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Russian Scientists Upgrade Nuclear Battery Design To Increase Power Output (sciencealert.com)
schwit1 shares a report from ScienceAlert: A team of Russian researchers have put a new spin on technology that uses the beta decay of a radioactive element to create differences in voltage. The devices are made of stacks of isotope of nickel-63 sandwiched between a pair of special semiconducting diodes called a Schottky barrier. This barrier keeps a current headed one way, a feature often used to turn alternating currents into direct ones. Finding that the optimal thickness of each layer was just 2 micrometers, the researchers were able to maximize the voltage produced by every gram of isotope.
Nickel-63 has a half-life of just over 100 years, which in an optimized system like this adds up to 3,300 milliwatt-hours of energy per gram: ten times the specific energy of your typical electrochemical cell. It's a significant step up from previous nickel-63 betavoltaic devices, and while it isn't quite enough to power your smart phone, it does bring it into a realm of being useful for a wide variety of tasks.
Nickel-63 has a half-life of just over 100 years, which in an optimized system like this adds up to 3,300 milliwatt-hours of energy per gram: ten times the specific energy of your typical electrochemical cell. It's a significant step up from previous nickel-63 betavoltaic devices, and while it isn't quite enough to power your smart phone, it does bring it into a realm of being useful for a wide variety of tasks.
Buying a 100-year-old Tesla and having to replace the original battery.
Fake news
Indeed. This may very well have been leaked/STOLEN information given by the TRUMP administration to the Kremlin in order to further their nuclear program.
Funny how that works.
I'd rather have a nuclear battery in a pacemaker that lasts a lifetime than having to deal with surgery every 10 years to replace a conventional one, risking infection and other complications.
I said it before and I will say it again: I want my nuclear powered car! I must have my nuclear car.
You can't handle the truth.
Isn't beta-decay a process that produces exponentially less energy over time? Like, after 100 years, it'll still produce half the voltage (or amperage) out. After 200, 25%. But after 25 years it'll only produce 70.7% of the output, which may not be enough. Or it could be more than enough at 200 years.
Your ad here. Ask me how!
But after 25 years it'll only produce 70.7% of the output, which may not be enough
That's better than most conventional batteries after 25 years.
Nickel-63 is an artificial isotope, which means it has to be made; But, it only decays by beta decay, so a piece of foil (or a deposited schottky barrier) will prevent that from escaping.
Pu RTG's put out everything from alphas to heavy fission gammas and neutrons, so this is a gogolplex better from any radioactivity standpoint.
I hope this takes off; it all depends on what it costs to make a gram. A 3300mAh lithium battery is about $1 in quantity, but has a very limited lifetime.
Truth isn't Truth - Guliani
That would require a temperature gradient.
http://oakridgetoday.com/2018/...
Truth isn't Truth - Guliani
Dude . . . really?
You act surprised. Let me guess. You are from the Bible Belt.
Is "3,300 milliwatt-hours" the same as 3.3 Watt-hours?
Or should we really be measuring this in Libraries of Congress?
No sig today...
But after 25 years it'll only produce 70.7% of the output
The fraction of remaining power = exp(-t * ln(2)/100)
So after 25 years, it will be a 84%. It will be at 70.7% after 50 years. If that isn't enough, then just make the battery 40% bigger.
If you read the https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0925963517307495 you find that the actual power density is 10uW/cm^3, which is really very very poor compared to batteries. Yes, it will run for many years without charging, but it won't run a very big load.
that is 3.3 watt/hours per gram. According to my calculations, you can use a 80 kg battery can easily power a Tesla for the next 100 years. A Model S can do 320kw/hour. No supercharger needed. Another option is to use a 16Kg battery which will charge the battery packs. Only in extreme use, long trips, etc. you may need an outside charge.
Fight Spammers!
Everybody has a bad day once in a while, but to make them further apart my free advice is to not talk about that again.
Poe's law may require revision
It's not the internet that turns people into self parody, just being a lefty seems to work.
Yup, thanks for the correction!
Your ad here. Ask me how!
http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/v...
These look like good things for deep space missions, but where else would you find a good use for them, that solar couldn't do more effectively?
This won't be cost-effective until the database 'cares' about black victims.
Sorry I'm not interested in lame beta decay batteries at this time, but do call me when they legalize Plutonium RTGs.
Come on stop with the conspiracy theories. I want my nuclear powered iPhone.
Science advances one funeral at a time- Max Planck
Yeah I noticed that they were measuring the output in microAmps. I don't have anything that can run on something like 60 uA. Load capacity is always the problem with betavoltaics. I wonder how hard it would be to put a million of these in parallel though. That could make for a very interesting battery depending on the size and weight involved.
Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.
So who says a communist country cant invent something that isnt from the war department? And if Russia isn't a communist nation why are we treating it as a enemy nation?
Apples and oranges, really.
A major difference between decay and conventional batteries are that decay batteries run continuously. For all that we know we can't affect the rate at which nuclear decay happens. It just happens. Therefore such a device will produce those (ideal) 3.3Wh whether you need it or not. On the other hand they can't produce more than that whether you need it or not. A conventional battery may run dry pretty quickly, but it does so by providing a relatively high electrical current, which may be needed for some applications. So if you want a decay battery to do something similar you need at least some intermediate energy storage device like a capacitor or a conventional battery that stores enough energy to support a high current for a period of time. So in the end you may still need a conventional battery in addition to your nuclear decay battery.
