Slashdot Mirror
Nuclear Battery That Runs 10 Years
Jenny writes "A battery with a lifespan measured in decades is in development at the University of Rochester, as scientists demonstrate a new fabrication method that in its roughest form is already 10 times more efficient than current nuclear batteries -- and has the potential to be nearly 200 times more efficient. Similar to the way solar panels work by catching photons from the sun and turning them into current, the science of betavoltaics uses silicon to capture electrons emitted from a radioactive gas, such as tritium, to form a current. As the electrons strike a special pair of layers called a 'p-n junction,' a current results. I can imagine lots of applications for this new battery including my own laptop."
So now instead of just overheating... my laptop can have a total meltdown?
"Everything you know is wrong. (And stupid.)"
Moderation Totals: Wrong=2, Stupid=3, Total=5.
If you ever have an iPod with one of these things, don't send it through the washing machine, and then start stabbing it with a screwdriver...
Next time your laptop battery runs out, you get to replace the entire laptop.
-mkb
Before going off and thinking that a radioactive battery would be bad because
of toxic exposure through its mere presense, please read this Wikipedia article about Tritium, which explains
that " The low-energy beta radiation from tritium cannot penetrate human skin, so tritium is only dangerous if inhaled or ingested."
So it might make a good candidate for a household battery.
Ok, so if the iPod explodes as-is with the current battery, what happens with a nuclear cell...
XenoPhage
Technological Musings
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Naw ... just kidding but think of the added benefits ...
http://www.primidi.com/2005/05/11.html
I can imagine lots of applications for this new battery including my own laptop.
Sure, who doesn't want to keep volatile nuclear material near their crotch for several hours at a time?
Business \Busi"ness\, n.;
A scam in which all people involved perceive as beneficial...
How does tritium affect people's health?
As with all ionizing radiation, exposure to tritium increases the risk of developing cancer. However, tritium is one of the least dangerous radionuclides because it emits very weak radiation and leaves the body relatively quickly. Since tritium is almost always found as water, it goes directly into soft tissues and organs. The associated dose to these tissues are generally uniform and dependent on the tissues' water content.
How does tritium change in the environment?
Tritium readily forms water when exposed to oxygen. As it undergoes radioactive decay, tritium emits a very weak beta particle and transforms to stable, nonradioactive helium. Tritium has a half-life of 12.3 years.
How do people come in contact with tritium?
People are exposed to small amounts of tritium every day, since it is widely dispersed in the environment and in the food chain. People who live near or work in federal weapons facilities or nuclear fuel cycle facilities may have increased exposure. People working in research laboratories may also come in contact with tritium.
How does tritium get into the body?
Tritium primarily enters the body when people swallow tritiated water. People may also inhale tritium as a gas in the air, and absorb it through their skin.
What does tritium do once it gets into the body?
Tritium is almost always found as water, or "tritiated" water. Once tritium enters the body, it disperses quickly and is uniformly distributed throughout the body. Tritium is excreted through the urine within a month or so after ingestion. Organically bound tritium (tritium that is incorporated in organic compounds) can remain in the body for a longer period.
Obliteracy: Words with explosions
happened to that kid if he tried to fix his ipod with one of these in it.
Think about terrorism, this technology is unamerican.
Betavoltaics? I'll wait until this radioactive battery is more... stable.
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
....a combination laptop/birth control device. Where is a patent attorney when I need one?
it's only a wee bit dangerous to all living organisms including cockroaches.
I just wonder, no matter how efficient, safe, and cheap this thing can be, if it will ever sell. Nuclear tech seems to be kind of a boogeyman still. How long until Fox or the SciFi channel makes a Made for TV movie about someone's pace maker having a meltdown and taking out 2/3 of north america.
Famous Last Words: "hmm...wikipedia says it's edible"
Yeah. Just don't try to take it on a plane.
Have we learned nothing. Calling it a nuclear (or nucular) battery will only ensure it's complete and total failure.
Nice - I can keep warm and cozy on my chair with my new laptop that runs for years on a single charge. Is it worth the enlarged prostate and impotence? Damn straight!
Yes, in a laptop
special pair of layers called a 'p-n junction'
The p-n junction is sometimes called by its more technical name: the "diode".
implanted defibrillators
defibrillators are usually *not* implanted, so it's worth specifying.
I can imagine lots of applications for this new battery including my own laptop
That a calculated risk: will you end up sterile and impotent or the proud wielder of a 14 inch hammer...
Trolling is a art,
Like neat glow in the dark effects, hairloss, impotence ... ;o)
Its pronounced "nu-cu-lar"
Sounds good. Just don't let that kid in Australia anywhere near one...
I'll turn into a supernova and burn up everything. Well I'll turn into a black little hole and you'll turn into string.
nuclear decay is a completely spontaneous process. the only way to get more beta particles is to have more radioactive material. long lasting does not mean lots of power.
this reminds me of an essay I read by a second year physics student that nanotechnology would allow us to run 10GHz computers for 10 years off a watch battery. it's BS but you don't need to look at the technology to see that, it's just basic thermodynamics:
law 1. you can't win
law 2. you can't break even.
law 3. you can't get out of the game.
"So ladies and gentlemen - here we have it; a high-tech battery that lasts many times longer than those made with current technology, a clean and efficient power source for the 21st century - ideal for all sorts of gadgets and items essential for the executive on the move! Just one small thing - how do we convince power laptop users to accept having a radioactive source approximately 2" away from their testicles? Anyone?"
AT&ROFLMAO
I can imagine lots of applications for this new battery including my own laptop
As if the existing laptops are not bad enough for putting on your lap! After Chernobyl there was a joke in Russia - "if you want to become a father, encase your ____ in lead".
... Getting that laptop through Airport Security!
nah, all you need is a lead cup
Don't link to Roland please....
Perfect.
I want one in my pacemaker!
Hivemind harvest in progress..
read post above: tritium radiation is too weak to penetrate human skin. /. crowd.
Tritium does not emit in the gamma range. It emits beta particles (electrons), and neutrinos. Both are harmless to humans, since the electrons are caught to produce current, and neutrinos can go through the entire planet without colliding with a particle.
It's particle physics, but it's not out of the public's understanding. Especially not the
---- I am certain of only one thing : I know nothing else.
I can imagine lots of applications for this new battery including my own laptop.
I'm not sure I'd want a nuclear battery on my lap. Maybe that's just me.GETPKG - Package Management for Slackware
And you thought men had worries about this before?
Its about time we start turning this direction for portable power needs. If certain "agencies" and media outlets would quit spreading misinformation and lies about these viable power sources then maybe we could make some real progress in the lack in the portable power dept. The densities that we are currently capable of, pale in comparison with today's needs. This would be just the ticket if the PR were handled correctly.
Just my thoughts..... Nothing to see here.
.
I couldn't fail to disagree with you any less.
C'mon, a slashdot reader named Jenny?
I'll turn into a supernova and burn up everything. Well I'll turn into a black little hole and you'll turn into string.
"As the electrons strike a special pair of layers called a 'p-n junction,..."
Those special layers are in every diode (including LEDs) in the universe.
It can give energy for 10 years, but if it gets ^^^^ed up, it gives harmful radiation for 100?
Sounds great.
How long until Yukos Mountain becomes choice real estate as we learn to turn waste products in to new sources of energy. Like when natural gas was considered a "waste" product of oil.
"A good friend will bail you out of jail. A true friend will be sitting next to you saying, 'damn....that was fun!'"
...and you'll still need to change the battery on a coast-to-coast flight to Uranus.
Okay, I've made some adjustments to a previous story to cope with this new technology. Just a few words.
Apple: iPod Dangerous When Wet
Posted by CowboyNeal on Friday May 13, @05:43AM
from the potential-hazards dept.
somefutureslashdotter writes "What do you do when your mom washes your iPod? Fix it, of course. A teenager in Australia found out the hard way that messing with the insides of his iPod is dangerous and needed to be pieced together from basic components after it exploded, leveling several city blocks."
Ok, these things last for 10 years? But how long will it take for me to charge these little buggers?
