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Run Your Laptop On Nuclear Energy
Reader zymano points to this news.com artcle on innovations in portable power sources. Would you feel comfortable with a radioactive power source inside your laptop or cellphone?
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Missle command on a nuclear powered laptop? That would turn my mind into a buttery crazy straw!
(-1, Raw and Uncut is the only way to read)
Would you feel comfortable with a radioactive power source inside your laptop or cellphone?
Sure, as long as it's not that yellow radiation.
It hurts when I pee.
An atomic pile the size of a walnut? Nonsense! Even the greatest technicians of the Empire could not do such a thing. Your upstart Foundation must be populated by wizards!
Look out radioactive man
i feel comfortable with a nuclear detector in my fire alarm
"Why worry. Each one of us is carrying an unlicensed nuclear accelerator on our back. Switch me on"
Would you feel comfortable with a radioactive power source inside your laptop or cellphone?
Inside a cell phone or laptop near my balls! Have to get some lead boxers...
"Karma can only be portioned out by the cosmos." -Homer Simpson
If these came into wide use, the US govenment would probably impose harsh export restrictions, since there is a small amout of radiation.
In the infamous words of Fry from Futurama
(On being scanned by some radiation emiting device)
"Ouch, my sperm"
heheh
.... ... }
int main (void) {
"The Department of Transportation last month removed one hurdle to the commercial acceptance of fuel cells powered by methanol by ruling that they could be taken on airplanes. The issue was that these fuel cells contain methanol, which is a flammable liquid."
I don't see them being so quick to remove a similar hurdle for nuclear fuel.
But, hey, if they make nuclear powered cell phones, the radiation would treat the supposed cancer risk. Right?
-R
...a whole new definition of blue screen of death. "Error #10012 - Meltdown eminent. "
"What kind of chip you got in there, a Dorito?" - Weird Al Yankovic
With a nuclear powered notebook on my lap I could save a load of money on future child support payments.
Trolling is a art,
No need for neon inside your case kiddies, the nuclear power source glows in the dark. And if you want to kick it up a notch, try our brand new nuclear powered monitors... true glowing beauty that you have to see to... hey... my face hurts... my whole body... feels like it's on fire... what's going on... ahh.. the burning.....ahhh!!!!
How is it that one careless match can start a forest fire, but it takes a whole box to start a campfire?
The "Cellphones cause cancer" groups would defenatly have fits over that. But the Government might find it useful. I can just see Bush on TV, "If we don't stop the evil terrorists(tm), they could turn your cellphone into a nuclear holocost. Think of the children!"
In all seriousness if the manufacturers can guarentee that its safe I'm all for portable power that lasts 200 years.
The Anti-Blog
So long as it wasn't running Windows.
Do you really think I'm go to put something novel here?
Remember all the mutant freak babies that were born in some Nevada towns after the Army was performing nuclear tests back in the 40's?
Sure this thing sounds safe but are you going to risk giving birth to a retard or a one armed baby when they really don't have any conclusive studies yet? I'm not.
--Rosie
...when they eventually do wear out? Eventually these batteries will have to be replaced and if they use radioactive material in their core then they could pose a very hazardous problem to the environment. Yucca is going to look like a playground compared to the problem with these batteries being disposed of when laptops are thrown out and replaced without transferring batteries for whatever reason.
Well, so much for me having kids!
Oh, wait... that means I'd actually have to get NEAR a real-life female first...
All kidding aside, I see major problems convincing portable electronics users that they'll be safe with ooooohhhhh.... "Radioactive" devices in their cars.
It's sad, because no one seems at all concerned with the energy already put off by cell phones and the batteries could be an awesome step torward better power management.
I wonder what the disposal concerns and criteria are?
Anything you say will be held against you.
"The amount of radioactivity is so miniscule that you don't have to worry about it as much."
If I may ask a simple question here: As much as what ?
These things are so weak that even a sheet of paper will block them. These things will probably be encased in metal and plastic. Everyone who is concerned about radation near their bodies should be more worried about the antennas than the isotopes. If these things can be shown to be safer than Lead, or Nickel-Cadmium (both extremely toxic, even in miniscule amounts), then these may be the next wave of power generation...
"In order to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe." -- Carl Sagan, Cosmos
...that this will not fly unless Beta Radiation hires a serious PR firm to spin its image into a happy, fun loving, club hopping, racially indeterminate, good looking female that everyone would want to have in their lap.
42 - So long and thanks for all the fish.
The radiation mentioned in the article is just the emission of beta particles -- in other words, ordinary electrons. At the energy levels associated with atomic decays they would be stopped by a thick piece of paper, to say nothing of human skin.
