Posted on 08/25/2020 6:44:53 AM PDT by Heartlander
California company NDB says its nano-diamond batteries will absolutely upend the energy equation, acting like tiny nuclear generators. They will blow any energy density comparison out of the water, lasting anywhere from a decade to 28,000 years without ever needing a charge. They will offer higher power density than lithium-ion. They will be nigh-on indestructible and totally safe in an electric car crash. And in some applications, like electric cars, they stand to be considerably cheaper than current lithium-ion packs despite their huge advantages.
The heart of each cell is a small piece of recycled nuclear waste. NDB uses graphite nuclear reactor parts that have absorbed radiation from nuclear fuel rods and have themselves become radioactive. Untreated, it's high-grade nuclear waste: dangerous, difficult and expensive to store, with a very long half-life.
This graphite is rich in the carbon-14 radioisotope, which undergoes beta decay into nitrogen, releasing an anti-neutrino and a beta decay electron in the process. NDB takes this graphite, purifies it and uses it to create tiny carbon-14 diamonds. The diamond structure acts as a semiconductor and heat sink, collecting the charge and transporting it out. Completely encasing the radioactive carbon-14 diamond is a layer of cheap, non-radioactive, lab-created carbon-12 diamond, which contains the energetic particles, prevents radiation leaks and acts as a super-hard protective and tamper-proof layer.
To create a battery cell, several layers of this nano-diamond material are stacked up and stored with a tiny integrated circuit board and a small supercapacitor to collect, store and instantly distribute the charge. NDB says it'll conform to any shape or standard, including AA, AAA, 18650, 2170 or all manner of custom sizes.
And so what you get is a tiny miniature power generator in the shape of a battery that never needs charging – and that NDB says will be cost-competitive with, and sometimes significantly less expensive than – current lithium batteries. That equation is helped along by the fact that some of the suppliers of the original nuclear waste will pay NDB to take it off their hands.
Radiation levels from a cell, NDB tells us, will be less than the radiation levels produced by the human body itself, making it totally safe for use in a variety of applications. At the small scale, these could include things like pacemaker batteries and other electronic implants, where their long lifespan will save the wearer from replacement surgeries. They could also be placed directly onto circuit boards, delivering power for the lifespan of a device.
In a consumer electronics application, NDB's Neel Naicker gives us an example of just how different these devices would be: "Think of it in an iPhone. With the same size battery, it would charge your battery from zero to full, five times an hour. Imagine that. Imagine a world where you wouldn't have to charge your battery at all for the day. Now imagine for the week, for the month… How about for decades? That's what we're able to do with this technology."
And it can scale up to electric vehicle sizes and beyond, offering superb power density in a battery pack that is projected to last as long as 90 years in that application – something that could be pulled out of your old car and put into a new one. If part of a cell fails, the active nano diamond part can be recycled into another cell, and once they reach the end of their lifespan – which could be up to 28,000 years for a low-powered sensor that might, for example, be used on a satellite – they leave nothing but "harmless byproducts."
In the words of Dr. John Shawe-Taylor, UNESCO Chair and University College London Professor: “NDB has the potential to solve the major global issue of carbon emissions in one stroke without the expensive infrastructure
projects, energy transportation costs, or negative environmental impacts associated with alternate solutions such as carbon capture at fossil fuel power stations, hydroelectric plants, turbines, or nuclear power stations. Their technology’s ability to deliver energy over very long periods of time without the need for recharging, refueling, or servicing puts them in an ideal position to tackle the world’s energy requirements through a distributed solution with close to zero environmental impact and energy transportation costs.”
Indeed, the NDB battery offers an outstanding 24-hour energy proposition for off-grid living, and the NDB team is adamant that it wishes to devote a percentage of its time to providing it to needy remote communities as a charity service with the support of some of the company's business customers.
Should the company chew right through the world's full supply of carbon-14 nuclear waste – a prospect that would take some extremely serious volume – NDB says it can create its own carbon-14 raw material simply and cost-effectively.
The company has completed a proof of concept, and is ready to begin building its commercial prototype once its labs reopen after COVID shutdown. A low-powered commercial version is expected to hit the market in less than two years, and the high powered version is projected for five years' time. NDB says it's well ahead of its competition with patents pending on its technology and manufacturing processes.
Should this pan out as promised, it's hard to see how this won't be a revolutionary power source. Such a long-life battery will fundamentally challenge the disposable ethos of many modern technologies, or lead to battery packs that consumers carry with them from phone to phone, car to car, laptop to laptop across decades. NDB-equipped homes can be grid-connected or not. Each battery is its own near-inexhaustible green energy source, quietly turning nuclear waste into useful energy.
