Posted on 11/28/2016 4:22:30 PM PST by BenLurkin
New technology has been developed that uses nuclear waste to generate electricity in a nuclear-powered 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.
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The team have demonstrated a prototype 'diamond battery' using Nickel-63 as the radiation source. However, they are now working to significantly improve efficiency by utilising carbon-14, a radioactive version of carbon, which is generated in graphite blocks used to moderate the reaction in nuclear power plants. Research by academics at Bristol has shown that the radioactive carbon-14 is concentrated at the surface of these blocks, making it possible to process it to remove the majority of the radioactive material. The extracted carbon-14 is then incorporated into a diamond to produce a nuclear-powered battery.
The UK currently holds almost 95,000 tonnes of graphite blocks and by extracting carbon-14 from them, their radioactivity decreases, reducing the cost and challenge of safely storing this nuclear waste.
Dr Neil Fox from the School of Chemistry explained: "Carbon-14 was chosen as a source material because it emits a short-range radiation, which is quickly absorbed by any solid material. This would make it dangerous to ingest or touch with your naked skin, but safely held within diamond, no short-range radiation can escape. In fact, diamond is the hardest substance known to man, there is literally nothing we could use that could offer more protection."
Despite their low-power, relative to current battery technologies, the life-time of these diamond batteries could revolutionise the powering of devices over long timescales. Using carbon-14 the battery would take 5,730 years to reach 50 per cent power, which is about as long as human civilization has existed.
(Excerpt) Read more at phys.org ...
Sounds like Star Trek technology! In “The Voyage Home”, I think, didn’t Chekoff recharge their dilithium crystals for their ship by bathing them in radiation leakage on the U.S.S. Enterprise?
Plenty of radiation in space so a diamond based missile killing laser might happen after all.
Now there is a fun way to dispose of nuc waste. Put it in little packages and sell it to the public! Brilliant.
We were promised little beer cooler-sized nuke generators that would run our houses back in the 50s...I’m still waiting!
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There’s nothing new about power generation by nuclear decay.
As far as I know it is illegal in the US.
If power can be increased this would be revolutionary, a landmark in human history.
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Just like the fluoride in your drinking water.
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This is new.
So, possibly a thousands of years battery for perpetual low-energy applications.
That would be useful for places where a generator is difficult to support.
Now there is a fun way to dispose of nuc waste. Put it in little packages and sell it to the public! Brilliant.It's worked before. That is how Alcoa managed to keep from having its fluoride waste products (a hazardous byproduct of Aluminum manufacturing) kept off the hazardous-waste listings. They paid off an incoming Executive branch administration, and paid Carnegie Melon to do a study and "find" that it was actually healthy for you.
Thank you for the history lesson. I had no idea.
In a way Alcoa couldn’t wait for tomorrow.
It was a slogan from the 70s fantastic finishes football commercials.
“Put on every zig!”
LOL.
WANT!
For great justice.
Nuclear flashlight batteries on the horizon!
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