So this actually sounds like quite a novel and safe approach. It's not like they're shoving a few pounds of plutonium into the thing and trying to get energy from the heat -- like NASA does on space probes.
Here's more info, straight from Cornell.
2 /t iny_battery.html
i le ver.ws.html
http://www.news.cornell.edu/Chronicle/02/11.7.0
http://www.news.cornell.edu/releases/Oct02/cant
It seems to me that this should be safe. They note in the article that they are only creating batteries which use Beta radiation, which is too weak to hurt you. If that is true, then yeah, I would use them, if it meant my laptop or cellphone would last for 10 or 20 years.
Can't you see that everyone is buying station wagons?
I would definitely be cautious using a battery like this, but I wouldn't be automatically opposed to trying it. Besides, if lots of radiation was leaking out of this thing, then that would be a pretty inefficient battery, wouldn't it?
I'm not a nuclear engineer, but I *have* spent many hours studying CANDU nuclear reactors.
So, the answer to the question in the post? Yes, I would(!!) feel comfortable walking around with what these guys are talking about in my pocket.
The fact is, you get more radiation from a digital watch than you do living as near a CANDU reactor as you're allowed to live (about a kilometer). These people don't screw around. In the current global climate of anti-nuclear-anything, they'd be idiots to even contemplate cutting a corner. And, hell, most of these people are good people - the sorrow they'd feel at anybody having died because of their designs would be real, and it would be deep. As far as the companies are concerned, you can't have a plant meltdown and then just rebuild it. Chances are, you have to build an entirely new facility somewhere else, since the original area is waaay too contaminated.
I fully expect that the people working on these batteries have the same mind set - they just don't dick around. (And from the papers I've read, that does seem to be the case.)
Barclay family motto:
Aut agere aut mori.
(Either action or death.)
Of the three types of decay radiation alpha particles are the safest, then beta, and finally gamma. Alpha particles are bare helium nuclei while a beta particle is basically a free electron. Alpha cannot penetrate the skin, and will only travel about 1 inch in air before it snags a couple electrons and turns into regular helium. Beta particles are much lighter and tend to have higher energies. They can penetrate skin but will be shielded by thin layers of metal or plastic. Though in a battery casing this wouldn't matter much.
one problem with advanced technology is that it is often indistinguishable from magic as every SF reader knows. The downside is how people respond to magic with awe and fear.
ugh, radiation bad, me no like radiation. it heap bad juju; it give Grog cancer.
Meanwhile, Grog likes woodstove and fireplace. Note that the pleasure of such heat sources is infrared radiation. There is a lot of difference between ionizing and non-ionizing radiation.
the article says these devices would use BETA radiation. Whazzat? fast electrons. If they won't penetrate skin, they won't cause mutations, they won't give Grog cancer.
Slashdotters SHOULD know better. If we're half as smart as we think ourselves, then we ought to be able to distinguish between beta radiation, infrared radiation, etc. and also the safe energy levels of each type of radiation
Folks, we have a leadership role here. If we know the techie background to say whether something is safe or not, we ought to apply it to this kind of stuff.
a whole new definition of blue screen of death
:)
Yes. A literal definition.
And speaking of literal definitions:
Error #10012 - Meltdown eminent."
I think you mean "Meltdown imminent," rather than, say, to substitute, meltdown "prominent," "lofty," or "well-placed;" although I will admit such a catastrophe would be pretty egregious.
I'm not a geek, I'm just a clever script.
So, how exactly would you get rid of the battery after use ?. Moreover, even if there is a proper way to dispose them, how can you make sure that people will be responsible enough not just trash them in a regular trash can ?. It sounds horribly risky !
I've got 6 monitors in my cube. What is a little radiation in my laptop? I'm probably already sterile. Woo Hoo!!!!!
-- Thou hast strayed far from the path of the Avatar.
Small nuclear power plants? We had those back in the 1970s.
(best -- show -- ever, except for when they "jumped the aliens")
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
quote: Run Your Laptop On Nuclear Energy
Does this include when I plug it into my wall outlet, the electricity from which is generated by a nuclear station?
Perhaps something along the lines of "Portable Nuclear Generator for your Laptop" would have been more appropriate. The next article could be "Portable Birth Control for Men", with the same link.
The global economy is a great thing until you feel it locally.
I think its okay to dispose of them like those others. Probably safer to drop them in the trash than regular nicads..
-
People are scared of what RF radiation could do to them. That's RF, as in Radio Frequency. Telling them that it's non-ionizing is pointless. They only understand "radiation" and they don't want to understand any more.
Now someone is proposing a nuclear battery. I wish them luck. With so many people believing that putting a cell phone next to their heads is dangerous today, wait until interest groups discover that the battery they're using is a nuclear device.
