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Just got me thinking: What would it take for us to get to a point where there are small, safe nuclear powered "batteries", that can supply enough electricity for a building.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> allowing for doctors to check in on their patients and replace either the batteries or the pacemakers themselves I cynically read this as "we needed to get more money out of these patients"
I read this as: Most patients don’t survive those 10 years anyways.
Just got me thinking: What would it take for us to get to a point where there are small, safe nuclear powered "batteries", that can supply enough electricity for a building.
The problem is that a nuclear reactor is a dynamic system, with some moving parts. It requires thermal management. It requires dynamic control. It is really hard to design a fully self-contained nuclear power system which wouldn’t require any human intervention to operate.
And even if we could, there is also a problem of waste management. Nuclear waste is not too dangerous, if you don’t touch it. It is, however, quite dangerous, if you grind it into fine particles and spray a large city with it by a crop duster. Our world is crazy. There are people like that out there, who might be interested in it. It is relatively hard to obtain hot nuclear waste from centralized large power plants. It will be really easy in the case of small building-scale reactors.
Tragically relevant story to accompany this article: the Goiânia accident. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goi%C3%A2nia_accident
Could I use it to power my iPhone? Frankly I’m fed up with the need for charging.
There's not a miniature nuclear reactor in there, it's just a RTG, which is simple but also very inefficient. So it doesn't get the crazy amount of power from a tiny amount of material a fission reactor does.
Just got me thinking: What would it take for us to get to a point where there are small, safe nuclear powered "batteries", that can supply enough electricity for a building.
Not related to nuclear, but the startup Bloom Energy was aiming this by fuel cells. A small box could power a house for a year, as they claimed. Trouble was the box internals run at very high temperatures (800°C) and there was potential for things going awry. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloom_Energy
The EneFarms used to be heavily subsidized by the japanese government in a long term program to encourage fuel cell development and manufacturing. Over time prices have decreased such that the subsidy is either already expired or could be soon expired.
The tech is near, and allows getting a bit more energy out if natural gas. The gas companies hope it will allow them to eventually reuse their pipes to send hydrogen. Personally I think the combo of cheap solar panels and 400% efficiency heat pumps will outcompete gas.
Could I use it to power my iPhone? Frankly I’m fed up with the need for charging.
However I do not trust the public to dispose of recyclable waste properly, let alone radioactive devices.
So this is the same technology as used in various space probes and the Curiosity and Perseverance Mars rovers ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-mission_radioisotope_the... ), just miniaturized. Fascinating, but not sure if I would want to have one inside my body...