11 ms·

‘Diamond-age’ of power generation as nuclear batteries developed

365 points by triplesec 10y ago

irq 10y ago
Does anyone have details? Like what is the nominal voltage, power density, etc?
- patch_collector 10y ago
  Here's the best I can find, from Eikka's comment on Phys.org: "Carbon-14 has a mean decay energy of 49 keV or 7.85e-15 Joules and activity of 165e+9 bq/g which gives you a power output of 0.0013 Watts per gram. So a gram-sized lump of carbon-14 - about half a teaspoon - assuming perfect conversion, will produce 1.3 Milliwatts, or about 1/20th of what it takes to light up a common red indicator LED." http://phys.org/news/2016-11-diamond-age-power-nuclear-batteries.html#jCp http://phys.org/news/2016-11-diamond-age-power-nuclear-batte...
  - Leon 10y ago
    That would actually be perfect for long range interstellar probes. A constant source of energy for thousands of years, even that small, would propel a craft to reasonably high speeds. Give a spacecraft a few pounds and you'd have something really great.
    - jerf 10y ago
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioisotope_thermoelectric_generator https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioisotope_thermoelectric_ge... (Because it's relevant, not as agreement or disagreement with any particular point.)
    - meric 10y ago
      But if it's for interstellar probes, we could use just carbon-14 and keep the diamond...? Unless we're wrapping it in a diamond to protect the electronics.
      - kobeya 10y ago
        The diamond is the carbon-14.
        meric 10y ago
        I would love to place my comment in a block of coal right now and then set the coal on fire.
        jonathankoren 10y ago
        would that be a block of C-14 coal? Dirty power! Dirty bomb!
    - samstave 10y ago
      So given that, assume you put an array of batteries together, what is the formula for Batteries of qty=N allowing a range of Z AU comm ability to earth / current-AU-distance == distance-from-earth before we will not be even able to receive said comms...?? So how far can they get on N batteries before we cant hear them? Is there such a thing as "solar-syncronous" and "galactic-syncronous" orbit such that we can deploy a TON of little relays that would speed up comms to each probe to the Earth? I.E. we have however many in a sphere around the solar system, then at some AU distance out, that the extending probes can contact more efficiently? Assume that the little diamond batts can only reliably transfer a signal by AU/.00X - then we need to create grids of these little guys at AU/.00X intervals to relay the signals within the power capabilities of the probes... or is this a stupid thing to say? --- This begs the questions; what is the best method/technology for sending messages between sensors through space? We can still hear the Voyagers, how long do their signals take to get here? How much data do they send? How long will their batteries last? How far until they go dark? (they are already like 34 times as far from us as we are from Jupiter.) How well could these little batteries power the new EM/ION drive: https://www.nasaspaceflight.com/2015/04/evaluating-nasas-futuristic-em-drive/ https://www.nasaspaceflight.com/2015/04/evaluating-nasas-fut... How much power does that need?
      - p1mrx 10y ago
        If you put a radio at ~10X the distance of Pluto, you can use the sun as a gravitational lens, and communicate with another star using milliwatts of power: http://www.centauri-dreams.org/?p=10123 http://www.centauri-dreams.org/?p=10123 You're still bound by the speed of light, unfortunately.
    - ars 10y ago
      There are far far far better choices for long range interstellar probes. In particular you want a material with much better power density. The type of decay used by this device (beta decay) is one of the least energetic types.
  - donw 10y ago
    Assuming linear scalability, size that up to a 100kg power source, and you've got enough power to run radio repeaters that could outlast civilization.
  - mzw_mzw 10y ago
    Some microcontrollers use under 0.2 watts, which would be 153 grams of this material. So there are at least some potential applications. If you combined that with a bistable LCD display, could you make a clock/thermometer/whatever that would run almost indefinitely (until the Carbon-14 ran out, that is)?
  - castratikron 10y ago
    0.0013 Watts per gram would be about 1 kilowatt per ton. If there were enough of this stuff and it would be easy enough to manufacture, maybe slabs could be installed under peoples' houses as the foundation. How much heat does it take to make a diamond? Would Americium be a more practical source of radioactivity, considering how much infrastructure is already in place for smoke detectors? I'm not really sure what they mean by "radioactive field", there are several different modes of radioactive decay (gamma, beta, alpha). Carbon-14 undergoes beta decay so I assume this is the only decay mode that will work. That would make sense since beta minus decay creates an electron. Americium undergoes alpha decay so if that's how this works, Americium would be no good. This could be used to make ever-luminescent things like road signs or something. Very interesting.
  - rlpb 10y ago
    "assuming perfect conversion" is important. It seems unlikely that the conversion is 100% efficient. It may for example only be 1% efficient, so you may need to multiply all power and weight estimates by 100.
  - the8472 10y ago
    radioisomer batteries would provide much much higher power densities, but they're currently more of a theoretical thing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_isomer#Applications https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_isomer#Applications
  - rstuart4133 10y ago
    It may be 1/20 of what it takes to light a LED, but it's 100 times what it takes to power a watch. A watch that lasts 5,000 years between batteries sounds attractive. There are an lot of things you can do with 15 joule per day budget. Being able to do it using an failsafe energy that lasts for millennia using a would be amazing. We could literally blanket the planet with sensors that never die.
marrone12 10y ago
If civilization ever falls, future generations would think using crystals for energy must have been a fairy tale.
- gallerdude 10y ago
  Enter Laputa.
downandout 10y ago
IMO the headline here isn't the minimally powered batteries, it's that this is a potential solution to the (very) secure storage of nuclear waste. In the US, for example, the proposal to store essentially all of our nuclear waste at one site (Yucca Mountain in Nevada) is a truly terrible idea that would create the world's most coveted terrorist target. Encapsulating the waste in small diamond shells that could be distributed among several sites seems like an ideal solution if they can get it to work at scale.
- samstave 10y ago
  What do you think about this documentary re: Finland storing waste in their version of Yucca: >This film explores the question of preparing the site so that it is not disturbed for 100,000 years, even though no structure in human history has stayed standing for such a long period. "Every day, the world over, large amounts of high-level radioactive waste created by nuclear power plants are placed in interim storage, which is vulnerable to natural disasters, man-made disasters, and societal changes. In Finland, the world’s first permanent repository is being hewn out of solid rock – a huge system of underground tunnels – that must last the entire period the waste remains hazardous: 100,000 years." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Into_Eternity_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Into_Eternity_(film) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gQ3dT7xcMgU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gQ3dT7xcMgU
- arama471 10y ago
  Why would anyone attack that facility? Its extremely easy to secure - If you somehow neutralize everyone protecting it you still wont get in and out with any meaningful amount of material before a military response comes in and removes your ability to actually do anything. Note that Yucca Mountain doesn't just have piles of fissile material - all the waste is in the same concrete capsules they arrived in. The ones that need a crane to be moved[1][2]. You could argue that these will fail before we know what to do with them and that they will leak radioactive material over time, but that still wouldn't make it a good terrorist target. [1] https://www.nwmo.ca/en/Canadas-Plan/Canadas-Used-Nuclear-Fuel/How-Is-It-Stored-Today https://www.nwmo.ca/en/Canadas-Plan/Canadas-Used-Nuclear-Fue... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dry_cask_storage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dry_cask_storage NOTE: Sources don't say that you cant move these without cranes, they just say that these are larger than a person and made of steel and reinforced concrete so I thought it would be a safe assumption these are a pain to move.
wolfgang42 10y ago
From #diamondbattery tweets: https://twitter.com/search?q=%23diamondbattery https://twitter.com/search?q=%23diamondbattery Could be used in underground seismic monitors https://twitter.com/Keminoes/status/803297734694465541 https://twitter.com/Keminoes/status/803297734694465541 Car keys that require batteries. If we don't have a spare battery with us and our keys die, we're stranded. MP3 players, too https://twitter.com/tysongeisler/status/803438384052129796 https://twitter.com/tysongeisler/status/803438384052129796 To power a low-power-mode Arduino for gas detection (CO, CO2, Low O2, etc), fire detection, radiation detection, etc. https://twitter.com/noalear/status/803389146433626112 https://twitter.com/noalear/status/803389146433626112 Could diamond batteries be used to power medical nanobots? https://twitter.com/weirbe/status/803418222972125184 https://twitter.com/weirbe/status/803418222972125184 Power clothes that contain sensors, as well as clothes that electrically regulate the temperature. https://twitter.com/CIMCloudOne/status/803440800759574528 https://twitter.com/CIMCloudOne/status/803440800759574528 how about in cell phones to give a little charge to the battery while the phone is not in use. https://twitter.com/W_Haas/status/803352403512872961 https://twitter.com/W_Haas/status/803352403512872961 Is there the potential to power watches as a fair amount of waste is generated from depleted watch batteries each year. https://twitter.com/Merrett72/status/803297788163289088 https://twitter.com/Merrett72/status/803297788163289088
