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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."
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
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.
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.
Who would want a 30 year old lap top?
Stop putting CFLs in your bathroom. They might have "lifetime hours" printed on the packaging to be able to compare them to incandescent, but the mechanism for failure is quite different.
The incandescent will fail after roughly the specified number hours no matter how you use it*. The fluorescent will fail after a number of starts equivalent to moderate usage over that specified number of hours. If you conserve starts, they should last for far longer than the indicated time. If you flip them on&off a lot, they should fail much sooner.
*except if you use a dimmer. The useful lifetime depends on the temperature of the filament, which is also what determines the brightness.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
That's more quality control than anything else. As demand for CFLs has increased, more and more no-name manufacturers are trying to get in on the action. Increasingly, they are skimping on quality control to try to appeal to price conscious consumers.
We all know what to do, but we don't know how to get re-elected once we have done it
It doesn't really work that way...I mean, plutonium has a frick-ton of potential energy, but it's not going to catch fire and explode your house under normal circumstances.
The same goes double for tritium, because tritium is relatively innocuous as far as radioactive materials go. Tritium is a hydrogen isotope...That means if its out in the environment it's probably either going to be a gas or a liquid, and that gas is going to be chemically very similar to hydrogen gas(it'll have 1 extra proton and be a weak beta emitter), and that liquid is going to be chemically similar to water(ditto).
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
In addition, with the CF, there's a non-zero probability of the mercury remaining sequestered in the glass tube. Even better, we COULD set up a recycling program. Burning coal disperses 100% of the mercury into the environment with little hope of recovery unless you count bioaccumulation in human beings as recovery.
100% huh? I guess we're back to 1870 when no one has heard of a scrubber.
I have read credible reports that the mercury in a CFL is less than mercury vented from a coal plant powering a incandescent bulb, it is important to realize that most of the mercury in the coal is captured and properly disposed of, not vented to the atmosphere.
Interesting aside, a leading contributor to atmospheric mercury emissions is crematoriums (who typically don't have scrubbers) cremating people with mercury containing amalgam fillings.
Google it.
Kneel Before Christ!
Not to mention, as the Compact Fluorescent Lamp Recycling Project notes, of that couple milligrams of mercury in a bulb, not all of it is released even with improper disposal. They cite the EPA as giving the following numbers:
Municipal waste landfill: 3.2%
Recycling: 3%
Municipal waste incineration: 17.55%
Hazardous waste disposal: 0.2%.
Interesting to note that recycling is barely better than landfill disposal. However, landfill disposal entombs the mercury, while recycling reuses it, which is obviously a better solution.
Kneel Before Christ!
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.