Once again, we have what is probably a technically elegant solution being offered to a seriously ignorant public. Expect the risks to be blown entirely out of proportion while "harmless" chemical batteries are added by the ton to landfills every day. Thank-you Jeremy Rifkin. Thank-you Paul Brodur. Thank-you Nancy Wertheimer. Thank-you Rachel Carson. You and your successors have taught a generation of idiots all about fear-mongering. Now we can all pay for the wages of stupidity and political grandstanding.
Meanwhile, because of our societal phobias we'll continue making a mess of our environment.
(Rifkin: Fearmonger on Genetically modified foods. Brodur: wrote the "Zapping of America", a treatise on RF phobias and science by innunendo. Nancy Werthiemer: Co-author of a seriously flawed paper on powerline exposure and lukemia. Rachael Carson: "Silent Spring"; although her cause was reasonable, her facts were not.)
Nearly fifty percent of all graduates come from the bottom half of the class!
The word Nuclear seems to have become a misnomer for anything at all involving atoms. The article you have linked to is not talking about nuclear power at all: power harvested from the nucleus is a distinct thing.
What they are doing is not making a battery out of a nuclear reactor or nuclear power source -- no fission or fusion is being used, therefore, they are not harvesting the power derived from splitting or merging nucleii, so the term nuclear would seem incorrect.
They are simply using some substance that has a certain radioactivity: it has the tendency to decay and release some energy, but other than that, is relatively harmless unless you ingest it or something (You would at least get very sick if you opened and ingested the contents of any battery, however!).
Read from the article:
You won't be glowing or sterilized if you put one of these in your lap, the danger is about as great as using an ordinary battery -- it could pop a leak and fill your lap with mercury, hydrochloric acid, or something, which would be just as bad.
Moreover, if simple radioactive decay is called nuclear because it deals with atoms, then it could perhaps be argued, that all batteries (and indeed, all power sources) are nuclear, because all electrical power sources eventually depend on generating electricity: exciting electrons, and electrons effect atoms.
It is not apparent that there is any danger with this battery that is new, that is, you can't tell by the fact that a battery uses this particular method of power generation that it would be more dangerous than any other kind of battery.
Check it out, then tell me if this is a big deal. (it's not.)
Rob
WebMaster:
BinFeeds
XXX Thumbnailed Image Newsgroups but
Look, the point of the article is that these are very small devices. The radiation source is only emitting ß particles, which is an electron (or positron)! They can't even pass through your skin. Not only that, but if these new batts are as small as the article implies, then you could waste a half-ounce and put a lead shield around the thing to prevent any leakage at all! And if the particle won't go through skin, think what a (very thin) lead sheet would do?
It's not that bad. Now if you actually had a fission plant going on, then you'd want to be concerned.
OK - How Atomic Batteries Work and Medical Physics 101 :)
Medical Physics
The damage done to human tissue is a function (~linear) of the amount of energy deposited by the radiation into the tissue.
This is a function itself of:
1) The amount of energy depositied by the radiation per unit of path length.
2) The length of the path in the body.
Also of interest in practical situations is this also applies to shielding i.e. if the shielding is such that the energy is enirely deposited in the shield materiel then the radition is fully shielded. If not then you have attenuated the radiation.
On one hand massive particles like Alpha Particles are 'safer' because they deposit energy quickly (they interact fairly strongly with matter), so can be stopped by very small masses like paper/foil/skin epidermis. On the other hand high energy Alpha Particles can be very dangerous if not shielded because they can carry a lot of energy into the body due to thier mass, and deposit it there as the tissue stops the particle.
At the other extreme Gamma Radiation is 'bad' because it doesn't lose energy very easily (becasue they don't interact as strongly with matter) so they cannot easily be shielded, but will at least not deposit the whole of the energy in the tissue but pass through it. Unfortunatley of course gamma radiation is highly energetic so it can still deposit a lot of energy.
So the risk of medical damage from a radioactive source is function of
1) The strength of the emmission
2) The type of emmission
3) The amount of shielding between the source and you
It is not just the radition type.
As already stated the biggest risk is when radioactive substances are ingested such that they stay in the body for some time, as this increase the energy depositied into the tissue - alpha emission is particularly bad here because it will deposit the whole of the energy into the surrounding tissue.
In this instance you may well find that a low energy beta source is a better choice, because with a low energy alpha source the raditation may not even make it out of the source's casing.
Atomic Batteries
For the interested 'atomic' batteries generaly work by using a radioactive source to heat a shield material around it. This heat can then be turned into electricity by putting a thermocouple matrix in the shield material, with the hot junction in the material, and the cold junction outside.
Now in this case we need a lot of energy in the shield material, but enough to get out of the sources casing, so low energy beta is good here.
