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.

Comments

Re:Quick question

[Hallux-F-Sinister]

Is "3,300 milliwatt-hours" the same as 3.3 Watt-hours?

Or should we really be measuring this in Libraries of Congress?

It does seem to be the same, but from TFA, that number was PER GRAM. A Lithium-Ion battery by contrast, (which had the highest energy density I found for a common chemical battery,) a quick web search reveals an average of about 129 milliwatt-hours per gram, and less for each of the other popular battery technologies currently seeing widespread use, including alkaline, NiMH, Nickel Cadmium and Carbon-Zinc. Getting 3.3 watt-hours out of each gram of a battery would be impressive, but there are probably other barriers to widespread adoption as a replacement or alternative to Li-ion or NiMH batteries in things like smartphones.

How much shielding does such a battery need? How great is the health risk if one leaks, or is damaged? What happens when internet-morons start drilling holes in them because they heard someone say they work even better that way, and fine particles of nickel-63 get released into the air and are subsequently inhaled, either by said internet-morons, or by people unfortunate enough to be near them? What else can nickel-63 be made into, i.e., if they start letting everyone have this stuff in abundance, can it be used somehow to fabricate something you'd rather not have everyone having one of, i.e., could it be used to simplify the making of U-235 out of something else? For example, if you took radon gas (which naturally emanates from soil in some parts of the world, such as much of the United States,) and place it under pressure near nickel-63, does the plate develop a coating of U-235? Now, I'm not even hypothesizing that's possible, just asking IF turning a radioactive isotope of something into a common consumer good is a good idea, since it is not that hard to get one kind of stuff to change into another if you know what you're doing. There are watch-dials and gun-sights that are (or were) commonly available for people to buy that turned an isotope of hydrogen into helium, not by fusion, (as I initially thought when I heard of these things,) but through decay, in a fashion that sounds similar to what these guys have done, but using the shed beta-particle to induce electrical current, rather than exciting an atom of phosphorus, causing it to spit out a photon, or whatever.

What I wonder though, is this: Does a battery that produces energy like this through radioactive decay work like a chemical battery? I.e., since the power is being produced by radioactive decay, it isn't really doing so on-demand, like a chemical battery does. In a chemical battery, aside from loss due to internal energy leakage, in theory, it should last forever until used. In theory of course, with NO loss due to internal leakage, the chemical reaction is CHECKED, is halted, by the fact that the electrons saturate the anode (unless I have it backwards) and the salt-bridge fills up until a circuit is completed, giving those electrons somewhere to go, so as to get around to the cathode, (again, unless I have it backwards,) to be reunited with what crossed the salt-bridge. With a radioactive-decay battery, the decay events will occur without regard to whether there's a circuit attached to it, meaning it will start "discharging," as it were, as soon as it's manufactured, and will have other properties dissimilar to chemical batteries as well. If you short-circuit a chemical battery, the reaction will happen inside much faster than it's designed to be able to handle, in terms of heat dissipation, meaning probably catastrophic failure and either a leak, a fire, or an explosion as it builds, depending on the battery, and how lucky you are. If you short THIS kind of battery out, it should do nothing but provide the maximum current its physical makeup is designed to support, provided all the components, (plates, wires, etc.,) can withstand max current, and produce nothing but THAT, even with it shorted completely, and continue chugging along, kind