This is a really exciting breakthrough, but the idea is far from new. The parallel-place electrometer was used in the early days to detect ionizing radiation by knocking off stored charge with the incoming flux of charged particles. This is in a way harnessing the current created by radioactive decay. Modern radiation dosimeters use a similar principle. It was always discussed that if you could simply harness the current of the emitted betas, you would have a useable battery. Until now this wasn't feasible due to the efficiency of capturing those betas and using them as a current source. I can't wait till this is made available to the public.
Earlier story on slashdot about Cornell work on atomic MEMS
Nevermind birth control... I would finally have the means to create superbabies!
Wasn't Tritium the cause of that warehouse collapse in New York last year? I seem to recall that some vehicles were pulled to the source and there was a small weather disturbance as well.
if you steal from one source, that is plagiarism, if you steal from many, well, that's just research.
"I can imagine lots of applications for this new battery including my own laptop."
I think I'll keep all of that radioactive stuff as far away from the family jewels as I can...thank you very much.
Its true, these things won't ever be safe to hand out to the public.
But that probably wont be the case anyway.
Hivemind harvest in progress..
If I'm not mistaken, tritium is, pound for pound, the most expensive material on the planet. I wasn't able to find the figures, but I would imagine that the amount of tritium needed to power a battery would cost a pretty penny.
How about a more practical battery, working now? Sanyo and IBM have announced their ThinkPad fuelcell (demo video). They claim 8h of video editing (or other powerhungry apps).
--
make install -not war
The military uses tritium in Lensatic compasses and it poses no harm. Though the running joke is that no guy should put one next to his crotch.
I mod down so you can mod up. Your welcome.
Even as a former nuclear physicist, I do prefer to keep radioactive gases as far away from my lap, as possible.
<^>_<(ô ô)>_<^>
But isn't tritium the gas that turns a several kiloton nuclear weapon into a several megaton nuclear weapon? (i.e. turning a "conventional" nuclear weapon into an H-bomb)
What isn't unAmerican these days? Damn terrorists ruining all of our fun. :(
click me
Betavoltaics, the method that the new battery uses, has been around for half a century, but its usefulness was limited due to its low energy yields. The new battery technology makes its successful gains by dramatically increasing the surface area where the current is produced.
The Advanced Materials paper details how these wells were dug in a random fashion, yielding a 10-fold increase in current over the conventional design. The team is already working on a technique to create and line the wells in a much more uniform, lattice formation that should increase the energy produced by as much as 160-fold over current technology.
It was all in the article, they aren't increasing the number of particles but the number that actually get intercepted and used to generate energy. Did you read that essay the same way?
The rock, the vulture, and the chain
the problem is these will never go into production as companies would stop making money from selling electricity(to charge up batteries) or selling new batteries(in the case of disposables) unless of course they are so expensive to the consumer that companies can make enough money from them not to care about long term income.
i once remember a teacher telling me that a guy invented and a near 100% efficient bearing. the rights wee bought by a large company because without people buying replacement bearings they would lose a large ammount of their income. whether or not that is true, its still relevant.
damn the system!
There's not much detail in TFA on how it works. FYI a pn junction is nothing new, it's aka a diode, and is the basis of other more complicated semiconductor structures (FETs, BJTs). Does anyone know how this works? I'd imagine it's similar to the way a BJT works. In a BJT, two pn junctions join to make pnp or npn bipolar transistors, the n or p in the middle is the base and it is a very thin layer. Injecting a small amount of charge in the base causes electrons to diffuse across one of the pn junctions (of of them is doped differently than the other). The base is thin enough that before the electrons can recombine they are swept across the other junction. In this manner you get very high current gains -- a small base current results in a much larger current in your bjt. Anyone know anymore about the battery tech in the article?
Intel transfer the difficult from Hadware to software, for get more power, programmer need more technology. -- chinaitn
http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=implanted
You are incorrect read the definition or implanted for medicine. Don't flame something before you look up the definition.
how else would the armies of killer robots achieve world domination without this?
[seriously, you UR guys rock! cool lab techs]
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
My father has always told me those three laws regarded relationships with women.
As the the commercial site notes, the power levels are too low to power a laptop directly. BetaBatteries would be paired with normal chemical batteries. The BetaBattery is an always-on, trickle charger, and the chemical battery handles the heavy load.
Not a perfect solution, but it means you'd never have to recharge your laptop ever again.
"We receive as friendly that which agrees with, we resist with dislike that which opposes us" - Faraday
somefutureslashdotcommentator writes "I called this Ipod Nuclear Armageddon weeks ago. Clearly my suberbly large brain in this pasty white earthly vessel is far superior to all you other /.'ers. Bow down and worship me in this post-apocalyptic world where our brains have radioactively evolved psychic abilities to levitate our keyboards, we worship a once used nuclear Ipod and the statue of Roland Piquepaille carrying a large torch is covered up on a beach. YOu bastards you killed them all."
EOM
If it generates electricity by catching electrons resulting from nuclear fission, then how do you turn it off? Is it always generating electricity? Do you have to have a constant connection to ground so that it can sink any current that's not being used?
Don't these people know anything about marketing. I would NEVER use the word nuclear and tie it into a product. Can't they hire some marketing person to think of a new term? Joe public has know idea what nuclear really is, other than it can blow stuff up or give you cancer.
Actually, you'll at least want to go use lead boxers while you use your new nuke-laptop. Otherwise, geeks will NEVER reproduce.
Hmm... Poor social skills + Slashdot oriented sense of humor + Laptop heat + a nuclear battery sitting on your lap...
No wonder there's a shortage of computer science majors, we can't reprodce, we're becoming extinct!
There is no way that I am going to allow my children to be exposed to nuclear batteries! Don't you people know that radiation is bad for you!?!?!
If anyone near my property was walking around willy-nilly with nuclear batteries, I'd call the police.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
w00t!
There is no mention of the power delivered by the battery - only its lifetime. It doesn't take much to run a pacemaker, but a laptop might require a battery the size of a loaf of bread, for all we know. Also, while tritium isn't all that dangerous, it IS radioactive, and carries all of the regulatory baggage that goes with that designation, so great care would have to be taken to prevent leakage during its lifetime, which wouldn't be easy.
"Anyone that has ever gotten an idea based on any of my work and done something better with it-good for you."--J.Carmack
Disclaimer: I am a nuclear engineering graduate student.
This seems like a rather nifty extention of the technology. However, note that the fuel source, tritium, is rather hard and expensive to come by. (The total world supply of the stuff is < 40 kg.) So I see this as a great boon for, say, space probes or other fancy applications where getting your hands on some tritium gas aren't the biggest of concerns on the budget. It'd be interesting to see how they compare to other nuclear batteries that rely on heat from alpha-decay of heavy isotopes like plutonium to generate electrical currents.
As far as all the jokes about a nuclear laptop battery using this technology causing sterility, note that tritium decays via beta emission (i.e. an electron), with a range in solid materials of a few mm, so those energetic electrons will stay in the battery. Your primary concern would be if you somehow cracked the thing open and inhaled the tritium gas -- then those few mm of exposure in your lungs etc. aren't the best things to have around energetic particles. (And, as far as having to ingest nuclear sources, tritium is probably one of the better ones, since not only does it have a relatively short half-life of ~12 years, but it gets flushed out of the body rather rapidly as it diffuses into the bloodstream/water in tissues, leading to a much shorter effective biological half-life of 11 days.)
I can imagine lots of applications for this new battery including my own laptop.
For a limited time only! Now you too can have zero sperm and have a radioactive schlong. Just set this laptop on your lap for a few moments, and you'll be long, green, & sterile in no time!
Tech, life, family, faith: Give me a visit
How much energy will manufacturing these "efficient" batteries consume? Including the manufacture, handling, and disposal of industrial quantities of tritium? Compared to other battery tech, including NiCd, polymer, and fuelcell, also considering handling other materials like mercury? And then the energy savings of a single battery install for 20-100 years, rather than replacement maintenance consumption?
Really, this tech might be a much better alternative to existing batteries. But only when the entire product lifecycle is considered, including safe disposal of the waste (if such is even possible with nuclear materials). A 100-year lifetime (or the more realistic 20 years) is a compelling maintenance energy savings. Especially considering the energy consumed in a worker manually replacing the relatively tiny battery in highly efficient embedded apps. If an app really can have a 20-100 year lifetime (realistically considering obsolescence replacement), its overall efficiency might make it worthwhile.
