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'30 Year Laptop Battery' is Unscientific Myth
An anonymous reader wrote to mention the wonderful news: "A research group funded by U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory is developing a battery which can provide continuous power to your laptop for 30 years! Betavoltaic power cells are constructed from semiconductors and use radioisotopes as the energy source..." Except, not so much. ZDNet's Mixed Signals blog with Rupert Goodwins explains why (as always) if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is: "The sort of atomic structures that generate power when bombarded with high energy electrons are the sort that tend to fall apart when bombarded with high energy electrons. While solar cells have the same problem, it's to a much lesser extent. There's a lot of research into making materials that don't suffer so much, but it remains a serious issue ... while it's true that a tritium-powered battery will eventually turn into an inert, safe lump of nothing much, and while it's also true that a modest amount of shielding will keep the radioactivity within the the battery the while, there's the small problem that if you break the battery during its life the nasties come out."
the nastiest came out and broke your grammar checker.
Yeah, my lap is exactly where I want to put something radioactive.
I was able to tell this before reading the article.
Mr. LaForge: We're trapped by the aliens!
Wesley Crusher: Wait! We only need to realize that the sort of atomic structures that generate power when bombarded with high energy electrons are the sort that tend to fall apart when bombarded with high energy electrons.
Mr. LaForge: That.... could.... destabilize the aliens death ray....!
Wesley: Yeah, just like in the academy.
Picard: Make it so.
It might be too dangerous for the masses, but that sure doesn't scare the military. So what's the problem again?
That's generally true anyway.
The simple truth is that interstellar distances will not fit into the human imagination
- Douglas Adams
Well up until this point a battery had the potential to give you mere burns on your lap. Now it can help you with family planning! ... on a more serious note. Tritium is not a particularly dangerous thing to have leak. It finds the shortest route up and out of harms way anyway.
j'ai découvert une démonstration vraiment admirable (de ce théorème général) que cette si
Anytime anyone promises a leap in technology with an order of magnitude of improvement, it's almost always BS. Think about it, the only two possible exceptions to this in the whole of the 20th century were the atomic/hydrogen bombs and possibly the internet. Con men always give themselves away by promising too much (You're not only going to make a profit by giving your money to me, you're going to make a 10000% return!).
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
I don't know about you ... but for ANYTHING radioactive that I'm going to be sticking on my lap I want more than a "modest" amount of shielding thank you very much.
don
all language nazi's will burne in heil!
Crap, if there were such a thing as a 30 year battery, eletric cars would be no problem along with a lot of other applications that are more important than a notebook, though I would worry about the amount of energy in my lap.
Also, if it had a 30 year charge already built in, I would have to wonder what they would have sold it for?!
Did an editor ACTUALLY CHECK on the facts of a story before posting?
Cue the porcine aviators...
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
Anyway, I don't think civilians will ever see these, but the military will find uses.
All ideas^H^H^H^H^Hprocesses in this post are Patent Pending. (as well as the process of patenting all postings)
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
That in sending radioactive products into the marketplace you could assume consumers would then take responsibility to make sure the products were disposed of properly.
That part was what really disgusted me when I saw that story yesterday. If the serious plastic waste problems in the oceans don't provide ample evidence that you can't control where products end up then there are hundreds of other examples including groundwater contamination in countries across the globe from selenium and other fun stuff that are essential in consumer electronics yet toxic when dispersed into the environment at the end of their useful lives which tend to be numbered in months rather than years with defective by design components like capacitors that have shelf lives like groceries.
I googled it a bit and I read that the half life in these things was like twelve hundred years. Maybe I was missing the dot in there and it was only twelve years but even so that's far longer than the life of a consumer electronics device.
It's still safer than putting a macbook pro on your genitals ;)
welcome our new, nasty overlords...
And to take a shower/bath if your power pack leaks. :)
There have been so many reports of exploding/leaking/igniting laptop batteries that it makes me wonder how dangerous these could be. I sure wouldn't want a battery that leaks radioactive material in my lap.
while(1) attack(People.Sandy);
When I was young, before the first war, we didn't have them fancy grammar checkers or spelling checkers. When we had a paper due for our teacher, we had to look up the ASCII codes manually (most of us memorized like our multiplication tables) while punching holes in cards to feed into our mechanical computer. The grammar and spelling checker was YOU! We didn't have batteries. We had to power our computers by connecting them to mills near powerful dams. And we liked it! Then we had to manually ink our ribbon before printing. And when we went to school, we often lost our papers because it was so cold. And the roads were uphill both ways!
