consumers are buying radioactive items every day (some smoke detectors contain radioactive material). It may not be nuclear waste but for the most part radioactive material is radioactive material
P.S. Ya, ya, I know that is way over simplifying things but I didn't feel like looking up the different types of radiation emitted by all the different radioactive materials in consumer products.
Radioactive batteries? (Score:3)
EEVblog's take on it: "debunked" (Score:5, Informative)
Re:EEVblog's take on it: "debunked" (Score:4, Informative)
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Except it's not wrong. As Dave points out, you can already buy similar batteries.
The problem is the 100uW output, not the physics.
Re:EEVblog's take on it: "debunked" (Score:4, Informative)
Take a look at the NDB web site:
https://ndb.technology/ [ndb.technology]
Some headings from it:
"To reinvent electricity & create a planet without fossil fuels by 2040"
"A SMARTPHONE THAT DOESN’T REQUIRE CHARGING"
"ELECTRICITY FOR EVERYONE & EVERYWHERE"
"NO RECHARGING OR REFUELING STATIONS REQUIRED." (next to a picture of a car).
It's wrong. They're not claiming a real time clock battery that never goes dead or something like that. They're very strongly implying that you're going to use this thing to power your electric car. And everything else.
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Yep, and Batteroo promised 8x battery life from ordinary Alkalines, Fontus claimed they could condense water in a bottle using a tiny solar panel, uBeam said they could charge your phone with ultrasound, etc., etc.
https://www.batteroo.com/ [batteroo.com]
http://fontus.at/ [fontus.at]
https://sonicenergy.com/ [sonicenergy.com]
Making claims on a web site is easy, it's the laws of physics that count.
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Bury your bottle up to the neck in the centre of a ring of rocks, fill the ring with sea water or vegetation. Lay clear film over the ring, using more rocks on the perimeter to secure it. Add a small pebble in the middle of the film so it makes a slight bowl shape. Leave in sunlight. You've made a tiny greenhouse
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These things would be fantastic for tiny space probe swarms and widely dispersed sensor arrays though. Places where the energy budget is next to zilch most of the time and only mode
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I expect it can be effectively scaled up more or less endlessly, if in no other way than making sheets of it, or just hooking a bunch together. I think you'd be looking at penetration in the range of mm rather than cm though.
But I don't think a scaled up one would be a good replacement for any of the use cases they seem to be promoting. It would be big and heavy and really, why would you want your laptop battery to last a decade? Carbon 14 might be an attractive isotope for space probes (I think the Russian
Re:EEVblog's take on it: "debunked" (Score:4, Informative)
There's also this gem: "When it comes to mechanical safety, diamond is one of the strongest materials in the world. 11.5 times stronger than steel. So again, that itself makes the battery tamper-proof and safe."
Diamond is one of the *hardest* materials in the world. As with most very hard materials, the toughness is nothing special. You can smash a diamond with an ordinary hammer, or burn it with an ordinary propane or butane torch. Diamonds definitely do not make something tamper proof. Burning it would be especially bad, because then all that C14 is going to go up in smoke, which you can breathe in where it can do some real damage.
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Woe betide the roughneck on the drill floor who clanged a chain tong or a dog collar against the diamond-impreg core head, or knocked a chip out of one of the early generation of polycrystalline diamond compact drill bits. The cost of a week's hire of the drilling rig (for a basic, million-lb land rig) broken in one second's inattention.
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Re:EEVblog's take on it: "debunked" (Score:4, Informative)
Not a very good debunking; he assumes that a single device represents the only possible device the company could make.
The Wikipedia article on betavoltaics [wikipedia.org] is probably a better place to start. The Russians have developed C14-Ni63 cells with a full mW output -- more than enough to run a pacemaker which consumes about 10 microwatts.
The volumetric energy density and mass power density of the Russian device is impressive, but the device is tiny and scale matters in engineering. A scaled up unit that produced 1000x the power wouldn't necessarily be 1000x larger.