--
make install -not war
While alpha and low energy beta can not penetrate a sheet of paper indeed, there ionization losses in what they DO penetrate are quite high. It can definitely damage cells in your lungs.
<^>_<(ô ô)>_<^>
Kids tend to SWALLOW batteries Batteries are dangerious Still how toxic does this compare to batteries today they swallow?
Maybe they can use them to power Australia iPods? (iPod Article)
I was reading about nuclear batteries in Heinlein and Asimov stories years ago. The stories were written before I was born (in 1965).
It's nice to see that reality is chatching up to fiction. Can I have my lightsaber and astromech droid now???
Just my $0.02 worth.
The only problem is: tritium is a gas, and if the gas leaked and breathed by humans, those beta particles could wreak havoc in the lungs.
Please direct all bug reports to
you have posted nothing about these issues. important issues.
Will this technology let you power your home on a dozen D-Cells (and read people's thoughts)? [/obscure?]
I can imagine lots of applications for this new battery including my own laptop.
A nuclear batter on your lap. What possibly could go wrong?
Adventure City Tours
This will be awesome in iPods.
Until your mother launders it.
And you take a screwdriver to it.
And it flips you into orbit.
-- often wrong; never in doubt
They could be used as a power source in smoke detectors. No worries about changing the battery every year. They already contain a radioactive source (Americium), although that's an alpha and gamma emitter (I think). They're supposed to be replaced (recycled) every 10 years.
If God had meant for man to see the sunrise, He would have scheduled it later in the day.
People would never be comfortable with "nuking" their food, anyway.
Your ________ encases YOU in lead!
Vibrators!!
"i have this terrible pain in all the p-n junctions down my left side..."
right, defribulators are not usually surgically inserted into the body.
The question is not "can the rays penetrate our skin?" it should be stated as "How big is the risk that dangerous amounts of this material enters our food-chain or is inhaled?". Considering how hard it is to keep heavy metals out of our dumps (and stored safely instead) this will probably be the one of the largest obstacles.
My first thought of application was in automobiles, not in portable computers.
I have no idea how much juice these puppies can continusly pump out, or how high that limit might increase. But, imagine a hybrid that also has a couple 10-year batteries in it, supplementing your electric engine with power...
Support a few technologists in Washington.
Any idea what kind of power this kind of battery can put out?
Tsunami -- You can't bring a good wave down!
About 25 years ago, I bought a very inexpensive digital watch that was 'glow-in-the-dark'. On the back was a radioactivity symbol that indicated the watch contained 200 mCi of 3H. As a molecular biologist who became very very careful when working with 5 mCi of 32P (a much stronger emitter) or 3H-thymidine, the idea of wearing 200 mCi of 3H seemed quite exciting.
Indeed, I believe there was a superfund site due to 3H contamination from watch manufacturing.
Company I'm working at right now just gave away a bunch of old Thinkpads. Reason being - it's cheaper to give them away than send the batteries off for a proper recycling.
So I wonder what the cost would be to recycle a spent tritium battery?
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
Relax - in order for sterility to acutally be an issue for you, you would have to first date a woman, marry a woman, and have sex with her with the intention of procreating. Now what's the odds of ANY of things happening?
1) Use specific tritium charger only. Do not use a NiMH or NiCd charger - Failure to do so may a cause fire, which may result in personal injury and property damage, across a wide area. 2) Never charge batteries unattended. When charging H-3 batteries you should always remain in constant observation to monitor the charging process and react to potential problems that may occur, by running away, fast. 3) Some H-3 chargers on the market may have technical deficiencies that may cause it to charge the H-3 batteries incorrectly or at an improper rate. It is your responsibility solely to assure the charger you purchased works properly. Always monitor charging process to assure batteries are being charged properly. Failure to do so may result in meltdown. 4) If at any time you witness a battery starting to balloon or swell up, discontinue charging process immediately, disconnect the battery and observe it in a safe place, several miles away, for approximately 500 years. This may cause the battery to leak, and the reaction with air may cause the isotopes to chain-react, resulting in mushroom cloud. 5) Since delayed chain reaction can occur, it is best to observe the battery as a safety precaution. Battery observation should occur in a safe area outside of any building or vehicle and away from any fissile material. 6) Wire lead shorts can cause fire! If you accidentally short the wires, the battery must be placed in a safe area for observation for approximately 800 years. Additionally, if a short occurs and contact is made with metal (such as rings on your hand), severe injuries may occur due to the conductibility of electric current. 7) A battery can still fission even after 1000 years. 8) In the event of a crash, you must remove battery for observation and place in a safe open area away from any combustible material, and major cities, for approximately 5000 years. 9) If for any reason you need to cut the terminal wires, it will be necessary to cut each wire separately, ensuring the wires to not touch each other or a short may occur, potentially causing a chain-reaction. 10) To solder a connector: Remove insulating 8-inch lead shielding of Red wire and solder to positive terminal of a connector, then remove insulating 8-inch lead shielding of Black wire and solder to the negative terminal of connector. Be careful not to short the wire lead. If you accidentally cause the battery to short, place it in a safe open space and observe the battery for approximately 100,000 years. A battery may swell or even possibly induce fission after a geologically insignificant time. 11) Never store or charge battery pack inside your car in extreme temperatures, since extreme temperature could cause irreparable damage to you car, and blow away half the state.
With apologies to thunderpower-batteries.com
What if someone *intentially* breaks one open?
...don't underestimate the depths of human depravity
Apparently its quite a big thing in Jamaica to go around throwing car battery acid in peoples faces...
This UID is 7651 digits too high to subjectively infer IQ from.
Jane Fonda says nukkklear energy is evil. Ban these batteries! Ban the sun! Ban stars! Ban supernovae. Strip naked and dance around, making sure to bend over frequently for reporters!
There is another way to make a "nuclear battery", which was discussed in the september 2004 issue of IEEE's Spectrum magazine (could not get a link...): by ionizing a bit of matter, it gets attracted to other matter (think static electricity). So you ionize a flat, piezoelectric part that's attached at one end over an unmovable base plate. The attraction makes the loose end of the part strain down to the base, and the piezoelectric nature of the part makes it generate electricity on the way.
You're not old until regret takes the place of your dreams.
oh man... i wish i had not used all my mod points today morning...
A p-n diode contains/uses a p-n junction for its properties but to say an p-n junction is a diode is a great over simplification.
There are many other types of diodes, some which do not use p-n junctions...although probably for 90+% of diode discussion you are talking about p-n diodes.
"Look Lois, the two symbols of the Republican Party: an elephant, and a fat white guy who is threatened by change."
Sheesh. They could have rewritten it with just one use of the word "implanted". It's just an economy of words things, doncha know ...
Infuriate left and right
a "p-n junction"? does this quoatable newfangle device have anything to do with those "lasers" i hear about?
---------
No matter how thin you slice it, its still baloney.
This is going to be an interesting thing to see develop over the next few decades. Nuclear power went from this supposed clean and perfect energy source to becoming the demon of nuclear war, chernobyl and three mile island. When you say nuclear power to people, they get images of three-eyed fish, cancer, etc.
Having said that, safe nuclear power, which is entirely feasible right now, is really our best option for dealing with energy shortages in the near future. The pebble bed nuclear reactor technology doesn't melt down, provides copious energy, and doesn't emit a gram of CO2. Plus, if I'm not mistaken, the disposal of the pebbles is less troublesome than the leftovers from the more traditional reactors.
A nuclear battery that could last 10 years would be way better, not only for the users of the batteries, but also for the environment. Think about how much energy you have to use to charge a laptop. All of that energy is primarily coming from fossil fuels. Then when you are done with the battery, you throw it in a dump (at least most people do), and the heavy metals that go into most of those batteries leak into the environment.
Of course, in order for any of this progress to happen, you're going to have to get people comfy with having a radioactive source a few inches away from their crotch. It might have all the shielding in the world, but it's still going to make a lot of people nervous.
This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
Beta-radiation? Only lethal if inhaled? Then why didn't you say so, guy? That's so awesome, these'll get rid of engergizer bunnies everywhere!
Except that tritium is helium, and helium is usually a gas in the conditions we live under. Their design specifications confirm the use of a circulating radiative gas. If this thing even so much as cracks during its ten years in operation you will end up with a god-aweful fuming battery of death. It's a great idea, but I would never feel comfortable around them.