Get off my lawn!
*shakes cane*
Since when has a laptop (or computer of any type) *needed* 30 years of power?
To
the article is correct that radiation destroys semiconductor efficiency although not all "nuclear battery" designs involve semiconductors. space probes sometimes use a chunk of radioactive material that has shielding around it while the energy released is in the form of heat. this heat [temperature gradient] is harnessed by a thermoelectric materal- basically it consists of several layers of different metals that produce a voltage potential in response to a temperature gradient. the advantage in this is that you can use metal as shielding and not relatively fragile semiconductor material. although you need a radioisotope that can generate enough heat from decay to be useful- tritium's half-life is about 12 years so it might qualify, although a better solution might be a solid unless they use T2O, ditritium monoxide, which is "superheavy water"
Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
Who would want a 30 year old lap top?
Those two have now been going for more than 30 years, but I don't want to put their batteries on my lap, or get millions of them in land fills around the world, leaching into the ground water.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
The power demands are wildly different between a fricking SUB and a fricking LAPTOP. The power generation is also far different; subs have active fission piles, they're literally mobile nuke reactors.
Atomic batteries, on the other hand, are just storage for existing nuclear material. They generate electricity as part of the radioactive decay process, either by using the heat generated by the decay, or by harvesting the incident energy of the decay process.
Types of radioisotope batteries (like RTG's) have been used in the space program forever.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
The article (two links in) is so vague, it could be talking about anything. I suspect it could be some sort of work on a smaller, more efficient RTG, but who could tell beyond all the baseless day dreams?
Airplanes. Data transmission rates and electronics in general. Gold when compared to the dollar. Sensitivity of photographic film. All improved by at least 10X during the 20th century.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
Face it, thereis no way to encapsulate high-powerd radiological substances so nobody can get at them. But if people can get at them, the same stuff that lets it produce energy also will kill humans when finely distributed into air, water or the like. For this reason, no such battery will ever be available on the open market.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
If I want to perpetrate a scientific fraud, I need to make it not sound *too good* to be true, but still sound pretty good.
They also said no one could fly, that flight was just wishful thinking, and I'm sure they had a million "scientific" reasons for it. I think someone in 1900 would have thought it scientifically impossible to have mobile devices that emulated telephones that allowed us to talk to someone while driving our cars.
I guess my point is, unless we strive for the great achievements, then then we will be limited to minor improvements. Some of the most useful things came from "thinking big".. such as the Microwave. Maybe we'll never get a 30 year battery, but who knows what will come out of it's research, not just related to batteries.
Thats not so bad, however I would prefer a scooter with a 30 year power supply versus the laptop. An electric scooter can run on 17v and be VERY fast.
I read the article. It wasn't that interesting so I decided to rant about this saying instead.
The one that goes "If it sounds to good to be true, it probably isn't". There are numerous examples of new developments that have come along in our lifetime that sounded to good to be true when they first came out. Just because you or I or some layman journalist can't get our heads around how something beneficial works doesn't make it "too good to be true". Flying machines, fireless light and free porn with just a few clicks on our keyboard were all once considered too good to be true.
Free the Quark 3 from asymptotic confinement! Bring your charm! Don't get down! All colours and flavours welcome!
When an old scientist says something is possible, he is probably right. When an old scientist says something is impossible he is probably wrong. (I'll let you ponder the seeming paradox, but you'd have to know some old scientists to really get it.)
We already have "dirty" nuclear materials in the hands of consumers: some types of smoke detectors, lead paint detectors, x-ray machines, and some other things.
If someone wanted to make a dirty bomb, a few thousand dollars worth of the right smoke detectors would do perfectly.
A larger pool of mutants means more chance of a favorable adaptation, right?
We can't be so selfish - think of the children.