- flukus 10y ago
  > Car keys that require batteries. If we don't have a spare battery with us and our keys die, we're stranded. There was a great solution for this in use for over a hundred years.
  - snuxoll 10y ago
    My 2006 has a workable solution as well that doesn't require a traditional key, there's a slot you can put your key fob in to start the car even if the battery in it is dead (only option on trims sold without the Smart Key System) and the driver door has a mechanical lock that can be opened with a key hidden in the fob. Keyless entry and ignition is a great convenience, especially for my wife since she can keep the fob buried in her bag - and it makes it easy for me to put my daughter in the car without trying to wrangle the fob out of my pocket to unlock the door. But it floors me that so many manufacturers just ignore the use-case where the battery in the fob is dead...
zellyn 10y ago
Sounds cool. One annoying bit of breathless (and brainless) enthusiasm stuck out though: "In fact, diamond is the hardest substance known to man, there is literally nothing we could use that could offer more protection." While diamonds are extremely hard, they are brittle, and shatter relatively easily.
- hasenj 10y ago
  Maybe it's my lack of imagination or not having English as a native language, but how can something be "hard" and at the same time shatter easily? EDIT: nvm found the answer via Google https://www.quora.com/Why-is-the-diamond-hard-yet-brittle https://www.quora.com/Why-is-the-diamond-hard-yet-brittle
  - tunap 10y ago
    Even better: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hardness https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hardness I read an enlightening discussion on HN a few months back about "hardness". I was under the impression professional scientists/researchers do not use the generic terms "hard" or "hardness". Outside of marketing, I presume they would employ concise measurements like ductility, elastic stiffness, plasticity, strain, strength, toughness, viscoelasticity, and viscosity.
- razzaj 10y ago
  Exactly. Not forgetting that radiation protection has nothing to do with the hardness of the casing. Lead is nowhere near hard and is one of the most used materials to shield from radiations.
- andygates 10y ago
  Relatively, but don't most electronics shatter much more easily? In a traumatic event that shatters my embedded diamond-powered pacemaker, isn't the squishy rest of me much worse off already?
roel_v 10y ago
This will sound like neckbeard cynicism, but I actually mean this and in a positive way: "There are so many possible uses that we’re asking the public to come up with suggestions of how they would utilise this technology by using #diamondbattery.” It's cool how they're engaging the public in their research in this way. Of course it's a transparent ploy to get social media mentions, but scientists of all sorts (and I kind of am one myself) would do themselves a favor by doing more to get the general public to know about their/our work. This particular thing 'feels' sort of slimy (to me at least, but I suspect to others on this site as well), but I think that's a bad reflex on my part, and that easy, low-friction things like giving people an opening to send a quick tweet or FB post reaches a different audience than having a stand at the 'open science fair' or having a lecture open to the general public; those tend to self-select in the audience they attract, to put it mildly.
- mahranch 10y ago
  > This particular thing 'feels' sort of slimy I was just coming here to talk about how inaccurate the title was. It implies (or leads people to believe) that "nuclear batteries" are something new. Or at least, that's what they want readers thinking. They're not even close to new. They're decades old. They're aboard the Voyager probes (which is why they're still working, 30 years later) and they're powering the Curiosity rover on Mars. Hell, there was even a nuclear battery powered automobile made by Ford I believe (the "Nucleon") as proof of concept. This was in the 1950s. The new thing here, is the fact that they can run the batteries with nuclear waste.
  - qbrass 10y ago
    The Ford Nucleon was a styling exercise and was never intended to have a working prototype. The concept itself didn't use a nuclear battery, it was designed around a miniaturized nuclear reactor which powered the car using a steam turbine.
  - x3n0ph3n3 10y ago
    Voyager I and II and Curiosity are powered with radioisotope thermoelectric generators [1], which are nothing like this proposal. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioisotope_thermoelectric_generator https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioisotope_thermoelectric_ge...
kbradero 10y ago
mm, I remember from a lecture that 'nuclear waste' is actually a label used by the nuclear industry but non all of them can be disposed, some by products can be used as a base atomic weapons. So all countries with nuclear power plants have to return/control the 'nuclear waste'.
tunesmith 10y ago
Haha this sounds straight out of Asimov's Foundation novels where a civilization was driven to innovate miniaturized nuclear power.
- intrasight 10y ago
  What I was thinking as well
- petre 10y ago
  Wasn't the Earth in Asimov's Foundation radioactive and unhabitable? Having that blue glow at the horizon (ionizing radiation-induced luminescence?).
  - RangerScience 10y ago
    I was going to say that you're probably thinking of Trantor, the imperial capital, and that the earth was protected by R Daneel Olivaw and his "descendants", but now I just want to wave the nerd flag and link Wikipedia, because you're right about the radioactive but (apparently) wrong about the habitability. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth_(Foundation_universe) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth_(Foundation_universe) You win this round, sir. Edit: What petre was referring to was that the eponymous Foundation was deliberately founded on a world poor in radioactives (and other metals), so that they'd be forced to make the most out of what they had, resulting in extremely small, low power equipment.
  - AYBABTME 10y ago
    The Earth was made radioactive due to a plot by the Spacers. On the other hand, the Foundation - the civilization using miniature nuclear reactors - is happening many millennial later and far away from Earth. So the "miniature nuclear tech" and "radioactive Earth" aren't related in the plot.
sandworm101 10y ago
This is no diamond-age. These devices are all well and good, but think of the scales involved. To generate enough power to do something like power a home, let alone a vehicle, we are going to need kilos of this stuff. Kilos of diamond. It's also going to get rather hot. That is the point. Using numbers from patch_collector: 1 x 50watt lightbulb / 0.0013 Watts/gram = 38Kg = 83lbs of diamond per bulb. Diamonds are far from indestructible. They shatter. More importantly, they burn. We don't see it very often but put enough of them together, add heat and electricity, and you better hope there isn't any oxygen nearby. Imagine a couple pounds of these things, on fire, pumping out radioactive carbon dioxide. At least when uranium burns it produces something heavy that can be filtered. Filtering radioactive CO2 would be a nightmare. These things will never find there way into any consumer product.
- ryao 10y ago
  At what temperature does Diamond burn?
  - jws 10y ago
    Diamons will burn at 690°C in pure oxygen. Houses burn at around 590°C. Maybe if you rupture an O₂ tank in a house fire right next to the diamond battery you could pull it off. I wouldn't worry about small diamond batteries. There is already 1 part per trillion carbon 14 in you. The odd telemetry battery that gets caught in an oxygen fire isn't going to shift the scales much.
    - legulere 10y ago
      Trash incineration is around 1000 degree Celsius. People already now throw batteries in household trash when they shouldn't.
    - marcosdumay 10y ago
      A pure oxygen atmosphere is pushing it too much, isn't it? Anything you have at home, except for the concrete walls and glass will burn in less than 0°C in a pure oxygen atmosphere. A pure O2 tank in a house would be a serious cause of concern.
kilroy123 10y ago
I'm not sure if this will lead to a new revolutionary battery. But I'll say this, the man/woman who creates a company that builds a new revolutionary battery that will keep your laptop humming for a week; will be very rich. Probably the next richest person on earth.
- neurostimulant 10y ago
  Putting that much power density on your lap is kinda scary. It's like carrying a slab of C4. Imagine if the galaxy note incident happen again but with a much much higher power density battery which can go kaboom.
  - ccozan 10y ago
    How would a C14 slab would go kaboom? Its only role is to give radiation which is transformed into heat or electricity. I don't expect any explosive parts here.
    - neurostimulant 10y ago
      I was talking about a high capacity battery that can power a laptop for a week, not the nuclear battery from the article.
- regularfry 10y ago
  Doubt it. Look at the evolution of mobile phones: they went from staying alive for a week to needing a charge overnight. People gripe around the margins, but in general seem OK with that.
  - rubber_duck 10y ago
    It would be a major thing for car batteries - lighter batteries with longer charge means you get more range from two factors - less stuff to move and more capacity to do it.
ChuckMcM 10y ago
It would be more credible if the Cabot Institute linked the paper on their "All Research Papers" page (http://research-information.bristol.ac.uk/en/organisations/cabot-institute(c0347f3a-1376-405f-aca9-7d3d008a9701)/publications.html?page=0 http://research-information.bristol.ac.uk/en/organisations/c...) or if they described how they are getting electricity out of beta decay (is it simple a thermo-electric generator? How much heat differential can they push? Or is it just bodging together chunks of radioactive material in a casement that has reasonable head conductivity and absorbs 99% of radiation. My favorite "invention" of that form is the water heater "booster" ball. Basically you take a kilogram of spent fuel rod, encase it in a austenitic stainless steel ball, and suspend that bad boy in the center of your water heater holding tank. Hot water for the next 500 years without using gas or electricity :-).