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Skepticism (Score:4, Interesting)
Here in the US our regulations on nuclear material are very tight. Even the little vials of Tritium are illegal for most purposes. (Though that doesn't stop them from being sold.) I find it difficult to believe that this would be permitted.
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It wouldn't be permitted and it is effectively vapor as a consumer product. But that's not stopping the company from soliciting capital from gullible investors.
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Those staticmaster brushes actually do still exist. You can buy them here [amstat.com]
The difference is the quantity of radioactive material. A battery capable of producing milliwatts at any nontrivial voltage is going to have a lot of radioactive stuff in it. I'd love to not worry about the batteries in e.g. a SPOT locator beacon, but I have difficulty imagining the world shifting enough that we'll let kilos of this stuff be sold to crazy people like me that will take it apart.
Not a chance. (Score:5, Informative)
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kWh is a measure of energy, W is a measurement of power. You're comparing two different things.
Not that your conclusion is wrong, but the real problem is that the amount of power than can be generated for the weight means that you car will weigh too much to ever travel any distance at all. You'd never need to recharge it, though.
No (Score:5, Insightful)
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Betteridge's Law of Headlines. [wikipedia.org]
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What a great idea (Score:3)
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Put it under your driveway and if you have snow, you'll never have to shovel again.
Cumulative radiation (Score:2)
Radiation is cumulative. So ambient radiation plus whatever radiation these things emit.
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Are you single? Because the logic of what you said means you should never sleep next to a human being - the radiation they give off, combined with the ambient radiation would be dangerous.
Also, by the same logic, do not eat bananas, and do not get near cases of clean white paper.
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There's nothing wrong with the logic; GP is absolutely right.
Radiation is cumulative.
So yes, eating lots of bananas does in fact increase your radiation exposure. So does being in a crowded room, or flying in an airplane, or being in some deep caves.
Does it mean it's harmful? Not necessarily. While there's no consensus on if there is a minimum safe exposure, it's readily evident that the effects of exposure below some critical threshold are at least not immediately dangerous.
But radiation - and the biologic
At least upgrade to C-17 if not C-20 (Score:3, Funny)
Carry the neutron source in your trunk... (Score:2)
...drive yourself to the MRI to stage your cancer diagnosis.
That's going to be one warm battery (Score:2)
Looking around beta voltaic achieves around 30% efficiency ... so 70% goes into heat. Any high power cell would be an even higher power heater.
The only way I see of getting decent efficiency is with direct charge. Direct charge needs very high voltages to slow the beta particles down and extract all the potential energy and thus very large size to get sufficient insulation (there's smaller direct charge systems, but any system which doesn't slow down the beta particles to a near full stop before impacting i
This comes after its already been debunked (Score:2)
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This is a lie. A scam to con you put of your money.
Yeah, don't invest in that crap. Instead, can I interest you to invest in my new battery powered by blockchain technology? Sure, no one has quite figured out yet how that's going to actually charge a battery, but I'm sure with research the solution is only 3 years out, max.
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Re:This comes after its already been debunked (Score:5, Informative)
Summarizing for those who don't want to watch an hour of Youtube video:
* The sustained power density is ridiculously low: 100 microwatts from the volume of an AAA battery. An AAA battery would last about two years with that load. So, you can't do much more with it than run a clock.
* You need about 1 g of C-14 for that, which would cost about $350 if you get the C-14-rich radioactive waste for free and you're very, very optimistic about the processing costs.
* That 1 g of C-14 has an activity of 1.6e+11 Bq (decays per second); it emits 0.4 mW of ionizing radiation. Although it won't kill you immediately if the container is breached, 10 micrograms of that inside your body (1.6 mSv/year) will make you exceed the maximum recommended non-natural radiation dose rate (1 mSv/y).
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On the other hand, it will run the clock for longer than the clock will last. They are actually being paid to take the c-14, so the cost for them is a negative number. Good luck cracking a diamond open and powdering it for ingestion.
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As a rule I don't watch endless Youtube videos. However a bit of (possibly incorrect) math seems to indicate that the power density from C14 decay is somewhere around 2 to 7 W/kg.
