Nuclear-Powered Cardiac Pacemakers

The first thing I thought of when I saw the pacemaker photo was to adapt the miniature RTG to power a digital watch. People have Nixie tube watches, I want my RTG powered watch.

I'd use a capacitor to accumulate a charge which would power one of the really old-school LED digital watches of the early 70s.

Totally impractical, dangerous and illegal? Sign me up!

You really should not. 60 beats per minute means that in ten years the leads of a pacemaker will be bent *315 million* times. That's an order of magnitude higher than we typically test fatigue resistance, and even if we were that confident about being able to produce flawless materials, there are millions of different enzymes and acids and temperature fluctuations in the body. Any one of those could impact the fatigue resistance.

Additionally, any kind of implanted device is significantly prone to a wide range of problems that range from inconvenient to devastating. The human body is very hostile to foreign objects, often with few warning signs. Clots and fibrous capsules (and eventually, calcified capsules) form around ANY implant, and that's the best case problem.

Titanium is extremely biocompatible. It forms a thinner capsule than most materials. It integrates with bones beautifully, due to surface treatments that allow bone to grow into microscopic surface cavities, with strong molecular bonds. But also sometimes, for no apparent reason, all the bone around a titanium implant will just start dying and resorbing. It's rare, but if you get a hip replacement you absolutely need to check on it regularly because if you don't you'll lose use of the leg completely (and quickly, and permanently).

In and around the heart is one of the most challenging places to implant things, aside from maybe the brain. Any moving part of the body will constantly stress any mechanical part, and build up scar tissue around and rubbing spots. The only reason the brain is worse is because its fragile and changes size significantly when you sleep.

Recently we started using leadless pacemakers. Even before that pacemakers were continually getting smaller, and smaller pacemakers are less irritating and experience less stress and movement. Even if that weren't true, it would still be worth checking in on pacemakers, because they're doing incredibly hard jobs and if they fail people can die faster than they can get to a hospital.

EDIT: oh, and heart disease is the #1 cause of death in the US, while heart surgery is one of the most difficult specialties to get in to. They are absolutely never short on patients, lol.

Is something less tragic if the victims weren’t fully participating in capitalism at the time of injury? If they’re performing a societal function that you obviously think is beneath you?

Yeah, tragic. They are no less human than you are. They had no clue what they were doing, like all of us in general. What fraction of the population is aware of the effect of radiation and the toxicity of medical sources? How would they go about assessing the risk in this situation?

Uncontrolled contamination can also harm innocent bystanders, in this case children.

Ooh, the Cobalt-60 incident in Mexico is also pretty crazy:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ciudad_Ju%C3%A1rez_cobalt-60_c...

There were houses built of contaminated rebar! The story gets crazier the more you read about it.