Everyone talks about evolution but nobody does anything about it.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
I thought I was fond of run-on sentences, but that was pretty silly.
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
betaparticlesonyourtesticles -Those battery "incidents" in flight, during conferences etc. should get livelier as well...
Defense contractors are always coming up with wonderful sounding ideas that are completely impractical. For example, in 1999 a company called Stavatti presented the DoD a design for a portable laser rifle suitable for use by common infantry. The device was to be powered by...wait for it... polonium (PO-210). An excerpt from the proposal:
.75 kg in a rifle that would be subject to damage, destruction and dispersal on the battlefield.
"...To increase the energy level of the CO2 N2 He gas mixture, a Zirconium-Nickel fuel rod approximately 40cm long and 1.8 cm in diameter containing approximately 740 grams (78cc) of Polonium-210 (Po-210) is contained within, and located down the centerline of, the cylindrical gas reservoir. The Po-210 provides a thermal energy source of approximately 141 watts/gram through the emission of alpha particles via the process of nuclear decay. This energy source provides a significant power density while alleviating the shielding requirements and apparent health risks associated with gamma ray emitting radionuclides. The presence of the Po-210 in the reservoir chamber will result in the delivery of approximately 104.34 kW to the CO2 N2 He gas mixture, thereby raising the gas to a state of thermal equilibrium corresponding to an internal reservoir pressure of approximately 272.1 atm, temperature of 2173.16 K and gas density of 44 kg/m3..."
You may recall that a few micrograms of PO-210 were used to kill that guy in London about a year ago, and this company has proposed putting
The paper describing the laser rifle can be found here:
http://209.85.165.104/search?q=cache:SEji6Jn6-4AJ:www.defensereview.com/352003/TIS1.pdf+pumped+polonium+laser+rifle&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=1&gl=us
So there's a risk of radioactivity leaking from the batteries?
Still sounds safer than Lithium-Ion laptop batteries supplied by Sony! Ba-duh, bum!
Adapt, adopt, or get out of the way!
And it's already in your groundwater. Tritium is Hydrogen-3, and though it's not (obviously) the most common form of hydrogen in our environment, it does exist naturally. It doesn't bind to your body if you drink it, which makes it a lot better than a lot of crap that ends up in our water, and it has a short halflife, so assuming that the batteries manage to hold together for the supposed 30 years, the amount of radioactive material available to leak out into the environment will have already dropped by more than 200%.
Voyager didn't use tritium batteries; they wouldn't have been powerful enough, or long lasting enough.
I wouldn't worry more about using this stuff (if it works) than a lithium battery. They both have their dangers. People are so damn paranoid about radiation; this is better than a lot of stuff we expose ourselves to everyday, without a thought.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
something tells me we'll need more ECC gear once we switch to those batteries.
We at slashdot are scientists, specialists and kernel hackers. Your FUD will be found out.
...running Linux?
They can be dangerous, but the precautions recommended for working safely, even with high energy, low half-life beta emitters like Phosphorous-32, are usually things you'd do anyway. People are already really irrational about radiation; if you say "dangerous" they think, "Melt your face off/make you sterile" not "Wear gloves and goggles."
Beta emitters (especially like [32]P) are bad news if consumed, but as long as there is something in between you and it, you're probably fine.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
Brilliant!
Who wants to be the first one to try to get a laptop with a radioactive battery (even a harmless radioactive battery) onto an airplane?
It's impossible to make long-term power sources from radioisotopes? Uh oh, somebody better tell the CIA that their spy satellites are going to start falling out of the sky any day now.
The article is actually better than the slashdot headline -- it gives reasons why nuclear laptop batteries seem to be commercially impractical (though I can imagine military applications), but doesn't call them an unscientific myth.
I couldn't decide whether to mod this informative or funny. That, good sir, was freaking amazing.
Earn a % of cash back from Newegg, Tiger Direct, Walmart.com, and more: http://www.mrrebates.com?refid=458505
welcome our nastie emitting overlords!
The betavoltaic battery is nothing more than pseudoscience. It's higher quality pseudoscience than junk such as zero-point free energy generators or gravity wheel generators, but it is pseudoscience nonetheless. Every few years you see these sorts of claims about betavoltaic devices pop up again, then fade away.