It never ceases to amaze me how things get moderated. Quite obviously, anyone reading my actual post would have realized the devices would be safe in laps, same as anyone reading the actual FA. And just as obviously, the moderators saw the subject, assumed it was a stupid joke, and never bothered to read the post, just clicked that moderation button.
... take your best shot at this post too. It obviously deserves to be modded as flamebait or troll, as that is what I am hoping for ... or you could all decide to leave the post alone, and then it would not have baited or caught any trolls, making it -1 useless. Your call.
Well, shucks. Is moderators reading part of the post better than moderators reading none?
And hey, moderators
Infuriate left and right
Aren't laptops full of p-n junctions that could get disrupted by this. Radiation is horribly damaging to microchips.
And I don't care how small the reactor is, why would you want a radioactive source near your nuts for prolonged periods of time?
a Guy named Paul M. Brown, of Peripheral Systems, did this back in like, the 80's, but he used Strontium-90 as the 'fuel' because it also goesnt give off gamma radiation, but only alpha and beta particles, his battery could put out something crazy like 7500 watts per gram of SR-90.
You can read about it here http://www.rexresearch.com/nucell/nucell.htm, his battery design was patented under the company Nucell or something.
To bad he died back in 2001, mysterious hit n' run. Auto/Oil Industry Conspiracy!!!!
Remember, calling it nuclear is a sure-fire way to steer the public clear. Call it incandescent batteries. I still think the smartest move the creators of the microwave made was to not clue the public in that somehow radiation was involved.
A nuclear battery in your laptop what an ingenious idea!
My sperm count is already decreasing directly proportionally to the amount of minutes I keep my LAPtop on my LAP due to heat being generated by my laptop. Now you want to go ahead and mutate the few soldiers I still have left on reserves??
On a more practical level, couldn't some malicious person or persons buy a large quantity of these batteries and extract the nuclear source out of them to build a dirty bomb? Just a thought..
--
http://unk1911.blogspot.com/
I have a similar machine, but worse, except for the battery. P120, 80MB RAM. My stereo tuner died so I pressed the Thinkpad into service as a replacement. It works pretty well, sitting right where my tuner used to be with it's output going to my intergrated amplifier. Now my "radio" comes in through the Internet. I really should put a wifi card in there to reduce the cable clutter, though.
There's a modest demand for tritium. It's needed to recharge H-bombs. Fusion researchers need sizable quantities of it. It's used for night lights in exit signs, watches, and gunsights. Tritium has a half life of about 12 years, so you lose 5.5% every year as it decays to helium-3. So a new product that requires tritium faces a major supply problem.
The hazards of tritium exposure aren't high, but some precautions are required. Cleanup procedures for a broken tritium exit sign are as follows:
When an Exit Sign Containing Tritium (3H) Is Damaged (broken with the release of 3H):
The protective clothing required for cleanup usually consists of gloves and booties. The broken sign should be placed in an air-tight container by a health physics consultant. If silica gel is available it should be placed in the container with the broken sign. The silica gel will collect tritiated water. At a minimum, the broken sign and any miscellaneous pieces should be double bagged and sealed in plastic. Disposal of the broken sign should be arranged through the manufacturer or a health physics consultant.
And people screw up, even with ordinary exit signs. Here's a Nuclear Regulatory Commission report from 2004:
USAF personnel in the Johnston Atoll in the Pacific were attempting to remove the "batteries" from an exit sign they believed to be battery powered. During the attempt to open the case, they destroyed the sign only to discover that it was a tritium sign. All tritium modules were broken.
Five personnel were in the room at the time and all were potentially exposed to the tritium. The Radiation Safety Officer (RSO) isolated the room and the personnel clothing, etc. Pre-cleanup surveys indicated greater than 6 times the normal background survey readings in the room. The RSO double-bagged the sign and tritium module debris. The room and work areas were decontaminated. Post-cleanup surveys indicated normal background readings. Personnel uptake and dose evaluations are currently being assessed.
So, like the nuclear batteries of the 1960s, this will be a specialized technology of very limited application.
I see little evidence that "entrenched interests" have been able to stop progress. I work in an industry where technical advancement is continuous. Never once have I heard someone suggest we try to prevent the introduction of some else's advancement. People know that, practically speaking, it's impossible. The only intelligent thing to do is go with the flow.
And if our company owned the rights to the advancement, we don't hesitate for a second in getting it to market. There's for more money in introducing a new product than maintaining the status quo. And we know that if we don't do it, someone else will. And we get to watch as they eat our lunch.
So far as the "100% efficient bearing", well you can put that along side the carburator that doubles your gas mileage. Just another urban legend. Your teacher should be ashamed spreading such manure.
If we can turn radioactivity into electricity, can't we build generators around toxic nuclear waste?
that's probably overkill. A thimble would work just as well...
"Nokia is not a country, it's the capital of Finland!" -Moderated "Informative". Yeesh.
- A diode is anything that rectifies current.
- A p-n junction rectifies current
- Therefore: A p-n junction is a diode
Now if the poster had stated that all diodes are p-n junction, I'd agree with you.What happens when you punture it with a screwdriver?
Free Scotland!
they work great with a UPS
This is the hottest college website around! Also, check out some pics from the site here.
I'd be REALLY friggin' concerned about putting this in my lap!
I'm not a troll, but I play one on Slashdot.
http://www.bellona.no/en/international/russia/navy /northern_fleet/incidents/37598.html
IANAP (I am not a physicist)...this may be obvious, but...
If this nuclear source is constantly irradiating, but the battery is not constantly under load, how is the excess energy from the tritium breakdown finally dissipated into the environment? Won't this battery get awfully warm at "idle" if it's otherwise strong enough to power something significant?
The only other way I can think of to dissipate this energy would be to allow some of the radioactivity energy through the battery's skin, and I doubt that's the case. If the radioactivity is actually loading a conventional battery, then the above-described "battery" is actually just a charging device.
What's actually the case here?
Certified Microsoft Notworking Specialist
Take some PepcidAC before ingesting plutonium folks.
GIVEN the progress they have made, do they have enough to power a laptop? I doubt it since they're talking about sensors and pacemakers. so to use this in a laptop WOULD require more material.
if someone announces tomorrow that they've made a solar panel 10 times more efficient than previous panels, it doesn't mean next week we'll all have solar panel laptops. it just means anything that used to require 10 panels now requires only one.
In the shape of an exit sign
"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, it doesn't go away." - Philip K. Dick
Forget laptops. Can I get a big one of these and power my car with it?
Our new batteries are so efficient that you will never need a lamp after using one: you will glow in the dark!
beowulf of...
Couldnt it be a weapon of mass destruction?
This site rules. Thank you!
I mean, could you power tanks, battlearmor or exoskeletons with something like this?
And am I the only one who would NOT put a nuke battery on my lap? "Sorry the kid has 3 toes and one kidney honey, but I was able to watch all of LOTR on those long filghts."
San Francisco Photographers
So can we do this with radioactive waste from nuclear power plants/medical industry? Why not have a big bank of these generating more power instead of just burying our radioactive waste in a mountain?
This is actually a problem for spill detection and cleanup, because you need special sensor gear just to find the spill.
Sustainability and energy independence essay
That would be great....batteries that last a long time. Too bad they have already ruined the product's chances by using the word nuclear.
No matter how hard they try, how well they advertise, or how many safety studies they publish, the common, ignorant, consumer will completely avoid this product and most likely hold demonstrations banning its use and its production. All it will take is one hysterical comment like "...but its nuclear so that means that your laptop will explode and blow up half a city.." or better yet "...nuclear powered devices are just giving more potential weapons to terrorists..."
While I've never been morally opposed to nuclear power plants (except in my back yard...), It's always bugged me that they were nothing more than coal/gas/oil/etc burning plants that just use a different fuel to "burn" in order to spin a turbine. I don't know the thermodynamics involved, but that always struck me as a somewhat inefficient use of the energy that's being spewed out of a lump of radioactive material.
Then again, maybe I've read about too many "clean fuel" situations in all those sci-fi stories down through the years.
naaaah....
If you're gonna be dumb, you gotta be tough.