- slimsag 10y ago
  > My favorite "invention" of that form is the water heater "booster" ball This sounds super cool! what happens if people e.g. go on vacation for 3 months? would it explode the heater or melt through the ball..? do you have any other links/info about it you can give me? I'm super curious about it. I googled moderately but I only found some seemingly unrelated things[1] [1] http://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffmcmahon/2013/02/22/nasa-a-nuclear-reactor-to-replace-your-water-heater/#7b4faf433ba3 http://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffmcmahon/2013/02/22/nasa-a-nu...
  - leeoniya 10y ago
    if there's any water left in that water heater after a couple hours and it didnt explode from vapor overpressure, you'll painfully die of acute radiation sickness. that's the best case scenario.
    - icantdrive55 10y ago
      By law, all water heaters need a regulator pressure valve. (Before this federal requirement; some people had rocket in their garage. Middle of the night a water heater would go through the roof, if the homeowner was lucky.). In this case, I would want four regulators, on my nuclear hydronic heater.
JoeAltmaier 10y ago
Suspicious: sounds like a con, in every breathless undocumented wild claim.
- threeseed 10y ago
  Watch the language. It's a university press release. It may not meet expectations. The science may be faulty. They could be utterly incompetent. But a con implies wilful behaviour on the part of the University of Bristol to deceive people.
  - Dylan16807 10y ago
    > It's a university press release. Which are often trying to actively deceive people, implying that tiny iterations are new fields, and that devices are orders of magnitude more effective than they are. I'm comfortable calling this press release deceptive.
  - JoeAltmaier 10y ago
    I stand by my characterization: it sounds like a con, using the same hyperventilated language. It makes superficially-reasonable-but-quite-wrong claims (diamond will shield from radiation). It avoids important order-of-magnitude problems (the theoretical power generated is insignificant for almost all uses). All its missing is the hook - the link to "How can I invest?"
outworlder 10y ago
> A team of physicists and chemists from the University of Bristol have grown a man-made diamond that, when placed in a radioactive field, is able to generate a small electrical current. So, they are replacing the thermocouples as used in RTGs with this diamond-like stuff? And low radioactivity sources (as opposed to plutonium)? That would indeed be revolutionary if it worked.
- ars 10y ago
  It'll work fine, but the problem with low radioactivity sources is that they are also low energy sources. So you need a lot of material.
jaza 10y ago
Dilithium crystals, anyone?
iseanstevens 10y ago
The part where they list "airplanes" as something it could potentially power was where it became silly... that's gonna be a lot of spent fuel rod mass.
hashin 10y ago
I can see that they are emphasizing on the #DiamondBattery hashtag so that general public will be hooked and share it more, but why haven't they given any hints (mildly technical) to the capabilities of the battery? // A team of physicists and chemists from the University of Bristol have grown a man-made diamond that, when placed in a radioactive field, is able to generate a small electrical current.// When I read the "small electrical current", the physicist in me was naturally assuming a very small current of the order of pico to nano amperes (without being conservative) - essentially useless. Metrics like the half life of the battery doesn't make any sense at all if the power or current rating is not specified. Current rating is something you could trust, that it will end up as a viable product. This would appeal more if they can give a direct link to their research paper.
- extrapickles 10y ago
  Current off the shelf betavoltaic batteries produce 50-350 nA @ 2.4v. I don't expect them to be producing much more than that.
  - berntb 10y ago
    Is that an idiom, or are they really "off the shelf" and not specially built for every space probe?
    - extrapickles 10y ago
      They are "off the shelf" in that you can give them a call and in 6 weeks have one. I suspect they obtain and load the nuclear material for your order, but the rest of the device is stocked as it involves custom semiconductors which have fairly large minimum orders. These are the class of battery that would replace the CMOS battery in something that can never lose power to its RAM, rather than the much more powerful RTGs that space probes use.
      - aminorex 10y ago
        Part of a spectrum from MEMs through pacemaker batteries, Cassini-style RTG, pebble-bed reactors, up to massive GE/Siemens style LWRs. It's a remarkably scalable tech, both up- and down- scale.
kodfodrasz 10y ago
Even if this is true I think this is such a public safety hazard, that the authorities will never allow its public adoption. Just think in terms of domestic terrorism and dirty bombs. Exploding a few such batteries would release radioactive powder, which is a quite dangerous if inhaled, and cleaning it up is very difficult.
- regularfry 10y ago
  C14 isn't much good for a dirty bomb. It's too light. You'd probably need to be actually caught in the explosion to stand a risk of inhaling enough to be problematic, and at that point you've got other things to worry about.
- talideon 10y ago
  You don't even need to think in those terms: just think in terms of some idiot who doesn't bother properly recycling the things. If they're not safe in that circumstance, then they're a potential safety hazard, much as at the very least, say, lead-acid batteries are.
- lefty2 10y ago
  Yeah, even forgetting dirty bombs, spent fuel rods emit a huge amount of gamma radiation and need to be actively cooled in huge pools. Also, they can't be handled directly. If you came within a meter of unshielded fuel rod you would be dead within 5 mintues
brandmeyer 10y ago
10:1 odds that this is just a use of the photoelectric effect with a clever dielectric. Based on the press-release description, it is probably not a radiothermal generator (like that used in deep space probes). 1) Have an ionizing radiation source. 2) Get a robust dielectric, with metal plates on both sides of it. Call the plate near the radiation source the cathode and the far one the anode. 3) As the ionizing radiation impacts one side of the cell, the released electron travels only a short distance through the cell. Ideally, the first interaction is with a cathode and the far side an anode, imparting a negative potential to it. 4) A potential difference now exists between the far-side anode and the near-side cathode, from which you can draw current. Strictly speaking, this is a more like a capacitor which is trickle-charged by the radiation field rather than a battery. There is a design tradeoff between thickness of the metal and dielectric layers in that the initial and final ionizing interaction must be of a (cathode/dielectric -> anode) or (cathode -> dielectric/anode) to get any energy out of it. Ideally, the dielectric has an extremely small cross-section for interaction with whatever the ionizing radiation source is, while the metal plates interact very strongly. However, there will always be some losses due to internal ionization of the dielectric itself. I'm not sure how you would build an effective multi-layer structure, either. Is this preferable to an RTG? Almost certainly not. The vast majority of the radiation energy in an ionizing photoelectric-effect cell is still released as heat. Very little energy can be captured this way, so it is quite inefficient in terms of energy produced relative to the radiation emitted. You can extract some more electric work by pre-charging the cell such that the freed electron is slowed in part by the electric field gradient, but in practice the bulk of the energy is still lost as heat. Sea story time! The internal electric field within the dielectric will produce some weird mechanical stresses, too. When my ship's reactor plant went through a refueling overhaul one of the things they replaced was the reactor compartment windows. There are a couple of leaded glass windows that allow Mk. 1 eyeball inspection of the reactor compartment during operation. They are quite thick, electrically insulating, and they build up a large internal electric field along with internal stresses. Standard maintenance was to replace them well before the stress could fracture the glass. So... could the press release be ...excessively breathless? My guess is a qualified "probably". The physics behind the photoelectric effect are well known and understood. Diamond is special in part because it has a fantastically high dielectric breakdown strength. So, you can extract more work out of the ionized electrons by supporting a very high potential gradient between the anode and cathode, which could be seen as a breakthrough for this type of energy conversion device. BUT it also would enable a new generation of high-density ultra-capacitors. The energy density in a capacitor is limited (in part) by the breakdown strength of the dielectric, since the stored energy is a volume integral of the squared electric field strength. Since ultracaps are technologically much easier to commercialize, and much more investor-friendly than anything involving an ionizing radiation source, but that isn't what the press release points to, I think it is likely to be ... exaggerated. I could also be wrong, and we'll soon have a new generation of ultracaps!
codebook 10y ago
How much is it? same as diamond?
- imagist 10y ago
  Low-quality diamonds can be manufactured more cheaply than the synthetic diamonds intended to compete with the jewel industry. I imagine this prove would come down with the scale batteries are manufactured at.
known 10y ago
Reminds me https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toshiba_4S https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toshiba_4S