Despite years of claims, no one has ever come close to demonstrating a device with the sort of power densities claimed in the article. Furthermore, the biggest proponent of betavoltaic technology is Ruggero Santilli, an infamous pseudoscientist with a litany of nutty claims and bizarre theories of physics.
If you look at the web pages of the companies that are involved in betavoltaics (e.g. betavoltaic.com or nuclearsolutions.com), you'll find that they have no physical facilities outside of a rented post office box or the home of one of the principals. None of them have any product to sell or even demo. I don't expect that will ever change.
...a nuclear plant official explained at a stockholders' meeting in the eighties.
They just needed to keep the waste in an onsite holding pool for a few years, and then the government would take over. He explained that the U. S. Government made a firm commitment (he may even have mentioned a contract) to accept the plant's waste starting in 1998, when the Yucca Flats facility would begin operating.
So, what's the problem? All we need to do is make it easy for consumers to mail their dead radioactive batteries to the Yucca Flats facility.
Oh, wait...
(If he were still alive consumers could also mail them to Ronald Reagan, who stated at one point that if properly processed a year's worth of nuclear waste from a nuclear power plant could be stored under a desk...)
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
Bremsstrahlung x-ray radiation is a problem working around high-energy beta emitting radioisotopes, such as Phosphorus-32, but not Tritium, which is a very low energy beta emitter. Betavoltaics are real, workable technology; not science fiction or junk science. Cardiac pacemakers using Plutonium-238 Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generators are also a proven, decades old technology, too, for example. Tritium is an extremely low energy beta emitter. Given this, and the very short biological half-life of water in the body, it is one of the least harmful radioisotopes around. It occurs to a very small degree in nature, and is already used in radioluminescent watches, exit signs, gunsights, keyrings, compasses and such forth. The beta emission from Tritium is so low in energy that most radiation detection instruments will not detect it - only mixing the radioactive material with the scintillation cocktail in a liquid scintillation counter is sensitive enough to detect it. A gamma spectrometer, scintillation counter, geiger counter, ion chamber counter or detector won't even notice it.
Excuse me, but it sounds to me that the title is wrong.
If it was to be said to be a 'Scientific Myth', then the thing can indeed not reliably be built because it does not conform to the laws of sciences. It is essentially unscientific.
But if it is said to be an 'Unscientific Myth' (see Title of story), then the thing is essentially not unscientific. Therefore it is plausible and can be built.
Kinda impractical to stuff your laptop with several million gallons of radioactive waste.
Notebook obsolete in 3.
Bremsstrahlung is only a problem when using dense shielding materials (like lead). If you're shielding from betas with plastic or skin, you don't get sudden braking and hence don't get x-ray production. If lead were a major component in laptop batteries, I think that they'd be unpopular for other, non-radioactive reasons. Anyway, you'll not be doing much damage with a 5 keV electron. The majority of the bremsstrahlung produced by these electrons is around 100 eV or lower (extreme UV to soft X-rays) and there isn't much of it produced.
If you want a vision of the future, imagine a youtube comments section scrolling - forever.
This is another of those hard to die myths that will have to be debunked over and over again. Consider:
a)Butter has a higher energy density than a laptop battery
b)The hydrogen in a cup of water, if fusioned all the way to iron, would release enough energy to flatten a city ( or power it for our entire lifetime).
c)A lithium battery holding 0 charge is just as flamable and dangerous as a fully charged one.
I think this myth came about because people figured nuclear = dangerous, and Li-ion = dangerous. In reality things are far from that simple. It is not the energy density of Li-ion batteries that cause them to explode, as an example, it is the fact that they contain lithium, which is a very reactive alkali metal. As I already mentioned, a completely depleted Li-ion battery could still catch fire, and if you pulverised it and poured water on it, it would literarely explode as the liberated hydrogen ignited.
For a car, you could vitrify an isotope like Plutonium-238, forming a very inert ceramic rod which would produce heat at a perfectly predictable rate. It would also be very safe since even if the ZOMG terrorists tried to use it in a dirty bomb, the inert nature of the ceramic would keep the plutonium contained, and as a pure alpha-emitter enclosed in a ceramic, there would be virtually no mentionable radiation release. To give you an idea of how safe such a device could be. They have been used to power pacemakers.