As a comparison, my iPhone SE has an 1800 mAh battery @ 3.7v, or 6.6Wh, so discharging over a day is about 0.25W. It ain't gonna power a modern cell phone, but it seems like a great replacement for anywhere you need a 6 or 10-year battery. (a 9v cell weighs about 50g, and is rated for 500mAh - let's be generous and call that 4.5Wh,
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"5-" or 10-year battery. And I hesitate to call an original iPhone SE "modern", but a newer phone would draw even more power.
Re: This comes after its already been debunked (Score:2)
I saw this a few days ago and didn't feel like putting the effort into looking into it (it seemed too stupid to waste my time with).
The
Obvioulsy not! (Score:2)
The nuclear scientist Betteridge ruled it out years ago.
Apologies for RTFA.. Update (Score:4, Informative)
Update, August 27, 2020: We have contacted NDB to clarify several of their claims in this article. At this stage we believe the power density claims may relate to the power delivered by the supercapacitor part of the cell, rather than to how much energy the carbon-14 diamond itself is capable of generating. If this is the case, we may be looking at a very slow trickle charge from the diamond into the supercapacitor, and a high power output from the supercapacitor. The properties of supercapacitors are well known: high power density allowing fast charge and discharge, long lifespan, and low energy density – meaning they can store only a small amount of energy per volume. Such a system – a trickle-charged supercapacitor – could be useful for sustained, low-power applications, and for emergency applications like Uninterruptible Power Supplies (UPS) that can slowly charge themselves for weeks or months between periods of discharge, but would not generate power anywhere near quickly enough for use in a long-range electric car or other applications requiring sustained high power outputs from a compact battery pack. NDB speaks of low- and high-power versions of the cell in development, but until we see some output figures the claims are still hazy, and until we see some proof, they're just claims, and we're still waiting to hear back from the company. We'll keep you updated.
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Re: I'd buy it. (Score:3)
The Matrix (Score:2)
So use the human body for power.
No (Score:2)
fuck off
Headline that ends with a "?" always answers NO. (Score:2)
https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citation... [nasa.gov]
Page 5 of the linked document (page 9 of the PDF) lists a beta radiation energy per gram calculation so I ran the numbers, feel free to hit up the encyclopedia of your choice for the stats on Carbon-14 and double check me.
By my, admittedly weak, math Carbon-14 emits 0.0002 Watts per Gram at a constant rate. Your average AAA cell weighs 11 Grams so an Azimovian "Sufficiently Advanced" pure Carbon-14 battery could at the maximum
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you can't use the weight of an AA battery for estimating the weight of a rod of carbon 14 diamond almost the same size, might be a bit heavier depending how big the active part could be.
3.85 cc (volume of AAA) of carbon 14 in diamond form (3.51 g / cc) = 13.5g time 0.0002 W/g is a whopping 2.7mW....w0h0000
Should be easy to make (Score:2)
BUT, the idea that this will power a car? Hotwheels with a day-long charge, MAYBE. But, not going to work for large requirements.
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And when the TV remote doesn't work... (Score:2)
and you pop the cover off those old nuclear AAs, what are you supposed to do when they are oozing glowing green waste everywhere?
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oozing glowing green waste
See, you're being sarcastic, but the average person of the world actually thinks that's what'll happen with anything 'nuclear'.
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See, you're being sarcastic, but the average person of the world actually thinks that's what'll happen with anything 'nuclear'.
Yeah was going for +3 Funny, but instead hit +3 Too-close-to-my-backyard.
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Nice idea *in theory* but here's the problem: (Score:2)
The one over-arching reason an idea like this will never fly for anything other than, say, powering space probes: all it takes is one terrorist cell, or one angry asshole with malicious intent in mind, and you have to evacuate an entire city (and maybe abandon it for years and years) because they set off a dirty bom
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Haha, no, c-14 isn't very radioactive, it's why the half-life is 5 millennia. Of course, it's also why an AAA battery sized rod of the crap only puts out 2.7mW (as I corrected calculation elsewhere).
The whole concept is a waste of time.
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100 MICROwatt (Score:1)
"And it's totally safe ..." (Score:1)