
Nuclear waste recycled into diamond batteries - montalbano
https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/news/recycling-nuclear-waste-diamond-battery-a9297571.html
======
Animats
(2016) See Wikipedia.[1]

Press release from University of Bristol.[2]

Article which actually has some numbers.[3] 100μW for 5,000 years. Maybe power
a dumb watch. 10 to 15 of those might power a hearing aid.

This might have potential for tracking devices where cost is not a big issue.
Trickle-charge a capacitor until there's enough energy for a burst
transmission.

"Near-infinite power", no.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diamond_battery](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diamond_battery)

[2] [https://www.bristol.ac.uk/news/2020/january/recycling-
nuclea...](https://www.bristol.ac.uk/news/2020/january/recycling-nuclear-
waste-for-diamond-battery.html)

[3] [https://www.electronicsweekly.com/news/research-
news/diamond...](https://www.electronicsweekly.com/news/research-news/diamond-
nuclear-battery-generate-100%CE%BCw-5000-years-2016-12/)

~~~
crooked-v
Tile tracker tags use a 3V 130mAh CR1632 battery, which lasts for a year... I
wish I remembered the math to figure out what trickle wattage that works out
to, for comparison.

~~~
kalenx
3*0.130 = 0.39 Wh Over 5000 years it would amount to about 8.9 nW (nanowatt),
of course assuming the chemistry to be able to sustain such time span (which
is not).

~~~
doersino
If drained over a year (which is as long as the battery from the post you're
responding to is supposed to last), it works out to:

390 mWh / (24 h * 365 d/Y) ≈ 0.061 mW = 61 μW

~~~
crooked-v
In that case, one of these diamond batteries would be able to substitute for
the CR1632 and give a sealed tracker an effectively infinite lifetime (at
least compared to, well, human civilization). I imagine it would be pricey,
though.

~~~
jfengel
It also wouldn't be able to do drive a speaker, another key purpose of a Tile.
Its actual tracking is primarily passive, so it's hard to locate with just a
phone. (You might be able to triangulate from multiple phones... I recall an
HN article with somebody doing that a few weeks ago). The main use case is to
get close enough to trigger it, then follow your ears. That's thousands of
milliwatts.

I suppose it might be possible to add a capacitor that's being continually
charged.

~~~
sbierwagen
Piezo buzzers can be more efficient than that. This 95 cent buzzer sold by
Adafruit is rated to 9V at 3mA:
[https://www.adafruit.com/product/1740](https://www.adafruit.com/product/1740)

~~~
jfengel
Is it loud enough? Tiles are supposed to be detectable at up to 300 feet, but
that's less useful if you can't actually hear it.

I don't actually know the specs they use for that. I just figured that it
would take a few watts to be heard at distances over tens of feet.

------
gus_massa
Stupid title, but interesting article. They try to use radioactive Carbon-14
to make diamonds to produce heat in a RTG power source.

Obviously it doesn't have near infinite power. The amount of power will be
very small, but it may be useful for some applications. Also, the half-life of
C14 is 5750 years, so after a few milenia it will need a replacement.

~~~
montalbano
Indeed the title is not great. I assume that by 'near infinite power' they
mean in duration, not magnitude.

~~~
wlesieutre
Power is a measure of energy per time, so to get nitpicky about it that's the
equivalent of saying "near infinite speed" about something that goes a mile
per hour for a few thousand years.

It'll cover some distance, yeah, but it's not what I'd call speedy.

------
hinkley
There's another option I don't see used often for things like this and that's
infinite standby.

Batteries self-discharge. If you have a power source that is greater than the
self-discharge rate of a battery, then standby time can exceed the useful life
of the device. That's a different problem, but it's also a useful one, and has
a much bigger power budget than devices powered solely by the new power
source.

I could see wide applications for emergency equipment, for instance.

------
ChuckMcM
One of those, "If cars can fly we wouldn't need to build any more roads!"
concepts.

I got to learn a bit about betavoltaic[1,2] devices which seem pretty neat,
but I'm not going to hold my breath on seeing production versions any time
soon :-).

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betavoltaic_device](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betavoltaic_device)

[2] "Advances in Betavoltaic Power Sources" \--
[https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/795d/eb5ca274f79a11730b9a34...](https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/795d/eb5ca274f79a11730b9a34e78633f3dfe781.pdf)

------
dougmwne
This actually seems like it has potential application if they could be safe
enough. As we get the last drops of power efficiency out of Moore's Law, we
might end up being able to get a useful amount of compute out of a tiny amount
of energy. This could enable things like ambient sensors that never need
replaced. Shower a country with a million microSD-sized soil sensors that run
for decades and you have a real-time agricultural monitoring system.

~~~
benjohnson
It's getting possible now - there's devices that 'harvest' ambient radio waves
to power themselves - here's a device that has a full Bluetooth stack:
[https://9to5mac.com/2019/01/15/battery-free-bluetooth-
sticke...](https://9to5mac.com/2019/01/15/battery-free-bluetooth-sticker-
chip/)

------
lsiunsuex
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 ?

~~~
kllrnohj
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.

------
barbegal
100uW is fine for a lot of low power applications. For example Bluetooth Low
Energy (BLE) connections can operate on as little as 10uW.

------
EducatorDirTeam
"With the majority of the UK’s nuclear power plants set to go offline in the
next 10-15 years this presents a huge opportunity to recycle a large amount of
material to generate power for so many great uses."

Great news..!

------
lostmsu
Could not find how much power they generate.