Half life is 100 years.
So, half, that is 5 times the chemical batteries is available over 100 years. Right?
So, on average, 1/20 of the energy is available per year .
That works out to 1/7300 per day. But the decay is exponential, so we need a correction from mean to peak. Let us be generous and round up e (=2.7182818) to 3. So you are looking at 1/2500 of chemical battery energy per day. Divide by another 86400 to get per second. That is the max power out put of this device. Looks like you would be better off harvesting the power from local WiFi signals.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Why don't they dope the semiconductor substrate with radioactive isotope beta-emitters? Talking about some *real* n-dopant donating electrons (Beta particles). Or, if they already use Schottky diodes where anode is a metal, use Nickel-63 as the metal of choice?
I wonder if anyone, back then in the "nukes are cool" time, made miniature vacuum tubes with beta emitters providing free electrons instead of using glow heaters for that.
The answer to that question is always: they don't want to tell us the actual performance because it is so incredibly bad.
Always be skeptical when you see great numbers for "theoretical" performance but not a single mention of real device performance.
How much shielding does such a battery need?
Betas don't penetrate very far. You need a few hundred microns of shielding-- the thickness of the case is going to be fine.
Reporters probably aren't going to introduce a mistake specifying uW, especially not using the proper letter mu instead of u.
correction - 10uW/cm^3. Forgot that Slashdot doesn't support unicode.
And the correction shows why the assumption in the first point is not a good one to make. Errors can be introduced in formatting and editing even if the original article as written was correct.
Also worth watching for, a mu (micron symbol) will turn into the letter m if the original text used a symbol font for mu, and at any point in the process the font gets changed from the reporter's font choice to some standard used by the publication. This happens.
There are several "cluelessness markers in this article, this is just one of them. This indicated that the whole article may be complete nonsense or at least give a very skewed picture ow what was actually found here.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Battery charges You!
I certainly do have applications that can run on 60uA amortized. Charge a capacitor while drawing 100nA, to use during the short periods where you need to consume a few mA.
A million in parallel is a metric ton, right?
the growth in cynicism and rebellion has not been without cause
Every decay works like that ...
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Substances with long half-lives aren't hot enough to easily extract energy from beta decay, substances with short half lives are more radioactive than you'd like.
From Wiki:
December 2001 â" Three lumberjacks in the nation of Georgia found two warm canisters near their camp and spent the night beside them. The canisters were discarded, unshielded heat sources from Soviet radioisotope thermoelectric generators, each containing 30 kCi (1.1 PBq) of 90Sr.[47] The lumberjacks started showing symptoms of radiation sickness within hours, and were subsequently hospitalized with severe radiation burns.[48] The disposal team consisted of 25 men who were restricted to 40 seconds' worth of exposure each while transferring the canisters to lead-lined drums.[49]
So, Sr90, not Pu-238.
Truth isn't Truth - Guliani
3.3Wh/gram sounds a lot but usability evaporates when taking the half-life of Ni63->Cu63 decay into account: 3.3Wh / 24 /365 / 100 / 3.3V == 1.141e-6A == 1.14 (insert UTF8 greek micro)A. The 3.3V is just an example.
It will deliver 3.3W at any point in time; if you draw more, the voltage will sag.
Combining 10000 of these will power a house.
A watt is Joules per second:
Wiki:
In the International System of Units (SI) it is defined as a derived unit of 1 joule per second,[1] and is used to quantify the rate of energy transfer.
Truth isn't Truth - Guliani
Surprised? No. Curious? Yes. So, in your mind someone not favoring troll posts & idiocy is likely from the Bible Belt? Interesting theory. There may be some truth to it. But that does leave some interesting questions about you and your heritage.
You've abused your modpoint privileges and I hope they get taken away from you. THAT post wasn't flaimbait, dipshit. THIS one may be, sure. But THAT one was not. Too bad there's no system (or is there one?) for reporting inappropriate moderation.
Either you clicked the wrong one, (in which case you're incompetent,) or you don't know what "flaimbait" means, in either case, you should not be allowed modpoints. There was nothing deliberately inflamatory in this post, and it should have been moderated either +1, Interesting... +1, Insightful, or perhaps +1, Underrated.
No reasonable person would read that post and say, "Oh, man... he's trying to start a flameware!" Only a fool would conclude that. Does anyone know how to fix this? Because this is kind of bullshit right here.
To the thoughtless asshole who modded this flaimbait: instead of abusing your moderation privileges, why not reply like a fucking adult, and actually address the points I brought up, instead of trying to supress what I said? Are you involved in the research, in which case you have a conflict of interest and shouldn't be moderating discussions ABOUT the research in the first place, in which case you're unethical and shouldn't be allowed mod points? Or are you a childish asshole who mods things down because someone was mean to you and you just couldn't handle it?
See, THIS post could be viewed as flaimbait. It's not, it's a legitimate gripe about some idiot abusing his mod points, but I'm sure it will be modded down too.
This begs the question why I am wasting my time venting about this trivial injustice, but the same could be asked about why I wrote the original post, or even look at slashdot. And it's a good question. Some people play video games. Some people read slashdot. Neither's really a productive activity, but that doesn't mean much in the end, since given the ultimate futility of life itself, there's really no such thing as a productive activity. I come here because it's a slightly more intellectual activity than... well, some things.
Our reign has gone on long enough. Indeed. Summon the meteors.