Alterra research into Precursor Ion Crystal tech produces results
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US Join Date: 2016-10-06 Member: 222906Members
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https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2017/02/these-scientists-are-turning-radioactive-waste-into-diamond-batteries
5,730 years to drain it to 50% power, and the radioactive stuff is enclosed in a second layer of diamond, which has the nice side effect of BOOSTING power output. Much wow! Very amaze! Head asplode!
5,730 years to drain it to 50% power, and the radioactive stuff is enclosed in a second layer of diamond, which has the nice side effect of BOOSTING power output. Much wow! Very amaze! Head asplode!
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If no captain comes to my rescue I'll attempt to find a more through answer later (if I have the time).
Who Isn't changing their profile picture for Halloween?
Someone call me? Settle in, folks; Science Man has been summoned.
Actually, unless they've also discovered the single least efficient manufacturing process in history, they're going to be in positive return.
We're using a form of nuclear waste here, which means we've already harvested - ballpark figures - about 24 million thermal kWh per kilo of fuel. Average conversion efficiency is about 50%, so you're still looking at about 12,000,000 kWh/kg, or 12 GWh/kg. In practical terms, this is roughly the same amount of power Norway consumes in a year. Nuclear fuel doesn't liberate all this energy at once, of course, so we're looking at a steady energy harvest rather than a big wad, but nevertheless, that's a metric crapload of energy. (Technical term.)
Net result, unless they're blacking out Norway for a year to bake their graphite, they're still well in positive territory. Plus, don't forget, these aren't kilogram batteries; they're much smaller, so your efficiency actually goes up.
This is where we start going into deep science, so TL;DR crew, eject now. Everyone else, let's have some fun.
First point of order. Despite how the article makes it seem, we're not using nuclear fuel waste. This isn't burnt uranium or MOX, this is graphite. Graphite, lest there be confusion on the matter, is not nuclear fuel. It is, however, integral to the use of nuclear fuel, so it's a pretty inescapable waste product. Without graphite, fission barely works, so you have to count it into the energy production for any discussion of efficiency and use.
(The very, very short version is that when a uranium atom fissions, it spits out three neutrons that are moving really fast. The graphite slows down neutrons so that they can stick to other uranium atoms, prompting them to fission, and then you have a chain reaction. The constant neutron bombardment, however, converts the ordinary carbon of the graphite into carbon-14, the same stuff we use to date fossils and rocks. In nature, it's very low-order and very low-concentration, so you can relax. The graphite pulled from a reactor core, though, is hot as hell (in all senses) and not something you want to be near.)
The diamond cell process involves heating graphite laden with radioactive C14 to the sublimation temperature of carbon, which is about 6500*F (3600*C for our metric buddies), turning it into a gas which can be captured and used to make diamond batteries. This is about three times the temperature of the hottest steel blast furnaces, and you have to do it in containment. Happily, this is within the temperature range of an arc furnace, and those can be contained, so win there. (We use low-power versions in steel production all the time, and they're amazing to watch...it's lightning in a can.) A low-temp unit running at about 1600*F consumes, ballpark again, 132 MW per hour of runtime. But it's worth pointing out that steel arc furnaces are big, inefficient, and not well optimized, so for the smaller units needed to pull off the radioactive diamond battery process, call it...eh...50% more power. So call it about 200 MW per hour of runtime, which means 60 hours of runtime will equal the energy originally harvested from the kilo of nuclear fuel. Now, we don't know what kind of heating profile it'll take to harvest that graphite, but odds are good that each kilo is going to take a lot less than an hour. So we're still in the positive.
As batteries go, these are interesting little guys. We're talking 2V cells, so they deliver 33% more voltage than a AA. You're not starting your car with these suckers, but they're physically tiny, 10mm x 10mm x 0.2mm, so you can wire up a crapload in series and up the voltage, so that's a plus. They're unbreakable for all intents and purposes, which is a safety bonus. Diamond is a natural superconductor, so their efficiency is sky-high. They're very low energy, delivering just over 3000 joules/year (enough to vaporize one gram of water), so about, eh, 15joules/day. (A AA alkaline, run flat in 24 hours, will deliver about 14,000 joules.) But we can wire them together in parallel to up the amps. So we can wire them in stacks, and then array the stacks to get higher power output. Oh, one more detail...
