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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.
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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!