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur
Of course, you can't buy them in paranoically advantaged countries like the US, but a couple of years ago I bought a bunch as Christmas presents for all the members of my family --- they're surprisingly useful.
/we can rebuild him, we can make him better than he was before...
--
"Open source is good." - Steve Jobs
"Open source is evil." - Microsoft
I believe the material in smoke detectors is usually Americium. Some links:
http://www.uic.com.au/nip35.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Americium
I've got an idea for a power source. For those who live in a metopolitan area why not tap the RF energy? RFID works this way. If you live close to a cell tower, television or radio station, why not
tap the energy? Use the energy to charge your batteries, etc. And you don't have to worry about getting cellular mutation (unless you live way too close to the transmitting towers).
How about good old 60hz inductive loads on the power lines? Not a problem.
"I can imagine lots of applications for this new battery including my own laptop."
So you think having radioactive materials near your balls is a good idea, eh?
Even as a former nuclear physicist, I do prefer to keep radioactive gases as far away from my lap, as possible.
Why? I think the human race needs to be more open to mutation.
To run anything as power hungry as a laptop.
l
You might be able to run a watch with it if
you designed it carefully to watch your power
consumption.
" I think that you might get at least a couple of milliamps of high-voltage current from it. "
http://www.americanantigravity.com/plasmavolt.htm
-- Programming with boost is like building a house with lego. It's a cool but I wouldn't want to live in it
This is my biggest argument as to why exactly that storing nuclear "waste" is a non issue. As we finally get over our asinine fears of nuclear power, and understand that it is probably the best near term solution for power. (Crap digressed too far again :) )
Historically, as we use these "new" technologies, they spin off offshoot tech's the often find use for the original byproducts. I fully believe as we truely start to embrace nuclear energy, we will find more and more useful ways to recycle the current "waste" into other fuel sources.
If it is a light battery that has more power than conventional batteries, maybe it could be used as a powersource for cars.
God spoke to me.
...will last a full 45 minutes...woohoo...
Hedley Lamarr: "You mentioned strontium-90 twice"
Rei: "I *like* strontium-90!"
Hedley Lamarr: "Kinky!"
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
Tritium? Isn't that what Doc Ock was after in Spider-Man 2? Was he actually on to something here? Am I going to see a dood with 4 mechanical arms welded to his body running down the road looking for the stuff?
Scary times...
To make a pun demonstrates the highest understanding of a language
Except not all p-n junctions rectify current. In fact, your own link refers to such a thing as "Non-rectifying Junctions".
"Look Lois, the two symbols of the Republican Party: an elephant, and a fat white guy who is threatened by change."
But think about it. Houses or offices can have their "mini nuclear power station" and recharge their standard batteries there. Who knows? You might see "beta benders" out there in the future. Just insert a coin and put your battery there.
(Hmmmm wasn't this idea shown in the sci-fi game 'Flashback' by Delphine soft?)
and not that bunny can keep going, and going, and going, and going...
If you have an analog watch with glowing hands or markers, you may already have a source of tritium on your body folks. It's not that big of a deal.
Admittedly, this is a small amount of tritium, but tritium itself isn't highly radioactive.
Never look down your nose at others. Someday, someone is bound to see your boogers.
How do you turn a nuclear battery off?
I assume that the nuclear decay process will go on till the battery has run down, but what happens if you don't use all of the current?
The decay energy has to be dumped somehow. Therefore, does the battery get hot when it is not in use and cold when it is?
Oh well, what the hell...
You need to reread the paper, or rethink your objection to it. The point isn't that you can run a traditional 10GHz processor off a watch battery. The point is that there are systems permitted by the laws of physics (although we have no idea how to manufacture them at this point), which are capable of doing the same computations as a present-day 10GHz processor but produce far less heat in the process.
Do you know what 99.99...% of the power of a modern processor winds up as? Waste heat! Just as a large fraction of what you put into a horse is spent on things other than moving your cart forward, a the vast majority of the power used by a processor is wasted. Just as it is quite reasonable to try to design something that is more efficent than a horse at moving a load forward, it makes perfect sense to try to design things that compute more efficiently. And since we only care about the abstract result, we are better off making it smaller.
Before you lable something "BS" it's best to make sure you understand it.
--MarkusQ
Wait. You mean I can't recharge it? I have to buy hydrogen and refuel it? I'll keep my Lithium Ion even if it does last less, at least I don't have to keep buying stuff, I can just plug it in and recharge.
Yeah, I can't recharge the nuclear batteries, but if it lasts for 10 years, it's going beyond the life cycle of current batteries anyway. That's a hell of an improvement if we can get actual power out of it.
Oh, I'm sure it'll be just dandy for the environment with people improperly disposing of nuclear batteries. Is there even a safe way at all?
Because if that tritium gas ever leaks, you don't want it in your lungs. It's not too bad if it's just a little bit, because it's chelated and expelled pretty quickly. But the article doesn't talk about mass. Say a commuter plane crashes, and the rescue crews have to deal with all the laptop batteries that are leaking tritium. They might just have to wait it out for a bit.
Same thing if you decide to blowtorch a fire detector. Hold your breath; those few kBq of Americium will make your anus bleed.
I think I might think twice about a nuclear battary powered laptop. Not sure if I really want something like that resting on my family jewels with only some cloth and plastic for protection.
Nuclear!!!
Do you realize just using that word is so dangerous they had to turn NMRI's into MRI's so that people wouldn't get hurt. You must be crazy!! Nuclear battery!!
Run for your life.... Ahhhhhh
Stick with the safe, clean, tried and true way to get electricity. Burn something......
Brought to you by YOUR GOOD FRIENDS at OPEC
Good luck going to market. If you have the word "Nuclear" in the description every anti-nuke lefty wackjob will be out protesting against the dangers of nuclear power.
Just say that it's hydro-power or windpower. Then they'll move on over to the bio-engineered protest instead.
Karma means nothing to me, so suck it...
You are missing the real danger! What if a focused nuclear blast hits you while using your laptop! The tritium could fuse, and KILL you!
while (sig==sig) sig=!sig;
Tritium is the most expensive material (by weight) in modern nukes and the only reason why it is used there is that it greatly boosts the efficiency of the fission primaries. I don't know how much tritium costs, but one can produce by weight about 50times more weapon plutonium than tritium using the same neutron flux in the reactor.
In fact, tritium is so expensive that US some years back was selling few hundreds gramms of tritium to UK (so that they could replace decayed tritium in their nukes) and it was a big deal.
And the radiation safety: tritium is a real mess when ingested, it has high emission rate and looks just like regular hydrogen so it gets incorporated into tissues. And it is hard to detect because the produced beta is very soft - I worked in a lab where a colleague was using miligram quantities of tritiated (radiolabeled) chemicals and we were all pretty nervous about it. Each week we run swabs in the lab, putting it into scintilation mix to find out if places in the lab got contaminated, etc. Tritium-powered device does not belong into hands of public.
I doubt that we will ever figure out - and I suspect that even if we did figure out we couldn't do much about it
While tritium itself is generally less harmful than other well-known radiochemicals, don't get the idea that tritium is always relatively harmless -- in the right circumstances there can be a severe hazard to human health, and that's why it is included in many countries' radiation safety regulations. Learn what the risks are and if you know you are near tritium sources, take reasonable steps to avoid the risks.
The beta particles emitted by tritium are electrons with energies from 6keV to 18.6keV. These electroncs are not energetic enough to be able to penetrate the surface-layer of dead human skin "epidermis", so the living cells underneath are protected. It's obvious that is not the way tritium can be a serious hazard. The health risk is from internal absorption of chemical compounds of tritium such as tritiated water (HTO), (tritium reacts just like hydrogen does to form water).
Your body will initially absorb 100% of inhaled tritiated water vapour (HTO). Of the total amount absorbed, 3% goes into body tissues with longer-term storage with a 40-day biological half-time (BHT), while 97% goes into shorter-term storage with a 10-day BHT. All the while the absorbed HTO is inside your body it is used to form proteins, neurotransmitters, RNA, DNA and other components of living cells. All of these materials are known to be easily damaged by ionizing radiation which is what the beta particles emitted by the tritium are. Even though the beta particles from tritium are of relatively low energy, they are able to ionize and damage the body's cells due to the atomic-scale proximity of the tritium to the molecules inside cells (there is no protective barrier of dead skin inside a cell).