~~~
saalweachter
1\. Nitrogen-14 has 0.99998807418 of the mass of carbon-14.

2\. After 1 year, 0.99987945993 of the original carbon-14 will remain.

3\. 1 carat of pure carbon-14 diamond will therefore lose 287.5 picograms of
mass in 1 year.

4\. 287.5 picograms of mass equates to 25,839.2 joules of energy.

This amounts to 0.818 milliwatts / carat for the first year (and a very slow
decline after that). Note that this is the _maximum possible output_ for a
_pure_ carbon-14 diamond. Usable energy will be less, and I'm assuming that
the diamonds would not start out as pure carbon-14. Practical outputs are
probably in the small-number-of-microwatts / carat range.

~~~
zaroth
So 1 gram of perfectly pure carbon-14 would produce theoretically 4mW
essentially continuously, or 35Wh per year.

I think that’s pretty neat. There are bursty low energy communication devices
which could perhaps work with that power budget?

The problem is, nothing in the world actually needs to stay on for 5,000
years. So the alternative of using a 100x cheaper battery that just lasts 6
months or something is going to be hard to beat.

~~~
saalweachter
For more human-scale applications, you're probably looking for something that
has a half-life of ~650 years -- that gives you > 90% original power for 100
years.

------
beat
This sounds... expensive.

Every time I read about miracle energy sources, I want to see the cost model.
Cost is everything.

~~~
t0astbread
I wonder, if natural disasters start increasing in impact and frequency, at
what point people would start reconsidering economics in order to accelerate
environmental protection.

------
nategri
Sounds like it might be a good pick as the energy source for an extremely long
haul interstellar probe?

~~~
FrojoS
It's already used (minus the diamond casing), e.g. in the Curiosity mars
rover, or the Voyager probes

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curiosity_(rover)#Specificatio...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curiosity_\(rover\)#Specifications)
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioisotope_thermoelectric_ge...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioisotope_thermoelectric_generator)

------
tus88
Tiny, low power batteries are not going to make a major dent in global nuclear
waste stocks.

~~~
saalweachter
Yeah, you'd have to start putting them in doorknobs or something.

~~~
derision
Can't wait for my SmartKnob powered by nuclear diamonds

------
gene-h
It doesn't seem like they've made much progress since this snopes article came
out in 2017[0]. I'm also skeptical that they could use these batteries to
practically power a cellphone. So a cellphone requires about an average power
of about 200 mw assuming we deplete the battery once every 24 hours. 1 gram of
Carbon-14 experiences about 156*10^9 decays per second, which release at most
156 KeV in the form of beta particles, so carbon 14 has a power density of
about 4 mW/g. By itself this is decent, but conversion of these high energy
electrons to electricity won't be very efficient. 9.8% efficiency has been
attained for diamond films under electron irradiation[1], although because the
beta particles emitted have a much larger energy than the bandgap of all the
semiconductors we know, the efficiency is likely to be less. So assuming 10%
conversion efficiency, we need 500 grams of just C-14. This about twice the
mass of the iphone 11 pro max. It is probably not very practical to haul a
large brick of radioisotopes around to power a phone.

However, in theory it is possible to make a nuclear battery capable of
providing this amount of power taking up only a fraction a phone's mass. [3]
shows that it is theoretically possible to make nuclear batteries with power
densities of 1-50 mW/g. The way they propose to accomplish this is to use the
alpha particle emissions from americium to generate power. Alpha particles
have on the order of MeV of energy rather than KeV beta particles typically
have. Even if the conversion efficiency is low, because there's so much energy
available we still attain high power densities. The issue is that because
alpha particles have so much energy and are massive they do quite a bit of
damage to semiconductors. This means that alphavoltaic batteries do not last
very long before they degrade, and it is not expected that alphavoltaic
devices can made with current semiconductors that last much longer than month.
I've also heard that some alphavoltaic devices have not lasted much longer
than an hour. Although, self healing liquid semiconductors appear to be a
promising option with one test demonstrating minimal degradation over a 57 day
period.

[0][https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/radioactive-diamond-
batter...](https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/radioactive-diamond-batteries-
real-thing/)
[1][https://aip.scitation.org/doi/full/10.1063/1.4954013](https://aip.scitation.org/doi/full/10.1063/1.4954013)
[2][https://www.apple.com/iphone/compare/](https://www.apple.com/iphone/compare/)
[3][https://aip.scitation.org/doi/full/10.1063/1.5123163](https://aip.scitation.org/doi/full/10.1063/1.5123163)
[4][https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-018-30815-w](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-018-30815-w)

------
foobar_
The flux capacitor!

------
Dylan16807
> "Eventually, a highly powerful version of a diamond battery could power a
> mobile phone"

Good luck with that. Using a heat-based power source inside a phone,
presumably with a cramped thermoelectric generator, is not going to get you
much.

~~~
kllrnohj
It's not heat-based. It's using betavoltaic cells, which is a non-thermal
conversion process.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diamond_battery](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diamond_battery)
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betavoltaic_device](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betavoltaic_device)

~~~
Dylan16807
Oh, okay. I was just going on the article, and "absorbs any radiation and
makes them safe" is a really bad way to explain that. It makes it sound like
pure containment, not that it's also converting it to electricity.