jlebrech 10y ago
in a diamond battery what serves as anode and cathode, how do you connect wires to a diamond? this diamond making process would be quite hazardous. I wonder if they should just create a layer of diamonds and and sandwich that between C14 rather than try and rely just or those diamonds to power spacecraft (would save having to develop the non-radioactive diamond layer). would a standard diamond also do that trick, I don't see why a radioactive diamond would be different if it is in the presence of C14?
- rini17 10y ago
  There are diamond LEDs so this is solved problem, I think by adding very specific impurities.
legulere 10y ago
> In fact, diamond is the hardest substance known to man, there is literally nothing we could use that could offer more protection. With such nonsense it is hard to believe the rest of the article. Heat a diamond and it will burn releasing CO2 into the air, smash it with a hammer and it will burst in million parts. Small particles and gasses are very easy to ingest.
- marcosdumay 10y ago
  > Heat a diamond and it will burn releasing CO2 into the air I bet you have never tried that. Heat a diamond enough (what it a lot), and it will turn into graphite (layer by layer), a substance usually used for heat protection since is one of the solid materials we have around that survive the hightest temperatures. Also, hit it with a big enough hammer, and yes, it will smash. It will also press a dent on your hammer.
  - joezydeco 10y ago
    A material can be "hard" but also be brittle. Diamond is one of these substances. You don't need a large hammer to crack or destroy one. Ask any jeweler.
    - logfromblammo 10y ago
      Diamond has perfect cleavage in four directions. If you want a mineral that you can really pound on without it breaking, you want nephrite. The Maori made war clubs out of it. Bring a diamond to a nephrite fight, and you're going to end up in the stewpot. If you need hardness and toughness, corundum is what you want.
    - randall 10y ago
      This is what makes me think it's probably going to be used in pacemakers / satellites, rather than phones. Imagine the Galaxy Note 7 fiasco with radioactive isotopes. Tesla has this problem too. They shield the underside of the car now, but imagine if you accidentally punctured the diamond. It'd likely shatter and spread radioactive material everywhere. It could be awesome in non-touchable contexts though.
etatoby 10y ago
> diamond is the hardest substance known to man, there is literally nothing we could use that could offer more protection Weird, I was under the assumption that density (and other more exoteric chemical properties) shielded from radioactivity, not hardness. /s
- ryao 10y ago
  Maybe they meant protection of the containment itself.
transfire 10y ago
Damn. I was hopeful if used gamma radiation. That would have been truly revolutionary.
bahjoite 10y ago
> Obvious applications would be [...] high-altitude drones This made me wonder about the funding for this research, but then I found that Dr. T Scott is involved with[0]: > Radiation Mapping Using Unmanned Aerial Vehicles > Following the events at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant, the Interface Analysis Centre has been developing an unmanned aerial system capable of mapping radiation in regions inaccessible to humans. [0]: http://www.bristol.ac.uk/physics/research/iac/casestudies/ http://www.bristol.ac.uk/physics/research/iac/casestudies/
Symmetry 10y ago
Normally with nuclear power you use the heat generated to drive a heat engine of some sort with strict limits on the theoretical efficiency. But many pulse fusion designs look at using the momentum of emitted charged particles directly through their interaction with magnetic fields at far higher efficiency than could be achieved with the energy going through a heat stage. Carbon-14 emits only beta particles which are, of course, all negatively charged. I wonder if they've managed to turn those into a very high voltage, very low current continuous source directly?
nathan_f77 10y ago
WOW. I always expected that we would see mobile phones that lasted for days or weeks before needing to be recharged. I never once considered the idea that we may have mobile phones and laptops that NEVER need to be recharged during our lifetime. That is an incredible thought. I wonder how hard it will be to convince people to put nuclear batteries in their pocket. Many people are still afraid of microwave ovens.
- givinguflac 10y ago
  It does sound incredible, but I don't think most people would be down with carrying nuclear waste in their pockets.
  - nathan_f77 10y ago
    Many of us already carry around lithium ion batteries in our pockets, and I think these nuclear batteries could be far less dangerous. Phones can explode without warning, and bending or piercing a battery can cause huge explosions and fires. You'd have to try really hard to shatter these diamonds, and they would probably have some lead lining.
    - enraged_camel 10y ago
      Sure, it's easy to say that as an engineer since we deal with facts and data, but the general public is anywhere from wary to extremely scared of anything "nuclear."
drzaiusapelord 10y ago
Every few years there's a proposal for a new nuclear battery. This was the last one: https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/190555-this-nuclear-battery-could-power-your-smartphone-forever-as-long-as-you-dont-value-your-life-or-sperm-count-too-highly https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/190555-this-nuclear-batt... The problem is none of these approaches solve the disposal problem or the dirty bomb problem. You can buy 1,000 of these and build a dangerous device that would require serious clean-up and, obviously, can hurt a lot of people. So, this will never be in a smartphone or laptop, but perhaps power industrial items that can't be practically charged often like remote robots or sensors. Or applications in space to replace aging, expensive, and heavy RTG's.
- Declanomous 10y ago
  It doesn't even have to be a dirty bomb. You just need someone who is overly curious and then you've got a Radioactive Boy Scout situation.
- nathan_f77 10y ago
  > You can buy 1,000 of these and build a dangerous device that would require serious clean-up and, obviously, can hurt a lot of people. Or you can buy $1,000 worth of lithium batteries and try to build a breeder reactor in your back yard: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Hahn https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Hahn Oh no, I didn't know he passed away only a few months ago. And that's very sad to read about the rest of his life.
  - drzaiusapelord 10y ago
    The lithuim is just used to purify the thorium he illegally acquired. I don't think your comparison really works here.
emeraldd 10y ago
(Note this math is a thought experiment ... completely off the cuff and utter non-sense.) Based on their numbers: AA is about 700J/g @ 20g gives about 14000J and a 24 hour drain gives us 580J/hour. DiamondBattery is about 15J/day or ~0.5J/hour Ignoring voltage issues (among other things), we come to 1.1kg of DiamondBattery being able to supply something that would drain their 20g AA in 24 hours. The math here is complete off the cuff non-sense, but an extra kg or so here is not unreasonable for some fixed applications ...
- drzaiusapelord 10y ago
  This is a little disheartening in terms of robotics. For a non-trivial robot with a handful of 12V motors and a decent workload, I imagine this would add tens of lbs compared to only a handful of ounces using lithium. Of course, those tens of lbs means more power needed to push the robot and you quickly hit the laws of diminishing returns.
  - emeraldd 10y ago
    Of course, we're talking about less than first-gen tech here as well.
rbanffy 10y ago
Would anyone care to explain how this works? The crystalline structure of the diamond and the directionality of the radiation source doesn't give me a clear idea about where to add terminals to this battery.
jules0 10y ago
Given that Bristol researchers did not explain the physics behind their diamond battery we can only speculate but considering some recent developments we can make some good guesses. It probably functions similar to a betavolatic cell. (See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betavoltaic_device https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betavoltaic_device) In a typical configuration you have a P-N semiconductor junction placed next to beta emitter. The beta particles impact the PN junction and create electron-hole pairs that are pulled apart by the junction to produce a current. The use of diamond seems like a could be a significant innovation: 1) Carbon-14 is an efficient beta emitter and could make op part of all of the diamond material. 2) Diamond has a wide band-gap which is necessary for high efficiency conversion to electricity. 3) Has strong resistance to radiation damage. In one configuration the diamond would be layered on top of a silicon P-N junction so it works like a conventional betavoltaic device. (see: http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2013/ph241/harrison2/ http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2013/ph241/harrison2/) A recent patent shows that diamond is a very efficient moderator for injecting electrons into the junction. (see https://www.google.com/patents/US9064610 https://www.google.com/patents/US9064610) Considering that diamond is itself a semiconductor we could also do away with the silicon. For example diamond is being considered for highly efficient photovoltaic cells. (see: http://exploration.vanderbilt.edu/news/news_diamond.htm http://exploration.vanderbilt.edu/news/news_diamond.htm) It is also being considered for production of next-gen schottky diodes. (see: http://www10.edacafe.com/nbc/articles/view_article.php?articleid=207252&section=ICNews http://www10.edacafe.com/nbc/articles/view_article.php?artic...) The diamond could be stacked next to a conducting metal to create a Skottky barrier which is a type of P-N junction. The beta particles would excite the electrons with enough energy to push them over the barrier and create a current. (see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schottky_barrier https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schottky_barrier)