The Relative Biological Effectiveness of tritium beta irradiation is generally greater than that of gamma irradiation and similar to or greater than that of X-irradiation. Although the observed effects of tritium are very largely attributable to ionization damage, the transmutation of tritium to helium also has the potential to cause damage to DNA (26,68). Rapid dissolution of carbon-helium bonds will leave reactive carbon ions that can damage DNA by causing single-strand breaks and interstrand cross-links(75,76).
Quoted from a report of the UK Working Group of the Consultative Exercise on Radiation Risks of Internal Emitters (CERRIE)
Scroogle
From TFA:
"The technology is geared toward applications where power is needed in inaccessible places or under extreme conditions. Since the battery should be able to run reliably for more than 10 years without recharge or replacement, it would be perfect for medical devices like pacemakers, implanted defibrillators, or other implanted devices that would otherwise require surgery to replace or repair. Likewise, deep-space probes or deep-sea sensors, which are beyond the reach of repair, also would benefit from such technology."
Sooo, don't expect this in the next-gen iPod or laptop or cellphone, cause it just ain't in the cards.
Coding with assembly is like playing with Legos. Coding an application in assembly is like building a car with Legos.
That's the ticket... put a radioactive battery in your lap. Note the crazy mutations in your children.
Wouldn't this pose an even more harmful environmental problem upon disposal of the battery? Even now, your standard Litium, NiCad or any battery has disposal issues. Throwing them into the dumpster to go to the landfill is supposed to be a bad idea (and companies who have large volumes of batteries probably do recycle) but your average consumer doesn't.
:(
What happens when your average consumer starts using these inplace of your standard AA's now? Is that a bigger threat to the environment? Seems the environmental impact studies will take just as long as the product development.
Disclaimers:
1. I understand you can use low radiation, short half-life material, but I don't know what they eventually decay to and how it compares to standard battery materials.
2. I am not a tree-hugger or any other sort of extreme environmentalist, however I acknowledge their existence and the reality of the resulting laws and policies.
3. I'm a dumb ass and could be completely wrong on all of the above.
Yeah, in ten years, there will be a lot of dead useless and radioactive batteries to throw out.
And what if the batteries break? What if they rupture or leak? I don't think thats going to be a very good scenario for your battery dependant gadgetry or medical devices like pacemakers.
Imagine the lawsuits that can come from this!
Its a shame Physorg failed to mention that these generate about one-thousandth the power of a chemical battery, making them quite useless for most all consumer electronics devices that are remotely power hungry. See the press release.
I wish that notebooks came with a way to use the video and PS/2 ports as inputs so that even if the computing hardware was obsolete, the display panel and keyboard could still be used. Obviously using the display is the most valuable part.
At my last job I really could have used one of those flip-up LCD display/keyboard trays in our racks, but the boss saw the cost and said "dream on". Of course I've chucked a dozen laptops that would have been perfect for that very application if they could accept video in.
Tritium is natually occuring. So naturally that you probably ingest trace amounts everytime you drink a glass of water. As a gas, you'd need a significant ratio in your breatheable air to be fatal. When I use the term significant, I mean the ratio at which most other things would also prove fatal, such as CO2 or Methane.
Beta Radiation is a fany name for free Electrons. Its given its name because of it's source, but don't be fooled, lost of other things give off free Electrons such as: TVs, common rocks, other electronic equipment, the power outlet on your wall, and that staticy blanket on your bed.
The fact that "Nuclear" is in it shouldn't scare you. When you go to the hospitol and get an MRI, remember that the process used to be called Nuclear Magnetic Resonance, and was changed to Magnetic Resonance Imaging to keep people from getting scared. The raditation amount you get from an X-Ray which your dentist does frequently is worth more of your fear.
Heat coming out of your laptop would kill more of your sperm than beta radiation, which wouldn't be able to penetrate your scrotom's outer skin.
Alkaline Batteries contain toxic materials. If you ever break one open, wash your hands and dispose of the battery. A tritium battery, if broken open, would disipate into the air and take off for the skys quite quickly, as it's atomic weight makes it comparable to helium, which if you've seen those balloons take off, you know how fast it is.
So, I hope we're all more educated now.
Possibly combined with a ion drive this battery could be very useful to power such a device for future space probes.
My UID is prime is yours?
Of course, they'll probably be saying it through their black lungs, but they'll still be saying it, dammit
Public use of any portable music system is a virtually guaranteed indicator of sociopathic tendencies. -- Zoso
The only problem is: tritium is a gas, and if the gas leaked and breathed by humans, those beta particles could wreak havoc in the lungs.
Ditto -- speaking from a radon infested part of the country.
this is a defibrillator. You know, the thing where they say "clear" and touch two terminals to your chest. Implanted defibrillators do exist, but a lot of them are not implanted. So, as I was saying originally, "implanted defibrillator" is not redundant. wikipedia link
10 years ago the democrats said, "No more nuclear power. Buy energy from overseas." and no-one wanted radiation within 10000 miles of themselves. Now the democrats say "Don't buy energy from overseas. Buy nuclear power." and no-one has a problem with radiation in their pocket.
I'm drooling. Think of how long I will be able to watch porn at the park on my laptop. My wife will never find me.
LeoPolus Web Design: http://www.leopolus.com
Yes.
as if laptops weren't already a threat to sperm production, now we can look forward to roasting our testicles with radiation! Thats progress!
This would be the ideal situation because you could use the laptop for any practical amount of time, and the battery would recharge whenever the laptop is plugged in, as it could and should be when used in a desktop situation where power is easy to obtain.
Such a laptop might even provide power to external peripherals when used in a mobile situation.
Other applications for such a battery could include UPS power supplies, in addition to embedded batteries in wall outlets in homes, office buildings, and even industrial facilities, such that you won't even perceive a power loss situation in a blackout. Furthermore, in a blackout situation, the meter could run backwards, supplying power to the grid, so that a blackout will be a thing of the past.
Nucular, as our great president says. Nucular.
Of course this won't be ready for production and retail sale until they can get the overall lifetime of the cell down to a few months.
How many villians were killed by falling into the Bat-reactor?
Kids of the 60's know nuclear reactors as killing machines.
As the electrons strike a special pair of layers called a 'p-n junction,' a current results.
That's an amazing technology. Let's release it 60 years ago and call it a "diode".
Now seriously, I found the idea interesting, but what's so "special" about a pn junction anyway?
Nice to see these went somewhere, we were working with PN junctions containing Tritium at the University of Toronto back in 2001. I figured, as I knew, I would through out some facts for those who were curious: 1 - Tritium, a radioactive isotope of Hydrogen, has a half life of around 14 years. 2 - Tritium undergoes beta decay, where one of it's neutrons emits a beta electron and becomes a proton (which is non radioactive). It becomes Helium-3, which is not radioactive. 3 - The beta electron has an average path length in silicon of around 1 micron, in other words beta electrons do not get very far before they decay. 4 - When the beta electron decays it will knock a valence electron off a silicon atom, which will generate an electron-hole pair. These are swept apart by the intrinsic field set up by a PN junction. I recall when I was looking at this, I found that the deliverable power levels were really low (read nanoAmperes) and the fact that they dropped over seven years was bothersome as well. One of the problems we encountered was that as the tritium decayed, we found that the dangling bonds left behind in the semiconductors would degrade the performance of the batteries faster than would be predicted by just looking at the half life. In fact, I recall really poor performance in just a few days. Anyway, that was about 4 years ago.
Can I hook it up to my PSP so that I can play for 2 hours at a time? Sign me up!
My power wheelchair eats juice when I go out. I'd love not to worry over if I'll be able to get home. Will these supply enough current for a high-drain device?
Goddess, it'd be great. With a catheter and leg bag, and this battery, I could axtually do all my weekly grocery shopping on the same day, instead of over three like I do at present. I might even get a life back!
Lemon curry?
As wonderful as this battery would be, I seriously doubt that any government would allow any such nuclear material to be distributed to the general population. I doubt it would ever be safe/practical for general use.
I mean what happens when your neighbor throws one of these things away in dumpster across the street from where your kids are playing and the casing corrodes?
