New addition to the Patriot Act?
by
lothar97
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
...tracking how many people buy batteries, especially at Costco. A terrorist could walk in, buy several thousand cases of nuclear batteries, and have a dirty bomb by sundown.
--
Re:New addition to the Patriot Act?
by
YankeeInExile
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
For all the good a few millicuries of Ni63 or tirtium would do, Mr. Terrorist would be better off buying bricks and throwing them at his target.
-- How does the Slashdot Effect happen given that no slashdotters ever RTFA?
These are already in use for some applications
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
If you've ever used a night sight you're using Tritium, of course. They are amazingly bright and they last for years. This article talks about using tritium. It has many advantages: it's very safe (the radiation doesn't penetrate skin) and very energetic. I've wondered why we don't see more tritium-powered devices. Maybe we will see them soon.
Re:These are already in use for some applications
by
AKAImBatman
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
How about macro-battaries?
by
multi-flavor-geek
·
· Score: 1, Interesting
I think that these battaries could be a great alternative for electric cars and other things that the science fiction world has promised us, if we couls make a battarie capable of producing 7,000 watts, with a capaciter storage bank so we could then draw 14kw for up to 15 seconds then I could replace the engine in my truck with a 10hp electric, boostable to 20hp for short periods of acceleration without much trouble, and since it is a truck I could handle having the battary weight in at as amuch as 800-1200 lbs and still have the truck be functional. Although ideally 20hp motor, 14kw continous, 28kw peak, and it wouldn't accelerate like one of those old VW diesel trucks coming home from the lumberyard.
I do suppose that teh cost factor would make these far more expensive then running gasoline, at least in the short term, so I suppose that I will avoid holding my breath until later.
-- Like arts? Like cheesy little Indie mags? Check out www.artwerkmag.com, and don't laugh at the bad coding please.
Its not new- radioactive Uranium in plane stablize
by
iMaple
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
This is slightly off topic but also relevant looking at the other posts which seem to be concerned abt the radioactive thing.
I dont know if many people know that Boeing used radioactive Uranium in the 747 -100 in the stablizer (or somewhere else.. I am not very sure). They wanted something with density and tungsten alloy (which they use now) was more expensive than U238 which was the wasted byproduct of power stations. They took care to sheild it and it had lots of warnings abt it being radioactive and ensuring that the sheild was undamaged.
So the point its not very unusual to use radioactive materials and nor very dangerous as long as they are properly marked.
Don't they already...
by
NeuroManson
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Use batteries like this in pacemakers?
-- Just because you can mod me down, doesn't mean you're right.
Shoes for industry!
Would it be possible to use something that undergoes Alpha decay (say, Radium or Polonium), and convert it's moving charged particles directly into electric?
In short, you take a small amount of the radioactive substance and wrap all but one face in a lead shield, only allowing alpha particles out one face. Place a wire coil around that face, voila... moving charge (alpha particle) induces voltage and current in a conductor (coil). Insulate the coil, and draw power off it's ends. Place a little endpoint for the alpha particles to hit that's grounded to the radium/lead sample, so it can recombine into helium.
Sounds good... can someone with more physics knowledge than I poke my idea full of holes? What kind of coupling efficiency/energy output/conversion efficiency/helium generation could one expect?
Re:Cool stuff but....
by
the_denman
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Its gonna take a lot of batteries to grind down before you would have any usable material for a dirty bomb,
Never doubt the steps some will go through to get radioactive stuff, I am reminded of David Han, "the radioactive boy scout" who tried to make a breader reactor with lantern mantels and smoke alarm parts (as well as many other things). While he didn't get his goal compleated, he got a heck of a lot closer then he should have.
Re:Well I'll be damned
by
wkitchen
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
The real problem is the issue of keeping the materials out of landfills.
I think the way to deal with that is to make them artificially valuable. Pay a deposit at the time of purchase, get a refund for turning one in. Make it large enough to be attractive, but small enough that the cost add isn't prohibitive. Say $10. That would be enough to discourage many from throwing them away, and if many throw them out anyway, you'd have people searching the trash with geiger counters to make a few bucks. Like bottle deposits, but bigger.
