Turning nuclear waste into diamond batteries
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Turning nuclear waste into diamond batteries
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Re: Turning nuclear waste into diamond batteries
#2No post body was provided.
Re: Turning nuclear waste into diamond batteries
#3Every now and then this comes up. There was a thread from a french nuclear scientist explaining why this isn’t what you think it is.
I can’t find it but the gist was that the power density is low and the price is several orders of magnitude too expensive (like trillions of dollars).
Re: Turning nuclear waste into diamond batteries
#4Every now and then this comes up. There was a thread from a french nuclear scientist explaining why this isn’t what you think it is. I can’t find it but the gist was that the power density is low and the price is several orders of magnitude too expensive (like trillions of dollars).
IDK about trillions of dollars, but it certainly would be expensive. The entire process appears to involve creating artificial diamonds in an environment where radioactive material has been gassified in order to capture it in the diamond structure.
All this for a battery that provides an (effectively) infinite microwatt supply.
The article tries to say that you could use this for a pacemaker (yeah right...) Really, this would only really be useful in something like a remote sensor where it can take a day/week/month to charge a capacitor that ultimately triggers report signal.
The article mentions space missions, but again, this is far less practical than doing something like an RTG.
Re: Turning nuclear waste into diamond batteries
#5It 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...
Re: Turning nuclear waste into diamond batteries
#6A 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.
Re: Turning nuclear waste into diamond batteries
#7Could it be useful to use these to charge long term batteries to be used millennia from now? So that future generations living centuries from now can have easy power when the fossil fuels run out?
Re: Turning nuclear waste into diamond batteries
#8It 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…
Could be useful for things that wake up very infrequently and run for a short amount of time.
Re: Turning nuclear waste into diamond batteries
#9Could it be useful to use these to charge long term batteries to be used millennia from now? So that future generations living centuries from now can have easy power when the fossil fuels run out?
No. Batteries only last a few years before the chemistry degrades.
And anyway, microwatts are useful in certain restricted circumstances, but are easy to come by. A solar cell illuminated by starlight gives you more. Needles in a lemon gives you way more more.
Re: Turning nuclear waste into diamond batteries
#10Every now and then this comes up. There was a thread from a french nuclear scientist explaining why this isn’t what you think it is. I can’t find it but the gist was that the power density is low and the price is several orders of magnitude too expensive (like trillions of dollars).
That's what they forget to mention every time there's a new article about battery tech breakthroughs.
The bigger the claim, the damper the squib it proves to be.