Can this be scaled up to run an Electric Automobile?
I spend most of my time trying to keep sharp, hot, or radioactive things away from my crotch, so radioactive laptop batteries just seem like a bad idea to me.
This technology is really cool though and there will be countless applications for it. Maybe radioactive waste could be used as the fuel for it.
-Kevin
Before everyone starts planning their purchase of a tritium-powered laptop, keep the following numbers in mind:
Assuming a perfectly efficient conversion of the energy released by the 18 keV beta particles from tritium, the specific power available from a tritium battery is 18 keV * 3x10^10 disintegrations/sec/Ci * 1.6x10^-19 Joules/eV = 86 microwatts/Ci.
The last time I checked (a long time ago), the price of bulk tritium was about $10/Ci (probably still true within an order of magnitude), so the price of one of these batteries (assuming, again 100% conversion of beta energy to output power, which is not even close to correct), is $100,000/watt.
Realistically, I think the efficiency could possibly approach 10% if they get very good at collecting the electron showers produced by the betas, but maybe tritium will come down a factor of 10 in price to compensate. I suspect that any large deviation in price from the $100k/W number is unlikely. For most people, that is a showstopper for daily use, since it significantly increases the price of a laptop, from about $1000 to about $1,000,000 (assuming your laptop takes 10 Watts, which is pretty optimistic). Of course, that would also imply that you are carrying around 100,000 Curies of tritium with you (again, at the 10% efficiency level). That's a LOT of tritium.
These are only likely to be important as very long-term sources of sub-milliwatt power. Nonetheless, they may be quite useful there. The efficiency might be quite a bit better that current radiothermal generators, although that will take some work to achieve.
who knows what would happen if enough got into the wrong hands.
Smells like vapourware...
So what happened to these things that were supposed to be released for consumers in 2004?
In America you charge battery. In country Russia battery charges YOU!
The last thing we need is for some Washington "Genius" to propose we spend $56 trillion on a Neutrino Defense shield for the Whitehouse and Capitol Hill.
"I'm just here to regulate funkiness."
Can something like this be built in, say, a garage? Tech like this always sounds so intimidating but at the same time it seems like very simple principals. Anyone more familiar with this have any insight on how hard it actually is to experiment with stuff like this as a hobbyist?
Hexy - a strategy game for iPhone/iPod Touch
It seems to me that betavoltaics could allow us to turn all the nuclear waste that nobody wants into a small power plant. Can anyone provide some more insight in to why this wouldn't work? (or why nobody's done it yet?)
Tritium is deadly to humans, why couldn't we just use gasified deuterium, which we consume in great amounts on a daily basis?
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Avg decay energy = 6500 Ev
Half-life = 12 years
Avagadro's number = 6^23
Atomic weight = 3
6^23 * 6500 Ev * 1.6^-19 J/eV = 96 KJ/mole
exp(-12/tau) = 0.5
tau = 17 years = 2^7 seconds
decay rate = -1/tau
96 KJ/mole / 2^7 seconds = 5 mW/mole
5 mW/mole / 3g/mole = 1 mW/g
And that's at 100% efficiency.
I don't think I'm going to be runing my laptop on one these things.
There will no longer be a doubt that laptops give you nut cancer.
Read my short stories - You won't regret it.
Jesus don't tell my girlfriend. The only thing getting me booty is the battery life.
The first cells give 400 milliwatts per cubic centimeter. Assuming your computer consumes on the order of 65 watts (which is probably more than it does consume even at full blast) you'd need 165 cubic centimeters of material, or a cube 5.5 cm on a side, or a 1x13x13 cm panel. That's not that big. If, as they claim, battery efficiency is improved by an order of magnitude, then you only need 16 ccs of battery. That ain't much - roughly the size of a "C" cell battery, if I'm not mistaken.
Of course, you would only be using a fraction of the power at any given time, and you can't turn the nukebatt off! So it makes more sense to use a smaller nukebatt have a normal battery that stores excess generation and delivers extra power when necessary. A well designed computer would scale demand when the battery is low. You could even allow it to charge off the mains or dump excess power onto the mains (how's that for a universal power supply?)
What's interesting is you can easily run your car on that sort of system too. I'll be conservative about it. Say you use 2 gallons of gas a day - thats 2.6x10^9 joules per 86,400 seconds, for an average demand of 30 kilowatts. You'd need 75,000 ccs to meet that demand at 0.4 watt/cc - equivalent to 18 gallons. At 4 watt/cc, you'd need a mere 2 gallons worth! Again, charging from or dumping to the mains gives you more flexibility, and in fact makes a lot of sense since your car would be generating power where you are using it, thus matching location of generation with location of demand and avoiding transmission inefficiencies. Plus a true electric vehicle would make far more efficient use of the electrical energy than an ICE makes of gasoline, even with the inefficiency of temporary battery storage, and would simpler besides.
Of course cost and availability of tritium is an issue, as is safety and proliferation. And heat dissipation should not be ignored. But imagine... never having to stop for gas again.
---If you can't trust a nerd, who can you trust?
Don't worry your nuts. Energizer lobbiests are drafting legislation right now to put a stop to this dangerous technology.
The draft bill says, simply, that the FCC will 'have authority to adopt regulations governing nuclear battery apparatus necessary to control the indiscriminate redistribution of electrons.'
How about 2.4GHz microwave radiation from built-in WiFi cards? Did you know that microwave ovens use almost exactly 2.4GHz? Now put *that* atop your family jewels :)
Tsunami -- You can't bring a good wave down!
I still think the smartest move the creators of the microwave made was to not clue the public in that somehow radiation was involved.
The smartest move the creators of the lightbulb made was not to clue the public in that somehow radiation was involved. A lightbulb's radiation has a much shorter wavelength and is therefore more similar to gamma rays than microwave radiation!
Stop worrying about the risks of nuclear power and start worrying about the risks of not using nuclear power.
I'm not real sure that i want a nuclear battery in my lap.. i like my balls just the way they are... they've been good to me
BOOM! *mushroom cloud*
also bring to mind the obligatory Far Side
"Everybody run, the canary's mutating!!!"
At first I figured the output, while long lasting, would just be too low to be useful. I went to beta-batt's website, got the numbers and did the math. These batteries are surprisingly good.
The first-gen tritium ones (and tritium ones is probably all we'll ever see in commercial applications) put out 400 microwatts per cubic centimeter of nuclear battery volume, half-lifing at 12 years of course.
Based on various data I pulled from Energizer's website and Betabatt's website, it comes out like this:
A regular AA-sized NiMH rechargeable battery (2,500mAh @ 1.2V) can be recharged by a nuke battery of identical volume (picture a companion Nuclear-AA battery next to it) from empty to full in roughly one month. Or five AA-sized nuked batteries could recharge a normal NiMH AA in a little under a week. In either case, that's for years (obviously, the charging rate gets slower as the years go on).
Even in that form, it's quite useful. Assuming linear scalability in both regular and nuke batteries, that means if you have a device which can last up to two months on a rechargeable battery of some size, you can stick a nuke-charged of equivalent volume to your battery next to it, and between the two of them your device will stay continuously powered for at least 12.3 years.
Imagine when the next generations come out and get more efficient. I can't wait. For useful largish devices you'll always need a chemical battery for bursty amperage, but have a nuke-batt as a recharger is so handy.
11*43+456^2
Actually, that's why we're working to develop inspections systems overseas in the facilties where the containers are loaded to begin with. All cargo in transit to the US must be transhipped through one of these hubs.
Any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.
America is doomed.
I am not sure I want a "Nuclear" battery anywhere my lap.
Slashdot - Where the slash is most definitely to the left.
my kodak disk camera the i bought over 21 yrs ago still has a working battery that powers the flash.
the camera is broken, but i keep it around to show people the amazing battery.
All you people bragging about how safe tritium is, eat some stuff contaminated with it and let's see how well you do. MSDS (best I could do):
e w.asp?pd=ca&pf=cbsbm
http://www.emedco.com/emed2/resource/msds/msds_vi
Sure, the beta radiation doesn't do much harm. Neither does the beta radiation from radium. Unless it somehow gets into your body.
