Turning nuclear waste into diamond batteries • Hacker News Board

Re: Turning nuclear waste into diamond batteries

#21

Post by marcosdumay » Sat, Apr 23, 2022, 9:19 PM UTC

tragictrash wrote: post #16

kgc wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pacemaker?

The pacemaker is probably only designed to last for 50 or so years. I'm not an expert, looking up the statistics, that seeems to be a very generous estimation. So you want to put a power source that can last hundreds of thousands of years in a device that's going to last 50, at great expense?

Well, there aren't many reliable chemical battery designs that can last for a few decades. We have stuff that lasts for at most one decade or two, and we have the nuclear stuff.

Of course, if you are using the nuclear stuff, you will prefer something shorter lived, so you can use a smaller battery. But I don't see why that huge objection on using the longer lived stuff too.

Re: Turning nuclear waste into diamond batteries

#22

Post by fsflover » Sat, Apr 23, 2022, 9:24 PM UTC

jannemann wrote: post #19

> Nuclear power is considered a clean energy source because it has zero carbon dioxide emissions; This is flat out wrong. Containing, mining, recycling and long term storage are so extremely costly and energy hungry that it does not make any economically sense in mid term to use nuclear power. And do not forget. Nuclear is not renewable. It has to be mined. There are mines which will be empty sooner than generally ex…

>> Nuclear power is considered a clean energy source because it has zero carbon dioxide emissions;

> This is flat out wrong.

No, it's not: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26673987 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26603464.

Re: Turning nuclear waste into diamond batteries

#23

Post by Manuel_D » Sat, Apr 23, 2022, 9:37 PM UTC

jannemann wrote: post #19

> Nuclear power is considered a clean energy source because it has zero carbon dioxide emissions; This is flat out wrong. Containing, mining, recycling and long term storage are so extremely costly and energy hungry that it does not make any economically sense in mid term to use nuclear power. And do not forget. Nuclear is not renewable. It has to be mined. There are mines which will be empty sooner than generally ex…

Nuclear has the lowest net CO2 emissions per unit of energy besides hydroelectricity [1]. Waste recycling would make known terrestrial reserves last for several thousand years. Furthermore, seawater extraction would make nuclear effectively unlimited [2].

You can pedantically point out that nuclear isn't truly unlimited. But once you're getting to the point of energy sources lasting millions of years, the term "renewable" becomes academic. You could just as easily point out that the sun will eventually run out of hydrogen.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life-cycle_greenhouse_gas_emis...

2. https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2016/07/01/uranium-s...

Re: Turning nuclear waste into diamond batteries

#24

Post by belorn » Sat, Apr 23, 2022, 9:52 PM UTC

jannemann wrote: post #19

> Nuclear power is considered a clean energy source because it has zero carbon dioxide emissions; This is flat out wrong. Containing, mining, recycling and long term storage are so extremely costly and energy hungry that it does not make any economically sense in mid term to use nuclear power. And do not forget. Nuclear is not renewable. It has to be mined. There are mines which will be empty sooner than generally ex…

Following that there does not exist an energy source that is zero carbon dioxide emissions. Just mining iron cost a lot of energy, pollutes the environment and cost a lot of energy. All current built wind and solar panels that include steel are built using processes that burn fossil fuel. If we look at plastic used in those the picture get even worse.

Re: Turning nuclear waste into diamond batteries

#25

Post by lazyeye » Sat, Apr 23, 2022, 9:56 PM UTC

panick21_ wrote: post #6

A much more practical use of nuclear waste is to make traditional RTG. Nuclear waste could also be used for medical isotopes. There are lots of other interesting things in nuclear waste. This talk from 2010 is really amazing at understanding what 'nuclear waste' actually is and what it will be. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rv-mFSoZOkE

I've often wondered if neutralising radioactive waste is a lesser technical challenge than fusion.

Re: Turning nuclear waste into diamond batteries

#26

Post by jannemann » Sat, Apr 23, 2022, 10:05 PM UTC

fsflover wrote: post #22

jannemann wrote: post #19

> Nuclear power is considered a clean energy source because it has zero carbon dioxide emissions; This is flat out wrong. Containing, mining, recycling and long term storage are so extremely costly and energy hungry that it does not make any economically sense in mid term to use nuclear power. And do not forget. Nuclear is not renewable. It has to be mined. There are mines which will be empty sooner than generally ex…

>> Nuclear power is considered a clean energy source because it has zero carbon dioxide emissions; > This is flat out wrong. No, it's not: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26673987 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26603464 .