It would also be absolutely useless for a nuclear weapon, even if the pure Pu-238 could be recovered, since weapons need very pure Pu-239. Just the heat generated from Pu-238 would make a fission weapon virtually impossible, and the neutronic properties make it absolutely useless.
The only reasonable risk I could see from such a device would be if it was left in a very enclosed space so that the heat generated would start a fire. This is however a fairly limited engineering problem which is not unique to RTGs. Similar precautions are needed for electric heaters and engines.
Main disadvantage is the ( at present ) fairly high price of Pu-238. Producing it in quantity is a fairly complex process, and it would probably be a lot cheaper to just use regular battery electric vehicles.
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Comment removed based on user account deletion
It's electrically like water but is three times heavier, changing the shape and chemical characterists when combined in other molecules. This is not good. And even where this isn't a problem, after a while (fairly short time really), it decays which is quite a problem when it's part of the water system that is your body.
Uranium is practically benign in comparison.
"Slashdot requires you to wait between each successful posting of a comment to allow everyone a fair chance at posting a comment.
It's been 23 minutes since you last successfully posted a comment"
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If drinking diet coke, being exposed to the sun on a cloudy day and cell phones cause cancer just imaging what this thing on your lap would do to your...boyz! :-(
I'll bet they can make a freaking awesome movie about this. Maybe even three of them.
Make the power connector and battery bay standardized (like AAs) and you could just keep the same batteries you had from your last laptop and use it with your new one.
Well these sort of batteries DO work and work very well.
The Voyager and Pioneer spacecraft were powered by a similar sort of thing
(using Plutonium decay). When you're a zillion miles from the sun, there
ISN'T much else you CAN use for power.
A disposable battery with a 30-year power capacity is a good start. But eventually somebody will figure out how to make a rechargeable version. And what that happens, your next laptop will come with instructions to "Ensure that the battery is fully charged before you use the laptop for the first time. To do that, plug in the laptop and let it charge for 12 years."
If the polonium-210 generates 141W/g, that means over 104kW per 750g.
And that thermal energy source does not shut off, when heated,
as the energy does come from natural radioactivity.
Does that not mean a thermal meltdown of the gun only few moments after
after it has been assembled?
The paper states, there should be a radiator to dissipate the heat...
maybe to the air.... as someone should carry the gun...
If air is warmed by 50 degrees Celsius in the radiator of the gun,
how much cooling gas do we need? About 1,3m^3 per second?
Suppose the air intake is 10x10cm (it is a gun!) the speed of
the air in the the intake has to be 130m/s?
Quite a blower.
Fantastic as the vaporizer for spectrometer on the Mars Science Lab, though. Unfortunately, that project is being castrated for a mere 4% of the cost of the rover. Radionucleotides can be safely packaged. RTGs entered the atmosphere and crashed into the ocean when Apollo 13 returned to Earth. No radioactive release occurred. They are contained in very strong titanium packages. The tritium for the battery is trivial. The laser rifle might not be so impractical, though I'm worried about how you are going to dump all of that heat. Might be better mounted on a HMMV.
Sorry, yea, 2.5 half-lives, so 2^-2.5 (~17) percent remains. I'm off caffeine, and it's showing.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
What we need now is for someone to invent the lead plated jockstrap and we're set...
The first problem is your assumption that they are using radium when they are really using tritium. With tritium, a Hydrogen-3 atom has a neutron decay to a proton, giving off an electron. There are 6.022*10^23 tritium atoms in about 3 grams. If you have 1 kilogram of tritium, 500 grams will decay over 12 years, giving off a total of 1*10^27 electrons. That averages to 2.6*10^18 electrons per second, or about 0.42 Ampere average.
The major problem though is that each electron given off will be moving through the wires to create current. In actuality, there will be a material collecting the high-energy electrons and converting them to electricity. One 0.01859 MeV electron caused by tritiium decay will push more than one electron through the wire. If you take that decay energy and the said 25% energy conversion... You get 3.25E-15 joules per decay. With 1kg of tritium and 500g decaying over 12 years, that's 1E26 decays, or 3.25E11 joules of energy. That converts to 9.4E7 watt-hours. That equates to 860 watts of average energy. Take that down to the 50 watts or so a laptop would use, and you could get by with about 2 ounces of tritium.