OTOH Tritium's half life is only 12.26 years. So once it gets into the environment - and it will what with millions of these "tritium duracells" being tossed into landfills - I would it would be a problem worth investigating. I would expect tritium would behave more or less like hydrogen once in the environment, form salts, etc. Operating a 50W laptop will take SLIGHTLY more tritium than illuminating a watch dial or exit sign.
Nevertheless this is a good innovation - the security risks associated with current TIGs - each with several Kg of cesium, or something equally nasty.
Give a man a fish and you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish, and he'll say "WHERE'S MY FISH, YOU IDIOT?"
Gigantic page, incompetent photography, ugly people. Lame.
it is all fine and dany that it uses a PN junction to gather the beta radiation, but how it this converted into usable energy?
As far as I know, the electrons that are emited by this decay are very energetic in the oreder ov 100's of KeV(Kilo electron Volt).
Since the current == the decay, you have a fixed amount of total charge that can flow, and that are very few AmpHours. That current must be very low for a halflive of 12 years(=105120hours) but it is potentially at a very high voltage.
But how do they convert this extremly higvoltage/exttremely low current into a usable current/voltage? Is that where this silicon pn junction has some tricks up it's sleeve?
PLease explain.
This space is intentionally staring blankly at you
found it here:u m.html
http://www.science.uwaterloo.ca/earth/waton/triti
This space is intentionally staring blankly at you
A little calculation suggests this is a really screwy idea. One Curie is 3.7 x 10^10 nuclear particles/sec. One coulomb is 6 x 10^23 electrons. Assuming each particle is one electron at a (guess) 600 volts, to get 10 watts, you need 10^22 electons/sec. That's 2.7x10^12 Curies, considerably more than the total Tritium ever made. Does someone have a decimal point off by say 10 places?
wow does this mean bleeding edge desktop replacement that won't run only 2 hours. Who knows maybe it'll be enough to power the next generation CPU and GPU!
Some people believe 1-1=3 and for the sake of being politically correct, we should respect their differences
"I can imagine lots of applications for this new battery including my own laptop."
When did spermecide and impotentcy count as applications of a laptop?
Exactly. I've had those type of un-oh moments before. I was once debugging an analog IC under the probe station microscope. Except it wasn't behaving at all like what was on my test board. Turn off the microscope light, and presto! things were back to normal. That's one of those lessons you learn the hard way (but you'll never forget again).
The p-n junction is the basic building block for semi-conductors, so what's so special?
I'm kinda joking here too but what's the point in a battery that lasts 10 years when most of my electronics will never last that long anyways. Sure I can re-use for another device but if the battery life is increasing, I think the longevitiy of some electronics should last just as long.
... in my mid 20s) doesn't seem to last as long.
The stuff that is being made nowadays last 4 or 5 years (and I'm young
TFA says 400 microwatts/cm^3, not 400mW...
"All I do is eat and poop!" -- Bean
Sorry, I dont believe the energy industry friendly epa's ideas about the dangers of radiation...long term exposure to radiation and its consequences would not be a good trade off for having your laptop work longer.
I care more about my health than my computer and would hope that readers on slashdot would not care only about their own health, but for the health of those in the society around them that sit next to them on the plane when they are using this radioactive device...xrays are harmless but yet the technician stands behind a lead enclosure when they take the xray because over the long term it will wreck your body. I would be seriously angry if people sat next to me in public with a nuclear battery on a regular basis...that worse than second hand smoke!
You'd have to inhale _a lot_ of it to get a deadly dose of radiation during that period.
I think they were planning on using the gas form or heavy water, not a tritium-containing compound that will sit in tissues.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
I couldn't figure this out from the article, but I assume that since they were talking about applications such as pacemakers and such we're talking VERY low power output for a long time.
Everyone would love a laptop that can be used 6h a day for 10y without being plugged in (note that you may only be getting 3.5h a day by the 10th year), but this doesn't sound like where they're heading -- more like, say, a clock battery.
Similar to the way solar panels work by catching photons from the sun and turning them into current, the science of betavoltaics uses silicon to capture electrons emitted from a radioactive gas, such as tritium, to form a current
Well sure, but only if you defenestrate the bihyperthermal aeonic trasmitters via a series of Gaussian-engine transmutative capacitors, and even then, that doesn't guarantee that the overall torque of the endophotonic plasma difibrulator will reach maximum joules-per-atomic-nanogrammaton. I mean, this isn't rocket science, people.
Slashdot requires you to wait longer between hitting 'reply' and submitting a comment.
Can't you see where this is headed? Of course a little tritium gas isn't going to power a lightsaber (what did the How Things Work article say, we needed about 3MW of power to get in the game?) but I can imagine if we cranked up the efficiency a couple of order of magnitude and then swap in a radioactive source with a little more jam we could light up Obi Wan's trusty enforcer. Now just have to figure out where to get those crystals and how to align them...
Hulk smash puny lead batteries!
erp...let's get the numbers right
6500eV * 6x10^23 * 1.6x10^-19 J/eV = 624 MJ/mole
You get half of that in 12 years
0.5 * 624 MJ/mole / 12 years = 825 mW/mole
So a 25W laptop needs
25 W / 825 mW/mole = 30 moles
Now that we have something worth talking about,
let's look at packgaging.
Gaseous T2
30 moles / 2 atoms/molecule * 22.4 l/mole = 680 liters
mmm...maybe not
Heavy water T2O
30 moles / 2 atoms/molecule * 22 g/mole = 330 g = 330 ml
Lithium Tritide LiT
30 moles / 1 atom/molecule * 10 g/mole = 300 g
Water is a bit heavier, but doesn't leave metallic lithium behind.
At 25% efficiency, we need 1.3 Kg. The p-n junction and a case bring it up to, say, 2 Kg. It's within field goal range.
Great... a penlight sized battery with 5kg of lead shielding, like that's going to fit my walkman!?!
Plus, given the recent case of the kid who tried to repair his iPod and punctured the battery, I think I'd prefer for them NOT to use these ones...
"No, Mr. President, it's not a nuclear attack, just another kid who washed his iPod by mistake"
Go permanent? In your dreams and my worst nightmares.
If I remember it correctly.
Correct. Sorry, I'm getting tired and called the control rods a moderator by accident. However, you'll note that the rest of my post jives with what you just said. (Other than the "control tods" that is. Whatever those are. ;-))
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Many, many years since I actually played GAMA WORLD (rpg), but now I finally how understand the nuclear cells there in, worked... I'd previously figured they must have been micro-reactors... Now I just need a MARK V blaster to go with it.
I guess this math stuff is just too hard for me. One of these days I'll figure out how to do percentages.
If you read the article, you know that this particular "battery" runs on tritium gas, which is why the guy I was quoting was talking about volume.
If we consider a theoretical battery that can use solid fuel, and a three watt (really?) laptop, the 100 cc of LiT to power it would weight 330 grams (11.6 oz) for the fuel part of the battery. Not too bad, I suppose. A thirty watt laptop would be pretty heavy though.
One good point about the hydride, tritium decays to helium 3, which would escape the battery case, making it grow lighter with time.
a,e,i,o,u and sometimes w and y (at be if of up cwm by)
I'm sorry, is there anyone reading Slashdot that doesn't know what a p-n junction is?
Patrick Doyle
I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....
But we should have a decade from the moment they're sold to figure it out, since they last so long.
Besides, to me it seemed that Tritium's decay was around a couple decades, so the question is: has it decayed to a level where it's safe enough to be handled without exhorbitantly priced precautions by the time they're brought in for recycling or not?
---- I am certain of only one thing : I know nothing else.
a Guy named Paul M. Brown, of Peripheral Systems, did this back in like, the 80's, but he used Strontium-90 as the 'fuel' because it also goesnt give off gamma radiation, but only alpha and beta particles, his battery could put out something crazy like 7500 watts per gram of SR-90.
You can read about it here http://www.rexresearch.com/nucell/nucell.htm [rexresearch.com], his battery design was patented under the company Nucell or something.
To bad he died back in 2001, mysterious hit n' run. Auto/Oil Industry Conspiracy!!!!
All the world's major philosophies are based on a negation of one of these laws Capitalism violate law 1, socialism violates law 2 and mysticism violate law 3.
Oh, and they are also the three laws of thermodynamics...
You will not drink with us, but you would taste our steel? - Walter Matthau, The Pirates