From the fine article: "As you reduce the size of such a battery, the amount of stored energy goes down exponentially. Reduce each side of a cubic battery by a factor of 10 and you reduce the volume--and therefore the energy you can store--by a factor of 1000."
No, the amount of stored energy goes down polynomially (specifically, cubically), dammit! Must even science articles abuse the word "exponentially"?
-- Quattuor res in hoc mundo sanctae sunt: libri, liberi, libertas et liberalitas.
Radioctive batteries used for Pluto mission
by
DotDotSlasher
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
My brother tells me about radioactive batteries used in space, specifically the Pluto probe due to go up in 2006 and arrive 2015.
More battery details
here
and here and here.
There's less and less solar power available as you move away from the Sun (which was abundant on the Mercury trip). Plus, you need power for 10+ years. Where do I get that battery? From nuclear material, of course. The battery is the last thing to go into the spaceship, and you do lots of testing without it. And you make sure all the materials in the spacecraft can function with a reasonably radioactive source (near the top, as I recall).
He told me all this because I didn't know that the pilot light in a gas heater heats a piece of metal which provides enough voltage to drive the thermostat (hey bro, why doesn't the water heater have an electric plug?) Radioactive materials are mixed with ceramics to keep a reasonably constant amount of heat. The voltage comes from the heat. Wow, appliance technology moved into the space program.
Want some Tritium? It's already started...
by
Chordonblue
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&ca te gory=4783&item=5521655837&rd=1#ebayphotohostin g
These are Trasers. The bright light comes from a radioactive source - in this case Tritium gas. This reacts with the inside of the glass, lined with phosphor. All this and a 10 year lifespan.
Pretty neat. Not that you are allowed to OWN one in the U.S. yet, but the military's had them for quite a while.
-- "...Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam..."
Re:Well I'll be damned
by
radtea
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
A couple of nW per mCi is going to have pretty limited usefulness. Even if they boost the conversion efficiency substantially (4% at the moment, so the max is 25 times) they're still talking about a miniscule amount of power for a non-miniscule amount of radioactivity.
IAANP, and I've handled mCi sources, and treated them with considerable respect. Even pure beta-emiters like 63Ni (60-odd keV endpoint) generate significant flux of x-rays due to shake-off electrons and bremmstralung (fairly negligable). A mCi pure-beta source is going to be about the limit before you get significant levels of difficult-to-shield radiation from these effects.
The k-shell x-rays from 63Ni (or rather, 63Cu, the decay product) are just under 9 keV, which can be shielded with a bit of lead, but enough that you're talking about a battery that is mostly shielding. You very rapidly burn the size advantage.
And then there's the disposal issue--these things will wind up in landfills, just like every other radioactive source. For example, a typical (micro-curie) calibration source is aluminum-encased and about the size of quarter. I once had a student put one in his pocket, walk out of the lab, and almost spend the source in a vending machine. There is no reasonable protection against stupidity of that nature. And there's so much of it about.
So while I think these things are potentially great for certain remote sensing applications, I don't expect to see one in my cell phone or lap-top any time soon now. If we were able to make a cell phone or laptop that could run comfortably on a mCi source, it would be able to run almost forever on a conventional battery, so the advantage of a radioactive battery is not at all clear.
The Persians may not have known why batteries worked, but it appears that they knew how to make them.
Re:Not that dangerous...
by
aXis100
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
That's mostly true - alpha emitters are normlly quite safe to handle.....however if they are breathed in or ingested, they can be quite dangerous as they can be in direct contact with healthy cells.
For example, burning them would be bad.
Extra alpha particles...
by
nns6561
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Microprocessor manufacturers are already going to great lengths to eliminate sources of high energy particles. This is just what they need, radioactive sources on the chip. This will make IBM's radioactive acid look like a joke. They already use old lead to minimize alpha particles. Lets add some polonium. This is the same stuff IBM uses to induce alpha particles to check for vulnerabilities. Processors do not need any more high energy particles floating around.
Lots of low level radiation ? good idea
by
fsterman
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
" Here's another idea: give each component--sensor, actuator, microprocessor--its own nuclear microbattery."
