How do plutonium-powered pacemakers work?

#1

Post by luu » Mon, Jan 15, 2018, 1:12 AM UTC

How do plutonium-powered pacemakers work?
blog.plover.com

Re: How do plutonium-powered pacemakers work?

#2

Post by saagarjha » Mon, Jan 15, 2018, 1:38 AM UTC

How long to these pacemakers last? Have people had to get the plutonium "batteries" replaced?

Re: How do plutonium-powered pacemakers work?

#3

Post by QAPereo » Mon, Jan 15, 2018, 1:55 AM UTC

saagarjha wrote: post #2

How long to these pacemakers last? Have people had to get the plutonium "batteries" replaced?

http://www.prutchi.com/pdf/implantable/nuclear_pacemakers.pd...

Last paragraph on page 2... quite a long damned time; by 35 years it was still going strong.

Re: How do plutonium-powered pacemakers work?

#4

Post by fratlas » Mon, Jan 15, 2018, 2:09 AM UTC

Dumb question, but would it be possible to have a nuclear-powered object in your body producing energy for your body to use?

Re: How do plutonium-powered pacemakers work?

#5

Post by Rjevski » Mon, Jan 15, 2018, 2:14 AM UTC

fratlas wrote: post #4

Dumb question, but would it be possible to have a nuclear-powered object in your body producing energy for your body to use?

Keeping nuclear material (safely) in your body is the easy part, the hard part is converting that energy into something your body can use. The issue is, our (badly designed) meat-hardware runs on glucose instead of heat or electricity, and there's no easy (or any way that I know of really, but then I'm not a scientist) to convert heat/electricity into glucose.

Re: How do plutonium-powered pacemakers work?

#6

Post by acidburnNSA » Mon, Jan 15, 2018, 2:15 AM UTC

saagarjha wrote: post #2

How long to these pacemakers last? Have people had to get the plutonium "batteries" replaced?

The half-life of Pu-238 (the isotope used in these) is 87.7 years [1]. So they pretty much last a lifetime. For the same reason, Voyager 1 is still kicking even though it's out of the solar system [2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plutonium-238

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyager_1

Re: How do plutonium-powered pacemakers work?

#7

Post by bruxis » Mon, Jan 15, 2018, 2:17 AM UTC

I did not know about these. They are so cool!

I wonder how long a plutonium-powered cell phone could operate...

Re: How do plutonium-powered pacemakers work?

#8

Post by acidburnNSA » Mon, Jan 15, 2018, 2:22 AM UTC

FTA:

> I wondered if there wasn't also worry about plutonium being recovered for weapons use, but the risk seems much smaller

The answer here is a simple "nope." Plutonium in radioisotopic thermal generators is always Plutonium-238 with a 87.7 year half-life. You can't make bombs out of it. The fissile isotopes of Plutonium are 239 (24,000 year half-life) and 241 (14 year half-life, but a beta emitter instead of alpha). The fission cross section (probability) of Pu-238 is >100 less than Pu-239 for a "normal-speed" neutron and also a lot less at fission-spectrum energies.

Re: How do plutonium-powered pacemakers work?

#9

Post by ComputerGuru » Mon, Jan 15, 2018, 2:23 AM UTC

bruxis wrote: post #7

I did not know about these. They are so cool! I wonder how long a plutonium-powered cell phone could operate...

It wouldn’t really be feasible, the power requirements would require a large amount.

Re: How do plutonium-powered pacemakers work?

#10

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Jan 15, 2018, 2:26 AM UTC

acidburnNSA wrote: post #6

saagarjha wrote: post #2

How long to these pacemakers last? Have people had to get the plutonium "batteries" replaced?

The half-life of Pu-238 (the isotope used in these) is 87.7 years [1]. So they pretty much last a lifetime. For the same reason, Voyager 1 is still kicking even though it's out of the solar system [2]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plutonium-238 [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyager_1

[deleted]