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Nuclear batteries with beta emitters driving some kind of semiconductor have been around for a while, but they're very low power.[1] "... Betavolt's team of sc
by Animats 2y ago
Nuclear batteries with beta emitters driving some kind of semiconductor have been around for a while, but they're very low power.[1]
"... Betavolt's team of scientists developed a unique single-crystal diamond semiconductor that is only 10 microns thick, placing a 2-micron-thick nickel-63 sheet between two diamond semiconductor converters to convert the decay energy of the radioactive source into electric current to form an independent unit."
"... 100 microwatts, a voltage of 3V, and a volume of 15 X 15 X 5 cubic millimeters ..."
3-4 orders below the power requirements for a phone. An AirTag-type intermittent device, though...
So, can those be scaled up? Are all those little beta-emitters in coin cell form factor going to be a problem? Nickel-63 has a half life of 100 years, so they'll be active for a while. Not dangerous unless broken up and ingested, but need to be kept out of the food chain.
[1] https://www-betavolt-tech.translate.goog/359485-359485_645066.html?_x_tr_sl=auto&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=en&_x_tr_pto=wapp https://www-betavolt-tech.translate.goog/359485-359485_64506...
- saulrh 2y agoNot dangerous unless broken up and ingested, but need to be kept out of the food chain. No worse than a NiCad in that respect. Probably better, if anything, since it's so much easier to detect and track.
- giantg2 2y agoAnd set off all the NBC detectors on the highways near major cities.
- arcticbull 2y agoWell yes but only if destroyed. Then wouldn’t you call that a feature? When in their enclosures there should be no radiation.
- giantg2 2y agoNo way could all the alerts be tracked.
- jacobgkau 2y agoYeah, you bring up another angle to look at it from: even if the alerts didn't go off when the batteries are being used/stored properly, it would make it easy to create a lot of noise/false positives as part of an actual attack (were those batteries to be readily available).
- arcticbull 2y agoThey were for a long time, betavoltaics were used in pacemakers. They started using more conventional batteries because the betavoltaics far outlasted the actual pacemakers.
- jacobgkau 2y agoThat's interesting. I imagine parts for an internal medical device would be able to be more tightly controlled than batteries for general usage, but maybe I'm wrong.
- thadt 2y agoNot Nickel-63 - Beta particles don’t go very far in air, and are shielded by almost anything. You’ll be unlikely to be alarming on beta emitters anywhere, unless they’re right up against your specialized Beta detector.
- KiwiJohnno 2y agoMy understanding is, the danger with Beta emitters is if they are broken up into dust, and you breathe the dust in (or eat/drink it) then you are toast, as your lungs and internal organs get a small, but continuous bombardment of Beta particles which will eventually give you cancer. If you are contaminated internally, with radioactive dust then there is no way to fix that.
- lazide 2y agoAlso nearly impossible to detect. No roadside detector will, anyway.
- hilbert42 2y agoWithout going into too many specifics, for a period during my career I was involved with an organization whose responsibility it is to track nuclear materials and keep them under safe surveillance—in fact my job had the words 'surveillance engineer' in its title. I say that only bring to your attention how difficult this would be in practice. Putting safety aside for a moment, in most countries the regulatory restrictions are enormous because they are signatories to the NPT—Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons which tightly bind them to how they use and handle nuclear materials. This involves, use, tracking, short and long-term disposal thereof not to mention how to keep radioactive materials away from bad actors/those who've ill intent. With safety, there are so many issues involved that I can hardly even mention them here. Just as an illustration, the once lack of regulations covering the manufacture and use of luminous radium paint turned out to be a disaster. I've thought about this a great deal, whenever the batteries in my flashlight die I wish I had some nuclear powered ones and evey time I'm brought back to reality when I think how difficult it would be to implement in practice.
- saulrh 2y agoI meant precisely what I said. Tracking NiCads to the standards of the NPT would presumably be impossible. If your standard is "keep it out of the food supply", though, I guarantee that there's a little bit of NiCad in that hot dog in your fridge, and there'd be much less NiCad in your hot dog if they tripped a radiation detector before they hit the incinerator or the landfill.
- XorNot 2y agoI've always said that I'm more afraid of heavy metal contamination then nuclear material contamination. There are no hand held devices which will tell you if the soil you're vaguely near has heavy metals in it, nor how much.
- CamperBob2 2y agoThere are no hand held devices which will tell you if the soil you're vaguely near has heavy metals in it, nor how much. Well, technically, there are, but now you're back in the ionizing-radiation business: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KdfHVcU8U7U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KdfHVcU8U7U
- FooBarWidget 2y agoI regularly see thrown away batteries on the streets of Amsterdam. This worries me.
- xtiansimon 2y agoMeanwhile and just a few days ago… “Rising rates of cancer in young people prompts hunt for environmental culprit (ft.com)” https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41178776 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41178776
- tgsovlerkhgsel 2y agoI think a NiCad is a lot less dangerous if it does get broken up. Once such devices are ubiquitous, that means improperly handled/disposed ones will also be ubiquitous.
- db48x 2y agoPretty dangerous when burned though.
- swores 2y ago> "... 100 microwatts, a voltage of 3V, and a volume of 15 X 15 X 5 cubic millimeters ..." > 3-4 orders below the power requirements for a phone. An AirTag-type intermittent device, though... If my maths is right (and it's past midnight, and I'm not entirely sober, so might not be) and my search results are too, 15 x 15 x 5 cubic millimeters is approximately 9.68 times smaller than an iPhone battery (95 mm x 37.6 mm x 3.05 mm, ish), but if energy capacity scales linearly to volume then its ~12,500 times lower capacity per volume than an iPhone battery.
- K0balt 2y agoThat’s 100 microwatts x100 years, so about 876 wh, or 292 amp hrs (292,000 mah) But, still, only 80mah a day . So 750mah scaled up to iPhone battery size. So abut 1/5 of the average daily power requirement for an iPhone. Even at that rate you’d need to use a supecapacitor to even out the load profile. OTOH, in terms overall energy, it would be about the same as about a 50 litre lithium ion so it is rediculously dense, just low output
- timschmidt 2y ago1/5 the daily power requirement is surprisingly decent. Swapping out the screen for an eink display or ultra low power LCD like those from PixelQi and downclocking the SoC might be enough to make up that gap.
- swores 2y agoFYI, your comment made me look up PixelQi and Wikipedia says that conpany died almost a decade ago (although 2015 feels to me like much, much less than a decade ago): > "By 2015, PixelQi's team and offices were unreachable, and the company is presumed defunct.[3] The intellectual property is now owned by the original investor of Pixel Qi, while the right to manufacture Pixel Qi technology contractually rests with Tripuso Display Solutions.[4][5]" https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pixel_Qi https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pixel_Qi
- com2kid 2y ago
- refulgentis 2y agoTFA states this and replies to this, in detail :)