365 points by triplesec 10y ago

irq 10y ago

Does anyone have details? Like what is the nominal voltage, power density, etc?

patch_collector 10y ago
Here's the best I can find, from Eikka's comment on Phys.org: "Carbon-14 has a mean decay energy of 49 keV or 7.85e-15 Joules and activity of 165e+9 bq/g which gives you a power output of 0.0013 Watts per gram. So a gram-sized lump of carbon-14 - about half a teaspoon - assuming perfect conversion, will produce 1.3 Milliwatts, or about 1/20th of what it takes to light up a common red indicator LED." http://phys.org/news/2016-11-diamond-age-power-nuclear-batteries.html#jCp http://phys.org/news/2016-11-diamond-age-power-nuclear-batte...
- Leon 10y ago
  That would actually be perfect for long range interstellar probes. A constant source of energy for thousands of years, even that small, would propel a craft to reasonably high speeds. Give a spacecraft a few pounds and you'd have something really great.
  - jerf 10y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioisotope_thermoelectric_generator https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioisotope_thermoelectric_ge... (Because it's relevant, not as agreement or disagreement with any particular point.)
  - meric 10y ago
    But if it's for interstellar probes, we could use just carbon-14 and keep the diamond...? Unless we're wrapping it in a diamond to protect the electronics.
    - kobeya 10y ago
      The diamond is the carbon-14.
      - meric 10y ago
        I would love to place my comment in a block of coal right now and then set the coal on fire.
        jonathankoren 10y ago
        would that be a block of C-14 coal? Dirty power! Dirty bomb!
  - samstave 10y ago
    So given that, assume you put an array of batteries together, what is the formula for Batteries of qty=N allowing a range of Z AU comm ability to earth / current-AU-distance == distance-from-earth before we will not be even able to receive said comms...?? So how far can they get on N batteries before we cant hear them? Is there such a thing as "solar-syncronous" and "galactic-syncronous" orbit such that we can deploy a TON of little relays that would speed up comms to each probe to the Earth? I.E. we have however many in a sphere around the solar system, then at some AU distance out, that the extending probes can contact more efficiently? Assume that the little diamond batts can only reliably transfer a signal by AU/.00X - then we need to create grids of these little guys at AU/.00X intervals to relay the signals within the power capabilities of the probes... or is this a stupid thing to say? --- This begs the questions; what is the best method/technology for sending messages between sensors through space? We can still hear the Voyagers, how long do their signals take to get here? How much data do they send? How long will their batteries last? How far until they go dark? (they are already like 34 times as far from us as we are from Jupiter.) How well could these little batteries power the new EM/ION drive: https://www.nasaspaceflight.com/2015/04/evaluating-nasas-futuristic-em-drive/ https://www.nasaspaceflight.com/2015/04/evaluating-nasas-fut... How much power does that need?
    - p1mrx 10y ago
      If you put a radio at ~10X the distance of Pluto, you can use the sun as a gravitational lens, and communicate with another star using milliwatts of power: http://www.centauri-dreams.org/?p=10123 http://www.centauri-dreams.org/?p=10123 You're still bound by the speed of light, unfortunately.
  - ars 10y ago
    There are far far far better choices for long range interstellar probes. In particular you want a material with much better power density. The type of decay used by this device (beta decay) is one of the least energetic types.
- donw 10y ago
  Assuming linear scalability, size that up to a 100kg power source, and you've got enough power to run radio repeaters that could outlast civilization.
- mzw_mzw 10y ago
  Some microcontrollers use under 0.2 watts, which would be 153 grams of this material. So there are at least some potential applications. If you combined that with a bistable LCD display, could you make a clock/thermometer/whatever that would run almost indefinitely (until the Carbon-14 ran out, that is)?
- castratikron 10y ago
  0.0013 Watts per gram would be about 1 kilowatt per ton. If there were enough of this stuff and it would be easy enough to manufacture, maybe slabs could be installed under peoples' houses as the foundation. How much heat does it take to make a diamond? Would Americium be a more practical source of radioactivity, considering how much infrastructure is already in place for smoke detectors? I'm not really sure what they mean by "radioactive field", there are several different modes of radioactive decay (gamma, beta, alpha). Carbon-14 undergoes beta decay so I assume this is the only decay mode that will work. That would make sense since beta minus decay creates an electron. Americium undergoes alpha decay so if that's how this works, Americium would be no good. This could be used to make ever-luminescent things like road signs or something. Very interesting.
- rlpb 10y ago
  "assuming perfect conversion" is important. It seems unlikely that the conversion is 100% efficient. It may for example only be 1% efficient, so you may need to multiply all power and weight estimates by 100.
- the8472 10y ago
  radioisomer batteries would provide much much higher power densities, but they're currently more of a theoretical thing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_isomer#Applications https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_isomer#Applications
- rstuart4133 10y ago
  It may be 1/20 of what it takes to light a LED, but it's 100 times what it takes to power a watch. A watch that lasts 5,000 years between batteries sounds attractive. There are an lot of things you can do with 15 joule per day budget. Being able to do it using an failsafe energy that lasts for millennia using a would be amazing. We could literally blanket the planet with sensors that never die.

marrone12 10y ago

If civilization ever falls, future generations would think using crystals for energy must have been a fairy tale.

gallerdude 10y ago
Enter Laputa.

downandout 10y ago

IMO the headline here isn't the minimally powered batteries, it's that this is a potential solution to the (very) secure storage of nuclear waste. In the US, for example, the proposal to store essentially all of our nuclear waste at one site (Yucca Mountain in Nevada) is a truly terrible idea that would create the world's most coveted terrorist target. Encapsulating the waste in small diamond shells that could be distributed among several sites seems like an ideal solution if they can get it to work at scale.

samstave 10y ago
What do you think about this documentary re: Finland storing waste in their version of Yucca: >This film explores the question of preparing the site so that it is not disturbed for 100,000 years, even though no structure in human history has stayed standing for such a long period. "Every day, the world over, large amounts of high-level radioactive waste created by nuclear power plants are placed in interim storage, which is vulnerable to natural disasters, man-made disasters, and societal changes. In Finland, the world’s first permanent repository is being hewn out of solid rock – a huge system of underground tunnels – that must last the entire period the waste remains hazardous: 100,000 years." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Into_Eternity_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Into_Eternity_(film) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gQ3dT7xcMgU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gQ3dT7xcMgU
arama471 10y ago
Why would anyone attack that facility? Its extremely easy to secure - If you somehow neutralize everyone protecting it you still wont get in and out with any meaningful amount of material before a military response comes in and removes your ability to actually do anything. Note that Yucca Mountain doesn't just have piles of fissile material - all the waste is in the same concrete capsules they arrived in. The ones that need a crane to be moved[1][2]. You could argue that these will fail before we know what to do with them and that they will leak radioactive material over time, but that still wouldn't make it a good terrorist target. [1] https://www.nwmo.ca/en/Canadas-Plan/Canadas-Used-Nuclear-Fuel/How-Is-It-Stored-Today https://www.nwmo.ca/en/Canadas-Plan/Canadas-Used-Nuclear-Fue... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dry_cask_storage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dry_cask_storage NOTE: Sources don't say that you cant move these without cranes, they just say that these are larger than a person and made of steel and reinforced concrete so I thought it would be a safe assumption these are a pain to move.