Okay, I was in Honors chemistry, my favorite part was nuclear chem, I did a massive research project on fusion reactors. I would take a good well managed Nuclear reactor over a coal one any day BUT just like I am tired of being exposed to waaaaaay too many low levels of chemicals as is this had better get some good shielding!
Since the nuclear industry has done sooo poorly in the past the maybe these batteries will be monitored like everything else should be!
And what about disposal? I am over an aquifer! A shitload of low amounts of radiation builds up. Now there are ways to lower the half life and recycle most of waste. Hopefully they just use tritium, then it's like 12 years and there is an unlimited supply of it in the ocean. Just one cubic kilometer is enough to power INSANE amounts.
-- Is there anything better than clicking through Microsoft ads on Slashdot?
What I don't understand is why they went with the electromechanical scheme that they used, instead of epitaxially depositing a big stack of P-I-N diodes and letting the ionizing radiation work its magic directly. The article mentions a single-layer diode test, but you want a big enough stack to sap charge from the entire trail left by the alpha or beta particle that's plowing through the device.
The electromechanical scheme has the virtue of collecting almost all of the energy as (nominally) usable heat, but conversion efficiency stinks, from what I can gather. Junction efficiency won't be so hot either (for the same reason solar cell efficiency is poor - carriers are given more energy than required to overcome the band-gap), but not too bad (anything over 10-15 eV will just create secondary showers of lower-energy electrons).
Can anyone familiar with these issues tell me what I'm missing?
Re:Unknown Error In The Submission
by
Tim+C
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Well, I agree with you, but this made me wince:
99% of anti-nuclear activists don't have a clue what they're talking about.
Unless you can cite a source for a statistic, it's best not to use one - this one especially looks made up.
I don't remember protests over (N)MRI, but I do remember being taught about it at university, and the lecturer explaining that MRI used to be called NMRI, but people didn't like the user of the word "nuclear".
People can be stupid; over here in the UK, we had a massive outcry against paedophiles a couple of years back. Protests in the streets, people being hounded from their homes - including a paediarician. The ignorant mob saw the "paed" bit at the start and leapt to entirely the wrong conclusion; morons.
So, my points:
a) don't make up statistics, it only detracts from your argument b) people can be fucking stupid c) offtopic, but mob/vigilante justice is a really, really bad idea
Radioactivity in the Body
by
ianturton
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
This site discusses the fact that radioactive Potassium is the largest source of Beta-radiation in the body. As an earth-science undergrad I learnt that coffee is in fact too radioactive to landfill under current EU regulations.
We went on a field trip where we were supposed to use a gigier meter to determine where the bed rock changed from granite to sandstone. In fact all we could determine was which farmers used more potassium based fertilser than others. You could pick the field boundaries out in the plots but nothing useful about the geology.
Slashdot Mirror
...tracking how many people buy batteries, especially at Costco. A terrorist could walk in, buy several thousand cases of nuclear batteries, and have a dirty bomb by sundown.
If you've ever used a night sight you're using Tritium, of course. They are amazingly bright and they last for years. This article talks about using tritium. It has many advantages: it's very safe (the radiation doesn't penetrate skin) and very energetic. I've wondered why we don't see more tritium-powered devices. Maybe we will see them soon.
I think that these battaries could be a great alternative for electric cars and other things that the science fiction world has promised us, if we couls make a battarie capable of producing 7,000 watts, with a capaciter storage bank so we could then draw 14kw for up to 15 seconds then I could replace the engine in my truck with a 10hp electric, boostable to 20hp for short periods of acceleration without much trouble, and since it is a truck I could handle having the battary weight in at as amuch as 800-1200 lbs and still have the truck be functional. Although ideally 20hp motor, 14kw continous, 28kw peak, and it wouldn't accelerate like one of those old VW diesel trucks coming home from the lumberyard. I do suppose that teh cost factor would make these far more expensive then running gasoline, at least in the short term, so I suppose that I will avoid holding my breath until later.
Like arts? Like cheesy little Indie mags? Check out www.artwerkmag.com, and don't laugh at the bad coding please.