I forgot to take the 25% energy conversion efficiency into account, so it would actually take about 8 ounces or 1/2 pound of tritium to give an average of 50 watts over 12 years...
This is such a stupid worry. We're kept from having a really useful tool because somebody could, possibly, break it? Just encase it in something really hard to break and let it fly. I can't think of anyone that's accidently broken a laptop battery open anyway and if they do it on purpose then it's no different than if they went out of their way to do something else dangerous. We didn't ban smoke detectors and microwave ovens because some looney could possibly use them to make a radioactive mess.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
Technically, the authors are incorrect in saying that this is a 30-year battery. It is not a battery. It is a micro power plant. The radioactive isotope method of producing energy is the same power source as what space exploration vehicles operating outside the orbit of mars use. Whenever NASA launches a mission to a far reach of solar system, there is usually a radioactive isotope battery power source on board, and thousands of protesters near the launch site. The protesters' rationale is that if something went wrong and there was en explosion, then harmful radioactive toxins would be released into the atmosphere. The extend of damage would be limited however, since this form of radiation is not nearly as harmful as the type of fuel that is involved in fission reactors.
Look up lighthouse batteries, and maybe lighthouse battery thefts. ...it's scary stuff, but was the first thing I thought of when I read radioisotope battery... ...of course these would be safer - I'm thinking Americium as a source as it's very energetic but relatively safe and controllable. Tritium would just be begging for a rupture in one in a million units if you ask me. Don't get me wrong - I like Tritium - I have some in a glowing keychain and a set of handgun sights and it's quite safe. Negligible radiation outside of either product. But enough to generate useful energy could be quite harmful if released into a poorly ventilated area (car, bedroom) and then inhaled.
These batteries can last a very long time with huge power output - they also put off huge amounts of heat, and sometimes ridiculous amounts of radiation, especially when they sit around discarded and rusting out, or are torn open by metal scavengers.
Nuclear batteries have been around for a very, very long time. And they will certainly run for 30+ years continuously. More to the point, tritium is a weak beta emitter, and will degrade whatever material far less than traditional nuclear battery materials. Making the claim the materials would degrade before 30 years is simply incorrect, and there are numerous examples of nuclear batteries that have been in service that long. The nuclear material decays first. Period. (and given tritium's T1/2 you'd have to use a lot of extra tritium to make it viable after 30 years at a certain power output level)
The author makes a point of stating "only 25 watts per kilo". Of course, a laptop draws about 10 watts with good power management. So the nuclear battery, according to his stats, would weigh less than a pound. (I suspect however, that a nuclear battery could not be that light, because tritium simply doesn't emit that much energy. For something more radioactive like Am-241 I could believe it. But you'd need a *lot* of tritium to generate 10 watts, and it would be very expensive. Even condensed as tritiated water under pressure, I'm not sure it'd fit into a practical volume, or be cost-effective.)
Further, stating there's a danger of release of radioactivity is just more typically ignorant anti-nuclear FUD. The battery would be likely sealed and constructed in such a way that it would be almost impossible to break. This isn't difficult; my USB flash drive can handle a semi truck driving over it.
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Then of course there is the toxicity of tritium, biologically very mutagenic, easily absorbed into the Gastro intestinal tract and lungs, decreased brain weight, retardation, shrinkage of male and female reproductive organs ovarian tumors, chromosomal breaks and abberations perinatal mortality. Then of course it's worse when it's organically bound to food, eaten and organically bound inside the body...
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
People don't throw out thermostats quite as frequently as they will bulbs, and not usually in such large quantities. In my home alone I have 85 bulbs, I just now walked around with a notepad and started noting how many I saw in each room. Of those, I have five CFLs, but I stopped adopting them after I learned about the mercury. I used to have eight, but three of them went bad within a year (they're supposed to last seven years I thought) and I threw them in the trash before I understood they were dangerous. I would have eventually converted my entire home to CFLs if I had kept on that path.