wolfgang42 10y ago

From #diamondbattery tweets: https://twitter.com/search?q=%23diamondbattery https://twitter.com/search?q=%23diamondbattery Could be used in underground seismic monitors https://twitter.com/Keminoes/status/803297734694465541 https://twitter.com/Keminoes/status/803297734694465541 Car keys that require batteries. If we don't have a spare battery with us and our keys die, we're stranded. MP3 players, too https://twitter.com/tysongeisler/status/803438384052129796 https://twitter.com/tysongeisler/status/803438384052129796 To power a low-power-mode Arduino for gas detection (CO, CO2, Low O2, etc), fire detection, radiation detection, etc. https://twitter.com/noalear/status/803389146433626112 https://twitter.com/noalear/status/803389146433626112 Could diamond batteries be used to power medical nanobots? https://twitter.com/weirbe/status/803418222972125184 https://twitter.com/weirbe/status/803418222972125184 Power clothes that contain sensors, as well as clothes that electrically regulate the temperature. https://twitter.com/CIMCloudOne/status/803440800759574528 https://twitter.com/CIMCloudOne/status/803440800759574528 how about in cell phones to give a little charge to the battery while the phone is not in use. https://twitter.com/W_Haas/status/803352403512872961 https://twitter.com/W_Haas/status/803352403512872961 Is there the potential to power watches as a fair amount of waste is generated from depleted watch batteries each year. https://twitter.com/Merrett72/status/803297788163289088 https://twitter.com/Merrett72/status/803297788163289088

flukus 10y ago
> Car keys that require batteries. If we don't have a spare battery with us and our keys die, we're stranded. There was a great solution for this in use for over a hundred years.
- snuxoll 10y ago
  My 2006 has a workable solution as well that doesn't require a traditional key, there's a slot you can put your key fob in to start the car even if the battery in it is dead (only option on trims sold without the Smart Key System) and the driver door has a mechanical lock that can be opened with a key hidden in the fob. Keyless entry and ignition is a great convenience, especially for my wife since she can keep the fob buried in her bag - and it makes it easy for me to put my daughter in the car without trying to wrangle the fob out of my pocket to unlock the door. But it floors me that so many manufacturers just ignore the use-case where the battery in the fob is dead...

zellyn 10y ago

Sounds cool. One annoying bit of breathless (and brainless) enthusiasm stuck out though: "In fact, diamond is the hardest substance known to man, there is literally nothing we could use that could offer more protection." While diamonds are extremely hard, they are brittle, and shatter relatively easily.

hasenj 10y ago
Maybe it's my lack of imagination or not having English as a native language, but how can something be "hard" and at the same time shatter easily? EDIT: nvm found the answer via Google https://www.quora.com/Why-is-the-diamond-hard-yet-brittle https://www.quora.com/Why-is-the-diamond-hard-yet-brittle
- tunap 10y ago
  Even better: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hardness https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hardness I read an enlightening discussion on HN a few months back about "hardness". I was under the impression professional scientists/researchers do not use the generic terms "hard" or "hardness". Outside of marketing, I presume they would employ concise measurements like ductility, elastic stiffness, plasticity, strain, strength, toughness, viscoelasticity, and viscosity.
razzaj 10y ago
Exactly. Not forgetting that radiation protection has nothing to do with the hardness of the casing. Lead is nowhere near hard and is one of the most used materials to shield from radiations.
andygates 10y ago
Relatively, but don't most electronics shatter much more easily? In a traumatic event that shatters my embedded diamond-powered pacemaker, isn't the squishy rest of me much worse off already?

roel_v 10y ago

This will sound like neckbeard cynicism, but I actually mean this and in a positive way: "There are so many possible uses that we’re asking the public to come up with suggestions of how they would utilise this technology by using #diamondbattery.” It's cool how they're engaging the public in their research in this way. Of course it's a transparent ploy to get social media mentions, but scientists of all sorts (and I kind of am one myself) would do themselves a favor by doing more to get the general public to know about their/our work. This particular thing 'feels' sort of slimy (to me at least, but I suspect to others on this site as well), but I think that's a bad reflex on my part, and that easy, low-friction things like giving people an opening to send a quick tweet or FB post reaches a different audience than having a stand at the 'open science fair' or having a lecture open to the general public; those tend to self-select in the audience they attract, to put it mildly.

mahranch 10y ago
> This particular thing 'feels' sort of slimy I was just coming here to talk about how inaccurate the title was. It implies (or leads people to believe) that "nuclear batteries" are something new. Or at least, that's what they want readers thinking. They're not even close to new. They're decades old. They're aboard the Voyager probes (which is why they're still working, 30 years later) and they're powering the Curiosity rover on Mars. Hell, there was even a nuclear battery powered automobile made by Ford I believe (the "Nucleon") as proof of concept. This was in the 1950s. The new thing here, is the fact that they can run the batteries with nuclear waste.
- qbrass 10y ago
  The Ford Nucleon was a styling exercise and was never intended to have a working prototype. The concept itself didn't use a nuclear battery, it was designed around a miniaturized nuclear reactor which powered the car using a steam turbine.
- x3n0ph3n3 10y ago
  Voyager I and II and Curiosity are powered with radioisotope thermoelectric generators [1], which are nothing like this proposal. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioisotope_thermoelectric_generator https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioisotope_thermoelectric_ge...

kbradero 10y ago

mm, I remember from a lecture that 'nuclear waste' is actually a label used by the nuclear industry but non all of them can be disposed, some by products can be used as a base atomic weapons. So all countries with nuclear power plants have to return/control the 'nuclear waste'.

tunesmith 10y ago

Haha this sounds straight out of Asimov's Foundation novels where a civilization was driven to innovate miniaturized nuclear power.

intrasight 10y ago
What I was thinking as well
petre 10y ago
Wasn't the Earth in Asimov's Foundation radioactive and unhabitable? Having that blue glow at the horizon (ionizing radiation-induced luminescence?).
- RangerScience 10y ago
  I was going to say that you're probably thinking of Trantor, the imperial capital, and that the earth was protected by R Daneel Olivaw and his "descendants", but now I just want to wave the nerd flag and link Wikipedia, because you're right about the radioactive but (apparently) wrong about the habitability. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth_(Foundation_universe) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth_(Foundation_universe) You win this round, sir. Edit: What petre was referring to was that the eponymous Foundation was deliberately founded on a world poor in radioactives (and other metals), so that they'd be forced to make the most out of what they had, resulting in extremely small, low power equipment.
- AYBABTME 10y ago
  The Earth was made radioactive due to a plot by the Spacers. On the other hand, the Foundation - the civilization using miniature nuclear reactors - is happening many millennial later and far away from Earth. So the "miniature nuclear tech" and "radioactive Earth" aren't related in the plot.

sandworm101 10y ago

This is no diamond-age. These devices are all well and good, but think of the scales involved. To generate enough power to do something like power a home, let alone a vehicle, we are going to need kilos of this stuff. Kilos of diamond. It's also going to get rather hot. That is the point. Using numbers from patch_collector: 1 x 50watt lightbulb / 0.0013 Watts/gram = 38Kg = 83lbs of diamond per bulb. Diamonds are far from indestructible. They shatter. More importantly, they burn. We don't see it very often but put enough of them together, add heat and electricity, and you better hope there isn't any oxygen nearby. Imagine a couple pounds of these things, on fire, pumping out radioactive carbon dioxide. At least when uranium burns it produces something heavy that can be filtered. Filtering radioactive CO2 would be a nightmare. These things will never find there way into any consumer product.

ryao 10y ago
At what temperature does Diamond burn?
- jws 10y ago
  Diamons will burn at 690°C in pure oxygen. Houses burn at around 590°C. Maybe if you rupture an O₂ tank in a house fire right next to the diamond battery you could pull it off. I wouldn't worry about small diamond batteries. There is already 1 part per trillion carbon 14 in you. The odd telemetry battery that gets caught in an oxygen fire isn't going to shift the scales much.
  - legulere 10y ago
    Trash incineration is around 1000 degree Celsius. People already now throw batteries in household trash when they shouldn't.
  - marcosdumay 10y ago
    A pure oxygen atmosphere is pushing it too much, isn't it? Anything you have at home, except for the concrete walls and glass will burn in less than 0°C in a pure oxygen atmosphere. A pure O2 tank in a house would be a serious cause of concern.

kilroy123 10y ago

I'm not sure if this will lead to a new revolutionary battery. But I'll say this, the man/woman who creates a company that builds a new revolutionary battery that will keep your laptop humming for a week; will be very rich. Probably the next richest person on earth.

neurostimulant 10y ago
Putting that much power density on your lap is kinda scary. It's like carrying a slab of C4. Imagine if the galaxy note incident happen again but with a much much higher power density battery which can go kaboom.
- ccozan 10y ago
  How would a C14 slab would go kaboom? Its only role is to give radiation which is transformed into heat or electricity. I don't expect any explosive parts here.
  - neurostimulant 10y ago
    I was talking about a high capacity battery that can power a laptop for a week, not the nuclear battery from the article.
regularfry 10y ago
Doubt it. Look at the evolution of mobile phones: they went from staying alive for a week to needing a charge overnight. People gripe around the margins, but in general seem OK with that.
- rubber_duck 10y ago
  It would be a major thing for car batteries - lighter batteries with longer charge means you get more range from two factors - less stuff to move and more capacity to do it.