This is slightly off topic but also relevant looking at the other posts which seem to be concerned abt the radioactive thing.
.. I am not very sure). They wanted something with density and tungsten alloy (which they use now) was more expensive than U238 which was the wasted byproduct of power stations. They took care to sheild it and it had lots of warnings abt it being radioactive and ensuring that the sheild was undamaged.
I dont know if many people know that Boeing used radioactive Uranium in the 747 -100 in the stablizer (or somewhere else
So the point its not very unusual to use radioactive materials and nor very dangerous as long as they are properly marked.
Use batteries like this in pacemakers?
Just because you can mod me down, doesn't mean you're right. Shoes for industry!
Would it be possible to use something that undergoes Alpha decay (say, Radium or Polonium), and convert it's moving charged particles directly into electric?
In short, you take a small amount of the radioactive substance and wrap all but one face in a lead shield, only allowing alpha particles out one face. Place a wire coil around that face, voila... moving charge (alpha particle) induces voltage and current in a conductor (coil). Insulate the coil, and draw power off it's ends. Place a little endpoint for the alpha particles to hit that's grounded to the radium/lead sample, so it can recombine into helium.
Sounds good... can someone with more physics knowledge than I poke my idea full of holes? What kind of coupling efficiency/energy output/conversion efficiency/helium generation could one expect?
Never doubt the steps some will go through to get radioactive stuff, I am reminded of David Han, "the radioactive boy scout" who tried to make a breader reactor with lantern mantels and smoke alarm parts (as well as many other things). While he didn't get his goal compleated, he got a heck of a lot closer then he should have.
From the fine article: "As you reduce the size of such a battery, the amount of stored energy goes down exponentially. Reduce each side of a cubic battery by a factor of 10 and you reduce the volume--and therefore the energy you can store--by a factor of 1000."
No, the amount of stored energy goes down polynomially (specifically, cubically), dammit! Must even science articles abuse the word "exponentially"?
Quattuor res in hoc mundo sanctae sunt: libri, liberi, libertas et liberalitas.
My brother tells me about radioactive batteries used in space, specifically the Pluto probe due to go up in 2006 and arrive 2015.
More battery details here and here and here.
There's less and less solar power available as you move away from the Sun (which was abundant on the Mercury trip). Plus, you need power for 10+ years. Where do I get that battery? From nuclear material, of course. The battery is the last thing to go into the spaceship, and you do lots of testing without it. And you make sure all the materials in the spacecraft can function with a reasonably radioactive source (near the top, as I recall).
He told me all this because I didn't know that the pilot light in a gas heater heats a piece of metal which provides enough voltage to drive the thermostat (hey bro, why doesn't the water heater have an electric plug?) Radioactive materials are mixed with ceramics to keep a reasonably constant amount of heat. The voltage comes from the heat. Wow, appliance technology moved into the space program.
Check this out:
u ct &pid=6
a te gory=4783&item=5521655837&rd=1#ebayphotohostin g
Here:
http://www.firebox.com/?dir=firebox&action=prod
or Here:
http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&c
These are Trasers. The bright light comes from a radioactive source - in this case Tritium gas. This reacts with the inside of the glass, lined with phosphor. All this and a 10 year lifespan.
Pretty neat. Not that you are allowed to OWN one in the U.S. yet, but the military's had them for quite a while.
"...Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam..."
A couple of nW per mCi is going to have pretty limited usefulness. Even if they boost the conversion efficiency substantially (4% at the moment, so the max is 25 times) they're still talking about a miniscule amount of power for a non-miniscule amount of radioactivity.
IAANP, and I've handled mCi sources, and treated them with considerable respect. Even pure beta-emiters like 63Ni (60-odd keV endpoint) generate significant flux of x-rays due to shake-off electrons and bremmstralung (fairly negligable). A mCi pure-beta source is going to be about the limit before you get significant levels of difficult-to-shield radiation from these effects.
The k-shell x-rays from 63Ni (or rather, 63Cu, the decay product) are just under 9 keV, which can be shielded with a bit of lead, but enough that you're talking about a battery that is mostly shielding. You very rapidly burn the size advantage.