Every energy source does require some sort of energy to make it possible to harvest it. And nuclear is no exception. We do not have any sustainable way to filter out enough carbon dioxide with any of the hypothetical excess energy. So saying there is a any energy source without any carbon dioxide emission is wrong.

Re: Turning nuclear waste into diamond batteries

#27

Post by jannemann » Sat, Apr 23, 2022, 10:05 PM UTC

Manuel_D wrote: post #23

jannemann wrote: post #19

> Nuclear power is considered a clean energy source because it has zero carbon dioxide emissions; This is flat out wrong. Containing, mining, recycling and long term storage are so extremely costly and energy hungry that it does not make any economically sense in mid term to use nuclear power. And do not forget. Nuclear is not renewable. It has to be mined. There are mines which will be empty sooner than generally ex…

Nuclear has the lowest net CO2 emissions per unit of energy besides hydroelectricity [1]. Waste recycling would make known terrestrial reserves last for several thousand years. Furthermore, seawater extraction would make nuclear effectively unlimited [2]. You can pedantically point out that nuclear isn't truly unlimited. But once you're getting to the point of energy sources lasting millions of years, the term "renew…

https://youtu.be/0kahih8RT1k

Re: Turning nuclear waste into diamond batteries

#28

Post by duskwuff » Sat, Apr 23, 2022, 11:24 PM UTC

cmroanirgo wrote: post #18

> the Bristol team warned that their radioactive diamond batteries wouldn’t be suitable for laptops or smartphones, because they contain only 1g of carbon-14, meaning that they provide very low power —only a few microwatts, which is less than a typical AA battery. Therefore, their application so far is limited to small devices that must stay unattended for a long time, such as sensors and pacemakers. I assumes that m…

> I assumes that more research can make or more usable in the consumer market?

No. The energy output is constrained by the decay rate of C14. Increasing the amount in use would help somewhat, but it's still many orders of magnitude away from being useful.

(The description of a few microwatts as being "less than a typical AA battery" is a massive understatement. Even a cheap AA-sized carbon cell can deliver a milliwatt -- a thousand microwatts! -- continuously for a few months.)

Re: Turning nuclear waste into diamond batteries

#29

Post by belorn » Sat, Apr 23, 2022, 11:31 PM UTC

gus_massa wrote: post #5

It was heavily discussed a few years ago, for example in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13060159 They last for a log time, but the important detail is that they have very low power, like 1mW with the size factor of a normal battery, so you need like a dozen for a (old) wrist watch and s few hundred to turn on a led. More details in: http://nanoscale.blogspot.com/2020/08/diamond-batteries-unli... https://www.you…

> like 1mW with the size factor of a normal battery

It seems like Carbon-14 is just not very radioactive, and if I read the Wikipedia article right, Geiger counters can't even detect the radiation for small amounts, which makes me wonder if they would even trigger around the 1 gram in those batteries.

Looking at a bit more sources, Carbon-14 radiation has a maximum distance of 22 cm in air and 0.27 mm in body tissue. The half-distance layer in water is 0.05 mm. In addition, Carbon-14 in nuclear waste tend to also include tritium, which is even weaker.

If we wanted powerful batteries, low-level waste seems like a bad choice. If the material don't even need shielding to be around, it is unlikely to carry a lot of energy. Intermediate-level waste and high-level waste would likely be better suited, especially Intermediate-level waste since those do carry a lot of energy but does not require cooling.

Re: Turning nuclear waste into diamond batteries

#30

Post by gus_massa » Sat, Apr 23, 2022, 11:45 PM UTC

duskwuff wrote: post #28

cmroanirgo wrote: post #18

> the Bristol team warned that their radioactive diamond batteries wouldn’t be suitable for laptops or smartphones, because they contain only 1g of carbon-14, meaning that they provide very low power —only a few microwatts, which is less than a typical AA battery. Therefore, their application so far is limited to small devices that must stay unattended for a long time, such as sensors and pacemakers. I assumes that m…

> I assumes that more research can make or more usable in the consumer market? No. The energy output is constrained by the decay rate of C14. Increasing the amount in use would help somewhat, but it's still many orders of magnitude away from being useful. (The description of a few microwatts as being "less than a typical AA battery" is a massive understatement. Even a cheap AA-sized carbon cell can deliver a milliwat…

I agree. Some numbers:

It varies from model to model, but with a few search in Google I got that a smartphone use approximately 5 watts, that's 5000000 microwatts. Let's assume that "a few" in the quoted text means 5, so you need 1000000 of these batteries to power a smartphone.

Each battery weight like 1 gram, so the total weight would be 1000Kg = 1 metric ton = 2000 pounds = 1 small car.