It is safe, because the whole point of the design is that the radiation is shielded, thats how you recover the energy into electricty. You will get very very little external radiation from a well designed atomic battery.
This is not new technology, deep space probes have been using them for years because solar cells would be useless in the outer solar system
The characteristics of this sort of power generation is that it is physically small, long lasting but low current. This is ideal for portable devices, but not usable really for transport or power devices.
Practically you would probably need another battery like LiIon such that the LiIon cell is trickle charged all the time, but can supply surges of power.
This would be great in a cellphone where the LiIon battery would supply the high power needed for transmiting during the calls, and the atomic battery would supply enough to charge the LiIon and do standby - phone not got enough charge, just leave it for an hour. Conceptually you may never need to charge the phone, or change the battery, it could be fitted for life in the phone.
The challenge is finding the right materials and making it mass producable. On space probes its easy because you can cool the cold junction in the vacuum of space and make it efficient, plus you don't really care about the cost or making 1000's of them a week.
The headline should read: Run laptop and get colon cancer.
All protons in our universe will decay in about
10^33 years from now.
You can't handle the truth.
"...chose only isotopes that emit beta particles because their energy is small enough not to penetrate skin. Radioactive material can emit beta particles, alpha particles or gamma rays--the last two of which are carry enough energy to be hazardous..."
Really gamma rays (ie photons) are the only form of radiation we'd have to worry about. They have such low specific ionization (# of ions created (due to photointeractions in this case) per cm trraveled that they can go right through your body...ionizing stuff which shouldn't be and making you sick (or worse).
The other two, beta (electrons or positrons) and alpha particles (essentially helium-4 w/o the electrons) have such high specific ionizations (due to their charges) that they will not penetrate past your skin. In fact, alpha particles won't even penetrate your DEAD skin! IMHO, I consider alpha particles are much safer (unless you swallow the emitter ) in that you could hold those 'batteries' in your bare hand and not have live skin be touched whereas the beta particles WOULD reach live skin.
In any case, all of this is just probability so 'safe' is a relative term. Economically, many more nuclides beta decay (specifically beta minus decay) than anything else so that is probably the real reason: easier and cheaper to get enouogh of the right nuclide...but I applaud the efforts at trying to show the general public that at least one type of radiation isn't so bad.
You can bet as soon as these decay-powered batteries are available I'll be the first in line to get one =)
--Jubedgy
Si hoc legere scis nimium eruditionis hebes
"Destroy science and religion. Science would re-emerge exactly the same; but not religion." - Penn Jillette, paraphrased
It is possible to convert the radioactive decay directly into electric energy without going through heat. Alpha and Beta particles are charged and they are released at relativistic speeds. This create a magnetic field that can be harnessed.
See U.S patent 4,835,433 "Apparatus for direct conversion of radioactive decay energy to electrical energy".
This technology has been demonstrated to be an order of magnitude more efficient that RTGs.
Stop worrying about the risks of nuclear power and start worrying about the risks of not using nuclear power.
Unfortunately, such a battery would be too big for a laptop (unless you can significantly reduce the power requirements). Based on Cornell's press release, they plan to use Nickel-63 with a half-life of about a 100 years. So how much Nickel-63 will they need?
Looking at a handy dandy table of the isotopes gives a half-life of 92 years and a decay energy of 67 keV per disintegration for Nickel-63. Also, it has an atomic mass of 63 g/mol. 1 Joule equals 6.24E+15 keV, so to produce 1 Joule of energy you would need:
6.24E+15 kEV/67 keV/disintegration = 9.32E+13 disintegrations
One Watt is a J/s, so to produce a Watt of power you would need 9.32E+13 disintegrations per second. So, how much Nickel-63 is needed to get this many disintegrations per second?
9.32E+13 / (1-exp(1/2903299200*ln(2)) = 3.90E+23 atoms
(Note 2903299200s = 92 years). Dividing by Avogadros Number and multyplying by the atomic mass gives a mass requirement of 40.8g for each Watt. A typical laptop computer consumes ~50 Watts giving a required mass of ~2 kg.
While a bit high, this probably isn't too bad, especially since future technologies can probably lower the power requirement to 10-20 Watts. However, the above calculations assume 100% efficiency. I have no idea what the actual efficiencies are, but they are likely to be less than 50% since the proposed battery uses a mechanical process to produce the electricity. This alone would double the mass. In addition this is only the mass of the nickel. The other components and any shielding are likely to double or triple the mass, so the overall battery would likely weigh 8-12 kg (18-26 lbs). Much too heavy for a laptop.
This is not to say there aren't many very low-power applications for which such a battery would be ideal, but a laptop isn't one of them unless the power requirement can be dropped below about 10W.