They're purely theoretical.
Yeah, we haven't prototyped these yet. We can't; we simply don't have the fabrication technology. We have most of the pieces, but some of them - like double-coating diamond layers - we just don't have a handle on yet. Now, the team did prototype a similar design, but with a lot of cheats; it doesn't use diamond, its energy source is radioactive nickel, and they had to muck about with some other details. What that prototype does do, however, is provide proof of concept, and that's always the first step. The lead researcher, Tom Scott, has hinted that they've made headway in C-14-based cells, but that's still tightly under wraps.
What's the advantage? Well, for starts, a long-lived battery changes the entire landscape of technology. Satellite lifespans, space probes, pacemakers - things where you can't or don't want to be swapping out batteries could be made so that you never need to. Would they replace all batteries? No; some applications require high output in a short span of time, and chemistry is still going to be your buddy there. So no diamond car batteries. (Cell phones? Maybe; wired up correctly, a sufficiently small cell size could work as an "eternal" cell battery, but there are going to be engineering challenges to overcome there.) But for ultra-long-term, steady output? Diamond cells could well dominate the field.
So, in the end, what are we left with?
If you read what @scifiwriterguy said, what you really want is 2,000. As that is very roughly on the order of how many you would need to power your cell phone.
Now I'm picturing this: as you.
Generally speaking, you don't hear about them because they're bulky, and the required shielding makes them bulkier still. I've heard of them being used as backup power for scientific and military installations, especially underground ones since you want to bury the thing for cheap shielding anyway. I'd heard they run on decay of radioactive materials that emit high-energy photons and react with a photo-sensitive layer inside the casing. Basically a self-contained solar power station, though I imagine it's not really "light" it's using as we understand it, despite being technically emitted photons. I've heard of some that use the heat generated as well, to generate low voltages.
Being this small thanks to this new method makes these exciting, but don't get your hopes up for a permanently-powered cell phone anytime soon. By the time you shield this tiny thing well enough to safely come into contact with human flesh, it'll weigh as much as an office chair.
Actually, this is a radically different design.
What you're talking about is an RTG - Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generator. They come in a variety of sizes, from moderately small (such as the ones used in the Voyager program) to pretty dang bulky (which power Soviet lighthouses), but all operate under the same basic principle: using the decay heat of a radioisotope to produce electricity via thermocouples. It's an incredibly simple design that relies on a radioactive isotope's natural production of heat through radioactive decay. The fuel has to undergo steady, fairly energetic decay. Uranium and plutonium were common fuels.
These diamond cell batteries are about as different as you can get while still being in the radioactive sphere. Rather than converting thermal energy into electrical energy, a diamond layer is used to capture beta particles (which are really just high-speed electrons). Since diamond is a natural superconductor, you can attach electrodes directly to your "pickup diamond" and harvest those sweet, sweet electrons. Catch enough of them and you have a power source. By encapsulating a fairly energetic beta producer inside a diamond, they're capturing (dang near) 100% of emitted beta particles and routing them into a circuit, minimizing the beta exposure hazard in a very efficient manner.
The short list of principal differences:
So, end of the day, while we could technically say they're both "radioactive power sources," that's an extreme simplification. The operating principles are very, very different.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_battery
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betavoltaic_device
It looks like the new tech here is using carbon-14 nuclear waste to build the cell. Plus, diamond battery makes for a great headline.
Quite so, Gamer.
The key difference here - and the major advance - is mating C14 to diamond. The cells in the '70s used sources with (comparatively) very short half-lives. The best they could do was about 12 years. This design uses a slightly weaker source but one with a half-life north of 5,700 years. The endurance improvement is very noteworthy. Add to that the high efficiency inherent in using diamond as both a containment and conversion material and you have something that's based on longstanding engineering but is still a colossal improvement.