I’m a bit confused. Where does the radiation go? They talk about a conductor absorbing heat and transferring it into energy, but radioactive heat comes directly from radiation.
Unless this thing comes with a briefcase carry case made of lead, isn’t this a downright horrible idea? Especially for consumer products?
Further, when a lithium battery fails, it catches fire or explodes. What happens when one of these batteries fail? It won’t be a nuclear fireball, but wouldn’t that cause very massive issues? No technology has ever had a 100% reliability rate.
Since it's already in use for decades with pacemakers i don't think that the radiation is that hard to stop, no need for inches of lead.
And i could have said that it's not a completely novel technology, i used "commercial" in the sense that it's apparently destined for the general public instead of specialised fields, the wiki article says that :
We'll have to see the price before finding such batteries in the supermarket though.
As for reliability, the articles say that another advantage is that it doesn't ignite nor explode, but i suppose that something could happen if you drill through it.
See, pacemakers, spaceships, and research installations are fairly understandable though, no one is going to be taking out their own pace maker, and science endeavors are extremely regulated. However, you just know some idiot is going to build a dirty bomb with these if given the chance.
Also, using the computer programming standard. Never underestimate the end user. Some idiot will try to drill through it or “stress test” a battery like this.
Plus those batteries cost tens of thousands if not millions of dollars depending on size. We have to definitely wait to see the cost.
Oh yeah, i wouldn't advise anyone to take this breakthrough as a promise for the future(, as someone who used to read futurism.com i'm well aware of that).
But i could counter your objections if you're interested :
- it can already be done currently : David Hahn built a nuclear reactor with the radioactive material extracted from clock hands. The nickel-63 is already present elsewhere(, armour plating, boat propeller shafts, ...), as well as many other radioactive materials ;
- but it's probably not feasible : A stronger argument is that the radioactive material is composed of a layer only 2µm thick, in between two layers of diamond, i don't know enough about the subject to confirm or deny that such extraction would be too difficult/expensive ;
- and even if it were other materials would be a better choice : Finally, at first sight and in my ignorant opinion, i don't think it'd add much to a bomb, it seems like it'd only infect people in the vicinity, and is only described in the first scenario here(, see the article titled "Terrorism: Nuclear and Biological Terrorism"), which considers it more useful for polluting water reserves for instance, contrary to ^137 Ce, ^131 I, ^32 P, or ^67 Ga. It'd be cheaper/easier and possibly more effective to steal such materials from hospitals rather than extracting it from batteries.
You'd probably have to drill through more than a few of them to have enough radioactivity leaking, at this point the number of people dying because of their stress testing would probably be equivalent to those dying because of chemical batteries explosion. It'd be up to the authorities to estimate the risks correctly and, as you said, we'll see how much a battery made to last 50 years will cost.
Strap a couple those to a gameboy and you could finally play it the whole time on a long car trip without the batteries running out!
Nuclear battery
Bullshit.
Nah, they're real and they're super cool. Without them, Voyager 2 would have been dead in the water decades ago. We'd never have gotten the incredible images of Jupiter and Saturn from the Voyagers nor Galileo and Cassini.
It'll be interesting to see terrestrial consumer applications and adoption given the general overwhelming fear response to anything nuclear.
Although commonly called batteries, they are technically not electrochemical and cannot be charged or recharged.
China
A place for focusing on all things China - language, history, politics, etc.
Rules:
0: Taiwan, Xizang (Tibet), Xinjiang, Hong Kong are all part of China.
1: Stay on-topic
2: Be Comradely
3: No spreading disinformation or bigotry.