And then there's the disposal issue--these things will wind up in landfills, just like every other radioactive source. For example, a typical (micro-curie) calibration source is aluminum-encased and about the size of quarter. I once had a student put one in his pocket, walk out of the lab, and almost spend the source in a vending machine. There is no reasonable protection against stupidity of that nature. And there's so much of it about.
So while I think these things are potentially great for certain remote sensing applications, I don't expect to see one in my cell phone or lap-top any time soon now. If we were able to make a cell phone or laptop that could run comfortably on a mCi source, it would be able to run almost forever on a conventional battery, so the advantage of a radioactive battery is not at all clear.
--Tom
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.
Acidic batteries in ancient Baghdad: http://www.world-mysteries.com/sar_11.htm
The Persians may not have known why batteries worked, but it appears that they knew how to make them.
That's mostly true - alpha emitters are normlly quite safe to handle.....however if they are breathed in or ingested, they can be quite dangerous as they can be in direct contact with healthy cells.
For example, burning them would be bad.
Microprocessor manufacturers are already going to great lengths to eliminate sources of high energy particles. This is just what they need, radioactive sources on the chip. This will make IBM's radioactive acid look like a joke. They already use old lead to minimize alpha particles. Lets add some polonium. This is the same stuff IBM uses to induce alpha particles to check for vulnerabilities. Processors do not need any more high energy particles floating around.
" Here's another idea: give each component--sensor, actuator, microprocessor--its own nuclear microbattery."
Okay, I was in Honors chemistry, my favorite part was nuclear chem, I did a massive research project on fusion reactors. I would take a good well managed Nuclear reactor over a coal one any day BUT just like I am tired of being exposed to waaaaaay too many low levels of chemicals as is this had better get some good shielding!
Since the nuclear industry has done sooo poorly in the past the maybe these batteries will be monitored like everything else should be!
And what about disposal? I am over an aquifer! A shitload of low amounts of radiation builds up. Now there are ways to lower the half life and recycle most of waste. Hopefully they just use tritium, then it's like 12 years and there is an unlimited supply of it in the ocean. Just one cubic kilometer is enough to power INSANE amounts.
Is there anything better than clicking through Microsoft ads on Slashdot?
What I don't understand is why they went with the electromechanical scheme that they used, instead of epitaxially depositing a big stack of P-I-N diodes and letting the ionizing radiation work its magic directly. The article mentions a single-layer diode test, but you want a big enough stack to sap charge from the entire trail left by the alpha or beta particle that's plowing through the device.
The electromechanical scheme has the virtue of collecting almost all of the energy as (nominally) usable heat, but conversion efficiency stinks, from what I can gather. Junction efficiency won't be so hot either (for the same reason solar cell efficiency is poor - carriers are given more energy than required to overcome the band-gap), but not too bad (anything over 10-15 eV will just create secondary showers of lower-energy electrons).
Can anyone familiar with these issues tell me what I'm missing?
Well, I agree with you, but this made me wince:
99% of anti-nuclear activists don't have a clue what they're talking about.
Unless you can cite a source for a statistic, it's best not to use one - this one especially looks made up.
I don't remember protests over (N)MRI, but I do remember being taught about it at university, and the lecturer explaining that MRI used to be called NMRI, but people didn't like the user of the word "nuclear".
People can be stupid; over here in the UK, we had a massive outcry against paedophiles a couple of years back. Protests in the streets, people being hounded from their homes - including a paediarician. The ignorant mob saw the "paed" bit at the start and leapt to entirely the wrong conclusion; morons.
So, my points:
a) don't make up statistics, it only detracts from your argument
b) people can be fucking stupid
c) offtopic, but mob/vigilante justice is a really, really bad idea
It's official. Most of you are morons.
This site discusses the fact that radioactive Potassium is the largest source of Beta-radiation in the body. As an earth-science undergrad I learnt that coffee is in fact too radioactive to landfill under current EU regulations.
We went on a field trip where we were supposed to use a gigier meter to determine where the bed rock changed from granite to sandstone. In fact all we could determine was which farmers used more potassium based fertilser than others. You could pick the field boundaries out in the plots but nothing useful about the geology.
Ian