ChuckMcM 10y ago

It would be more credible if the Cabot Institute linked the paper on their "All Research Papers" page (http://research-information.bristol.ac.uk/en/organisations/cabot-institute(c0347f3a-1376-405f-aca9-7d3d008a9701)/publications.html?page=0 http://research-information.bristol.ac.uk/en/organisations/c...) or if they described how they are getting electricity out of beta decay (is it simple a thermo-electric generator? How much heat differential can they push? Or is it just bodging together chunks of radioactive material in a casement that has reasonable head conductivity and absorbs 99% of radiation. My favorite "invention" of that form is the water heater "booster" ball. Basically you take a kilogram of spent fuel rod, encase it in a austenitic stainless steel ball, and suspend that bad boy in the center of your water heater holding tank. Hot water for the next 500 years without using gas or electricity :-).

slimsag 10y ago
> My favorite "invention" of that form is the water heater "booster" ball This sounds super cool! what happens if people e.g. go on vacation for 3 months? would it explode the heater or melt through the ball..? do you have any other links/info about it you can give me? I'm super curious about it. I googled moderately but I only found some seemingly unrelated things[1] [1] http://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffmcmahon/2013/02/22/nasa-a-nuclear-reactor-to-replace-your-water-heater/#7b4faf433ba3 http://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffmcmahon/2013/02/22/nasa-a-nu...
- leeoniya 10y ago
  if there's any water left in that water heater after a couple hours and it didnt explode from vapor overpressure, you'll painfully die of acute radiation sickness. that's the best case scenario.
  - icantdrive55 10y ago
    By law, all water heaters need a regulator pressure valve. (Before this federal requirement; some people had rocket in their garage. Middle of the night a water heater would go through the roof, if the homeowner was lucky.). In this case, I would want four regulators, on my nuclear hydronic heater.

JoeAltmaier 10y ago

Suspicious: sounds like a con, in every breathless undocumented wild claim.

threeseed 10y ago
Watch the language. It's a university press release. It may not meet expectations. The science may be faulty. They could be utterly incompetent. But a con implies wilful behaviour on the part of the University of Bristol to deceive people.
- Dylan16807 10y ago
  > It's a university press release. Which are often trying to actively deceive people, implying that tiny iterations are new fields, and that devices are orders of magnitude more effective than they are. I'm comfortable calling this press release deceptive.
- JoeAltmaier 10y ago
  I stand by my characterization: it sounds like a con, using the same hyperventilated language. It makes superficially-reasonable-but-quite-wrong claims (diamond will shield from radiation). It avoids important order-of-magnitude problems (the theoretical power generated is insignificant for almost all uses). All its missing is the hook - the link to "How can I invest?"

outworlder 10y ago

> A team of physicists and chemists from the University of Bristol have grown a man-made diamond that, when placed in a radioactive field, is able to generate a small electrical current. So, they are replacing the thermocouples as used in RTGs with this diamond-like stuff? And low radioactivity sources (as opposed to plutonium)? That would indeed be revolutionary if it worked.

ars 10y ago
It'll work fine, but the problem with low radioactivity sources is that they are also low energy sources. So you need a lot of material.

jaza 10y ago

Dilithium crystals, anyone?

iseanstevens 10y ago

The part where they list "airplanes" as something it could potentially power was where it became silly... that's gonna be a lot of spent fuel rod mass.

hashin 10y ago

I can see that they are emphasizing on the #DiamondBattery hashtag so that general public will be hooked and share it more, but why haven't they given any hints (mildly technical) to the capabilities of the battery? // A team of physicists and chemists from the University of Bristol have grown a man-made diamond that, when placed in a radioactive field, is able to generate a small electrical current.// When I read the "small electrical current", the physicist in me was naturally assuming a very small current of the order of pico to nano amperes (without being conservative) - essentially useless. Metrics like the half life of the battery doesn't make any sense at all if the power or current rating is not specified. Current rating is something you could trust, that it will end up as a viable product. This would appeal more if they can give a direct link to their research paper.

extrapickles 10y ago
Current off the shelf betavoltaic batteries produce 50-350 nA @ 2.4v. I don't expect them to be producing much more than that.
- berntb 10y ago
  Is that an idiom, or are they really "off the shelf" and not specially built for every space probe?
  - extrapickles 10y ago
    They are "off the shelf" in that you can give them a call and in 6 weeks have one. I suspect they obtain and load the nuclear material for your order, but the rest of the device is stocked as it involves custom semiconductors which have fairly large minimum orders. These are the class of battery that would replace the CMOS battery in something that can never lose power to its RAM, rather than the much more powerful RTGs that space probes use.
    - aminorex 10y ago
      Part of a spectrum from MEMs through pacemaker batteries, Cassini-style RTG, pebble-bed reactors, up to massive GE/Siemens style LWRs. It's a remarkably scalable tech, both up- and down- scale.

kodfodrasz 10y ago

Even if this is true I think this is such a public safety hazard, that the authorities will never allow its public adoption. Just think in terms of domestic terrorism and dirty bombs. Exploding a few such batteries would release radioactive powder, which is a quite dangerous if inhaled, and cleaning it up is very difficult.

regularfry 10y ago
C14 isn't much good for a dirty bomb. It's too light. You'd probably need to be actually caught in the explosion to stand a risk of inhaling enough to be problematic, and at that point you've got other things to worry about.
talideon 10y ago
You don't even need to think in those terms: just think in terms of some idiot who doesn't bother properly recycling the things. If they're not safe in that circumstance, then they're a potential safety hazard, much as at the very least, say, lead-acid batteries are.
lefty2 10y ago
Yeah, even forgetting dirty bombs, spent fuel rods emit a huge amount of gamma radiation and need to be actively cooled in huge pools. Also, they can't be handled directly. If you came within a meter of unshielded fuel rod you would be dead within 5 mintues

brandmeyer 10y ago

10:1 odds that this is just a use of the photoelectric effect with a clever dielectric. Based on the press-release description, it is probably not a radiothermal generator (like that used in deep space probes). 1) Have an ionizing radiation source. 2) Get a robust dielectric, with metal plates on both sides of it. Call the plate near the radiation source the cathode and the far one the anode. 3) As the ionizing radiation impacts one side of the cell, the released electron travels only a short distance through the cell. Ideally, the first interaction is with a cathode and the far side an anode, imparting a negative potential to it. 4) A potential difference now exists between the far-side anode and the near-side cathode, from which you can draw current. Strictly speaking, this is a more like a capacitor which is trickle-charged by the radiation field rather than a battery. There is a design tradeoff between thickness of the metal and dielectric layers in that the initial and final ionizing interaction must be of a (cathode/dielectric -> anode) or (cathode -> dielectric/anode) to get any energy out of it. Ideally, the dielectric has an extremely small cross-section for interaction with whatever the ionizing radiation source is, while the metal plates interact very strongly. However, there will always be some losses due to internal ionization of the dielectric itself. I'm not sure how you would build an effective multi-layer structure, either. Is this preferable to an RTG? Almost certainly not. The vast majority of the radiation energy in an ionizing photoelectric-effect cell is still released as heat. Very little energy can be captured this way, so it is quite inefficient in terms of energy produced relative to the radiation emitted. You can extract some more electric work by pre-charging the cell such that the freed electron is slowed in part by the electric field gradient, but in practice the bulk of the energy is still lost as heat. Sea story time! The internal electric field within the dielectric will produce some weird mechanical stresses, too. When my ship's reactor plant went through a refueling overhaul one of the things they replaced was the reactor compartment windows. There are a couple of leaded glass windows that allow Mk. 1 eyeball inspection of the reactor compartment during operation. They are quite thick, electrically insulating, and they build up a large internal electric field along with internal stresses. Standard maintenance was to replace them well before the stress could fracture the glass. So... could the press release be ...excessively breathless? My guess is a qualified "probably". The physics behind the photoelectric effect are well known and understood. Diamond is special in part because it has a fantastically high dielectric breakdown strength. So, you can extract more work out of the ionized electrons by supporting a very high potential gradient between the anode and cathode, which could be seen as a breakthrough for this type of energy conversion device. BUT it also would enable a new generation of high-density ultra-capacitors. The energy density in a capacitor is limited (in part) by the breakdown strength of the dielectric, since the stored energy is a volume integral of the squared electric field strength. Since ultracaps are technologically much easier to commercialize, and much more investor-friendly than anything involving an ionizing radiation source, but that isn't what the press release points to, I think it is likely to be ... exaggerated. I could also be wrong, and we'll soon have a new generation of ultracaps!

codebook 10y ago

How much is it? same as diamond?

imagist 10y ago
Low-quality diamonds can be manufactured more cheaply than the synthetic diamonds intended to compete with the jewel industry. I imagine this prove would come down with the scale batteries are manufactured at.