Most people aren't this conscientious, and even if they knew it was harmful to humans/animals they're not going to make an effort to safely dispose of the contaminates or to stop buying these bulbs. Many people buy these bulbs for their longevity, and the energy savings, and some for the environment. This *is* going to be a giant landfill problem in the future. There's no way to stop it now really, even with the knowledge that these contain mercury people are still buying them in record numbers. The genie is out of the bottle.
Here's a story which people are calling an urban legend which is actually true and happened in Maine, the account is accurate. What was left out is any follow up, after the clean up contractor showed up, they tested the area again and found no contamination over 300 ng/m3 (the state limit), on the carpet as the toxicologist had on the previous visit, it probably dispersed into the environment as fumes. However, they removed the carpet anyways.
The story:
"According to an April 12 article in The Ellsworth American, Brandy Bridges had the misfortune of breaking a CFL during installation in her daughter's bedroom: It dropped and shattered on the carpeted floor. Aware that CFLs contain potentially hazardous substances, Bridges called her local Home Depot for advice. The store told her that the CFL contained mercury and that she should call the Poison Control hotline, which in turn directed her to the Maine Department of Environmental Protection.
The DEP sent a specialist to Bridges' house to test for mercury contamination. The specialist found mercury levels in the bedroom in excess of six times the state's "safe" level for mercury contamination of 300 billionths of a gram per cubic meter. The DEP specialist recommended that Bridges call an environmental cleanup firm, which reportedly gave her a "low-ball" estimate of US$2,000 to clean up the room. The room then was sealed off with plastic and Bridges began "gathering finances" to pay for the US$2,000 cleaning. Reportedly, her insurance company wouldn't cover the cleanup costs because mercury is a pollutant.
As each CFL contains five milligrams of mercury, at the Maine "safety" standard of 300 nanograms per cubic meter, it would take 16,667 cubic meters of soil to "safely" contain all the mercury in a single CFL. While CFL vendors and environmentalists tout the energy cost savings of CFLs, they conveniently omit the personal and societal costs of CFL disposal."
And, the local government of Maine's official explanation of the incident:
http://www.maine.gov/dep/rwm/homeowner/pdf/prospecthistory.pdf
Now, in reality there's not much mercury in an individual bulb to really cause much of a problem but if all 85 of the bulbs in my home were CFLs and something like an earthquake caused many of them to shatter it would render the home inhabitable. How likely that is to happen, though?
In any event, they're going to end up in the landfills out of apathy. Look forward to increased levels of autism among the population in the coming decades.
Guys & Gals,
So many complaints of "I don't want to see this crap in a landfill". First off the article initially indicates it is a 30 year battery. Even if that is a crock of poo the half life on the material used is only around 12 years. IE the stuff in the landfill is well no longer a problem other than it being the same type of crap you think is "okay" to throw in a landfill.
Right now this world needs to find more efficent methods to generate power due to the constantly increasing dependancy/demand on electricity. This at least is a good start.
Did it work? Oh sure there were probably plenty of reasons based on safety and sanity as to why this was a BAD idea as a MAN PORTABLE weapon, but what interests me was, Did it work? You see while it might not be reasonable for a man portable weapon (although you might be surprised at what the calculus of war can make reasonable) it might have been perfectly suitable as an anti-missile or anti-aircraft weapon, a strafing weapon to replace the electric mini-guns on a US gunship, or for anti-satellite weapon in orbit. Simply because the proposed design is not suitable for what is was proposed for doesn't mean it's worthless.
Tesla, the company that's making the ultra-fast electric car, claims that battery capacity doubles every 5 years. This means that, 30 years from now, a laptop that can run for 2 hours on a charge will be able to run for 128 hours!
No, I will not work for your startup
The radioisotope thermoelectric generators in Voyager I and II have laster 30 years. They are a bit larger than laptop batteries, but that's the same principle, isn't it?
Whose gonna want to have the same laptop for 30 years?
Disadvantage: this battery has no off switch.
If you are in a plane and they ask you to turn it off.. then well that energy has to go somewhere....
Edit: s/and, banker's boxes/20 banker's boxes/