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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.
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
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!
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
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.
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*
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?
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.
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.
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
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.
The obvious answer is the lifetime of the laptop. For me, that would be about three-four years. A lot less than thirty. Even that is a bit long though. I may use a laptop for three years, but I don't use it away from mains power for three years. Most days, I sleep somewhere with mains power so I could easily charge it overnight. If I sleep 8 hours a day, then 16 hours of battery life would be enough. This doesn't count travelling, however. If I am travelling, I may go for a few days between charges. Two days of the laptop being on all of the time I am awake would be 32 hours, which is less than an order of magnitude more than I get already. As long as it's a battery that can be charged easily, a 32 hour battery would see most of my power needs quite nicely.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
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.
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.
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.
Kinda impractical to stuff your laptop with several million gallons of radioactive waste.
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.
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.