known 10y ago

Reminds me https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toshiba_4S https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toshiba_4S

jlebrech 10y ago

in a diamond battery what serves as anode and cathode, how do you connect wires to a diamond? this diamond making process would be quite hazardous. I wonder if they should just create a layer of diamonds and and sandwich that between C14 rather than try and rely just or those diamonds to power spacecraft (would save having to develop the non-radioactive diamond layer). would a standard diamond also do that trick, I don't see why a radioactive diamond would be different if it is in the presence of C14?

rini17 10y ago
There are diamond LEDs so this is solved problem, I think by adding very specific impurities.

legulere 10y ago

> In fact, diamond is the hardest substance known to man, there is literally nothing we could use that could offer more protection. With such nonsense it is hard to believe the rest of the article. Heat a diamond and it will burn releasing CO2 into the air, smash it with a hammer and it will burst in million parts. Small particles and gasses are very easy to ingest.

marcosdumay 10y ago
> Heat a diamond and it will burn releasing CO2 into the air I bet you have never tried that. Heat a diamond enough (what it a lot), and it will turn into graphite (layer by layer), a substance usually used for heat protection since is one of the solid materials we have around that survive the hightest temperatures. Also, hit it with a big enough hammer, and yes, it will smash. It will also press a dent on your hammer.
- joezydeco 10y ago
  A material can be "hard" but also be brittle. Diamond is one of these substances. You don't need a large hammer to crack or destroy one. Ask any jeweler.
  - logfromblammo 10y ago
    Diamond has perfect cleavage in four directions. If you want a mineral that you can really pound on without it breaking, you want nephrite. The Maori made war clubs out of it. Bring a diamond to a nephrite fight, and you're going to end up in the stewpot. If you need hardness and toughness, corundum is what you want.
  - randall 10y ago
    This is what makes me think it's probably going to be used in pacemakers / satellites, rather than phones. Imagine the Galaxy Note 7 fiasco with radioactive isotopes. Tesla has this problem too. They shield the underside of the car now, but imagine if you accidentally punctured the diamond. It'd likely shatter and spread radioactive material everywhere. It could be awesome in non-touchable contexts though.

etatoby 10y ago

> diamond is the hardest substance known to man, there is literally nothing we could use that could offer more protection Weird, I was under the assumption that density (and other more exoteric chemical properties) shielded from radioactivity, not hardness. /s

ryao 10y ago
Maybe they meant protection of the containment itself.

transfire 10y ago

Damn. I was hopeful if used gamma radiation. That would have been truly revolutionary.

bahjoite 10y ago

> Obvious applications would be [...] high-altitude drones This made me wonder about the funding for this research, but then I found that Dr. T Scott is involved with[0]: > Radiation Mapping Using Unmanned Aerial Vehicles > Following the events at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant, the Interface Analysis Centre has been developing an unmanned aerial system capable of mapping radiation in regions inaccessible to humans. [0]: http://www.bristol.ac.uk/physics/research/iac/casestudies/ http://www.bristol.ac.uk/physics/research/iac/casestudies/

Symmetry 10y ago

Normally with nuclear power you use the heat generated to drive a heat engine of some sort with strict limits on the theoretical efficiency. But many pulse fusion designs look at using the momentum of emitted charged particles directly through their interaction with magnetic fields at far higher efficiency than could be achieved with the energy going through a heat stage. Carbon-14 emits only beta particles which are, of course, all negatively charged. I wonder if they've managed to turn those into a very high voltage, very low current continuous source directly?

nathan_f77 10y ago

WOW. I always expected that we would see mobile phones that lasted for days or weeks before needing to be recharged. I never once considered the idea that we may have mobile phones and laptops that NEVER need to be recharged during our lifetime. That is an incredible thought. I wonder how hard it will be to convince people to put nuclear batteries in their pocket. Many people are still afraid of microwave ovens.

givinguflac 10y ago
It does sound incredible, but I don't think most people would be down with carrying nuclear waste in their pockets.
- nathan_f77 10y ago
  Many of us already carry around lithium ion batteries in our pockets, and I think these nuclear batteries could be far less dangerous. Phones can explode without warning, and bending or piercing a battery can cause huge explosions and fires. You'd have to try really hard to shatter these diamonds, and they would probably have some lead lining.
  - enraged_camel 10y ago
    Sure, it's easy to say that as an engineer since we deal with facts and data, but the general public is anywhere from wary to extremely scared of anything "nuclear."

drzaiusapelord 10y ago

Every few years there's a proposal for a new nuclear battery. This was the last one: https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/190555-this-nuclear-battery-could-power-your-smartphone-forever-as-long-as-you-dont-value-your-life-or-sperm-count-too-highly https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/190555-this-nuclear-batt... The problem is none of these approaches solve the disposal problem or the dirty bomb problem. You can buy 1,000 of these and build a dangerous device that would require serious clean-up and, obviously, can hurt a lot of people. So, this will never be in a smartphone or laptop, but perhaps power industrial items that can't be practically charged often like remote robots or sensors. Or applications in space to replace aging, expensive, and heavy RTG's.

Declanomous 10y ago
It doesn't even have to be a dirty bomb. You just need someone who is overly curious and then you've got a Radioactive Boy Scout situation.
nathan_f77 10y ago
> You can buy 1,000 of these and build a dangerous device that would require serious clean-up and, obviously, can hurt a lot of people. Or you can buy $1,000 worth of lithium batteries and try to build a breeder reactor in your back yard: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Hahn https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Hahn Oh no, I didn't know he passed away only a few months ago. And that's very sad to read about the rest of his life.
- drzaiusapelord 10y ago
  The lithuim is just used to purify the thorium he illegally acquired. I don't think your comparison really works here.

emeraldd 10y ago

(Note this math is a thought experiment ... completely off the cuff and utter non-sense.) Based on their numbers: AA is about 700J/g @ 20g gives about 14000J and a 24 hour drain gives us 580J/hour. DiamondBattery is about 15J/day or ~0.5J/hour Ignoring voltage issues (among other things), we come to 1.1kg of DiamondBattery being able to supply something that would drain their 20g AA in 24 hours. The math here is complete off the cuff non-sense, but an extra kg or so here is not unreasonable for some fixed applications ...

drzaiusapelord 10y ago
This is a little disheartening in terms of robotics. For a non-trivial robot with a handful of 12V motors and a decent workload, I imagine this would add tens of lbs compared to only a handful of ounces using lithium. Of course, those tens of lbs means more power needed to push the robot and you quickly hit the laws of diminishing returns.
- emeraldd 10y ago
  Of course, we're talking about less than first-gen tech here as well.

rbanffy 10y ago

Would anyone care to explain how this works? The crystalline structure of the diamond and the directionality of the radiation source doesn't give me a clear idea about where to add terminals to this battery.

jules0 10y ago

Given that Bristol researchers did not explain the physics behind their diamond battery we can only speculate but considering some recent developments we can make some good guesses. It probably functions similar to a betavolatic cell. (See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betavoltaic_device https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betavoltaic_device) In a typical configuration you have a P-N semiconductor junction placed next to beta emitter. The beta particles impact the PN junction and create electron-hole pairs that are pulled apart by the junction to produce a current. The use of diamond seems like a could be a significant innovation: 1) Carbon-14 is an efficient beta emitter and could make op part of all of the diamond material. 2) Diamond has a wide band-gap which is necessary for high efficiency conversion to electricity. 3) Has strong resistance to radiation damage. In one configuration the diamond would be layered on top of a silicon P-N junction so it works like a conventional betavoltaic device. (see: http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2013/ph241/harrison2/ http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2013/ph241/harrison2/) A recent patent shows that diamond is a very efficient moderator for injecting electrons into the junction. (see https://www.google.com/patents/US9064610 https://www.google.com/patents/US9064610) Considering that diamond is itself a semiconductor we could also do away with the silicon. For example diamond is being considered for highly efficient photovoltaic cells. (see: http://exploration.vanderbilt.edu/news/news_diamond.htm http://exploration.vanderbilt.edu/news/news_diamond.htm) It is also being considered for production of next-gen schottky diodes. (see: http://www10.edacafe.com/nbc/articles/view_article.php?articleid=207252&section=ICNews http://www10.edacafe.com/nbc/articles/view_article.php?artic...) The diamond could be stacked next to a conducting metal to create a Skottky barrier which is a type of P-N junction. The beta particles would excite the electrons with enough energy to push them over the barrier and create a current. (see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schottky_barrier https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schottky_barrier)