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Probably an incredibly stupid question but I've always wondered why we can't take small amounts of nuclear waste - say, size of a AA battery, put it into a meta

Probably an incredibly stupid question but I've always wondered why we can't take small amounts of nuclear waste - say, size of a AA battery, put it into a metal package and use it in laptops / cars / whatever. Short of the risk of leakage, the amount of power that can be generated from it is surely enough to power a laptop or put them into a battery pack for a car, no ?

Dylan16807 7y ago
How many watts do you want? In a standard RTG, you need 20 watts of heat for every watt of electricity. That and the "what if this gets breached" factor are the main problems.
kllrnohj 7y ago
Russia also made one of these as a prototype and it was ~90 mm3 & 0.35 g for ~1 μW of electrical power ( https://newatlas.com/nickel-nuclear-battery-design/54884 https://newatlas.com/nickel-nuclear-battery-design/54884 ) So to power a laptop you'd need a really, really, really big & heavy battery. Like, the size of a house big.
asdfman123 7y ago
I'm not an expert but I know of two different technologies to convert heat to power: thermocouples and heat engines. Thermocouples are great because they're small, can fit in enclosed spaces, have no moving parts and last nearly forever. However, they're not a very efficient way to convert heat to energy. Heat engines + generators can be very efficient, but they're bulky and have many moving parts (you're not going to attach a diesel generator to your cell phone).
crooked-v 7y ago
> Short of the risk of leakage That's the main risk. A major cause of civilian radiation accidents is radioactive material accidentally mixed with unlabeled scrap [1], and if you put any noticeable amount of the stuff into products meant for untrained civilians, the rate of that happening would skyrocket. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_civilian_radiation_accidents https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_civilian_radiation_acc... For a particularly nasty example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samut_Prakan_radiation_accident https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samut_Prakan_radiation_acciden...

Dylan16807 7y ago

How many watts do you want? In a standard RTG, you need 20 watts of heat for every watt of electricity. That and the "what if this gets breached" factor are the main problems.

kllrnohj 7y ago

Russia also made one of these as a prototype and it was ~90 mm3 & 0.35 g for ~1 μW of electrical power ( https://newatlas.com/nickel-nuclear-battery-design/54884 https://newatlas.com/nickel-nuclear-battery-design/54884 ) So to power a laptop you'd need a really, really, really big & heavy battery. Like, the size of a house big.

asdfman123 7y ago

I'm not an expert but I know of two different technologies to convert heat to power: thermocouples and heat engines. Thermocouples are great because they're small, can fit in enclosed spaces, have no moving parts and last nearly forever. However, they're not a very efficient way to convert heat to energy. Heat engines + generators can be very efficient, but they're bulky and have many moving parts (you're not going to attach a diesel generator to your cell phone).

crooked-v 7y ago

> Short of the risk of leakage That's the main risk. A major cause of civilian radiation accidents is radioactive material accidentally mixed with unlabeled scrap [1], and if you put any noticeable amount of the stuff into products meant for untrained civilians, the rate of that happening would skyrocket. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_civilian_radiation_accidents https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_civilian_radiation_acc... For a particularly nasty example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samut_Prakan_radiation_accident https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samut_Prakan_radiation_acciden...