Sounds like remarkable news to us!
We spoke with several members of the NDB executive team. Check out the full edited transcript of that interview for more information, or watch the cartoon video below.
VIDEO: Nano-diamond battery explainer
Harbor Freight will have coupons to buy one and get two free.
Can I get ‘em in SO-16 instead of DIP?
You could have 21 different voltages?
I’m puzzled about a couple of things:
1. The decay they speak of produces an electron but no corresponding positively charged particle. The negative electron (beta particle) is flung off and a proton (positive particle) destroyed. A battery basically sucks in electrons at lower potential and pumps them out at higher potential.
Wouldn’t the nano-diamond thing cause a buildup of negative charge?
2. In the company’s website they abstractly mention products but do not give any of the products’ outputs in amperes. Nor do they give output voltages.
3. Are they claiming that a very thin diamond outer shell will block all of the radiation from the decay?
Someone help me out on these puzzles.
Two people can carry this battery. ;)
It’s not a battery and therefore has no way of being charged or recharged. It’s a tiny nuclear power plant. Capacitors aren’t batteries.
It doesn’t say that this power source can be placed in an electric car and used for 90 years without being charged. It allows us to think that. I don’t.
So this article is useless. We need to be able to ask the developers some questions. It looks like this will be a convenient power source can replace batteries. More information is needed.
How long will it run a B.S. meter?
You get too much Gamma radiation your turn green and bulky every time you get angry.
Every human body has radioactive potassium 40 in it from ingested or inhaled potassium. K40 undergoes both types of beta decay and one of the decay chains has a neutrino and a 1.460 MEv gamma ray emitted. For grins take a Geiger counter and find someone who regularly smokes. Take said counter turn up the audio volume again for grins and put the sensor up to where their lungs are you will be absolutely shocked the number of clicks you will hear each and every one is a gamma ray striking the gas in the tube then remember that gammas are emitted in a 360 degree angle and the sensor is only detecting a tiny fraction of those emitted. I do this experiment with undergraduates all the time when we do our rock unit on naturally occuring radioactive materials aka NORMs. I always ask for a smoker as smoke is loaded with K40 particulates it’s one of the reasons smoking causes cancer the particulates get trapped deep in the lungs irradiating from that day forward.
Perpetual motion machine sales, still alive after hundreds of years. They have the advantage of selling to people who’ve never studied history.
But the radioactivity will shorten your life span to 12 hrs.
So, Energiser is going to sell you a package of batteries ONCE and you will not ever need to replace them again. Yes, I am sure this is a great long term marketing strategy.
I have long said that the “green movements” -e initiatives were never going to amount to much while still using solar cells or batteries as their primary power source. That it would take on-board power generation, possibly from a LENR type reactor or other breakthrough technology, to really bring about a revolution in how we power things.
Nice to know I was right again.
Now, extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. Missouri’s State motto comes into play here... Show me.
This will be huge, if government can get out of the way and if the companies involved can keep it safe and working, as they claim.
Thermoelectrics vs betavoltics is apples to Oranges. Thermoelectric is limited by carnot and the Peltier effect. Betavoltics is the direct capture of a high energy beta particles electrostatic and kinetic energy into the crystalline lattice of the diamond matrix. Betavoltic batteries are not new the limiting factors have always been the semiconductors used for particles capture degrade rapidly due to well the radiation flux. That and isotopes that decay with solely beta radiation are rare most have multiple decay modes and nearly all have a gamma ray mode which requires massive shielding with steel, lead , or.concrete. Nickel has a isotope that’s beta decay and a few companies have made betavoltic devices for remote use. Carbon 14 while solid is not always a good choice as it burns to CO2 which would be radioactive CO2 gas. One of the primary radioactive gasses from Chernobyl was C14 as CO2 and CO when the reactors graphite blocks burned in air that one event altered planetary inventory of C14 in the environment to such a degree its still detectable today 30 years later.
It’s been a long time coming.
Betavoltics is a form of direct energy conversion think of it as photovoltaics but instead of a light photon knocking electrons out of the semiconductor matrix the electrons are knocked free by high energy radiation particles in this case a beta ray which is itself a high energy electron. Think of it as an avalanche where the one high speed radioactive electron slams into a bank of snow in this case the diamond matrix and starts a cascade of other electrons like the snow on a mountain all moving. Anytime you have movement of electrons against a voltaic gradient you have coulomb flow and energy is moved. The source of the energy is the kinetic energy of the high speed decay particle and to a smaller degree its inherent electropotential as a negative particle.
It will last only an hour, though.................. Yeah, like their nails, maybe one out of a hundred might go in wood without bending.
It’s a primary battery not a secondary battery.
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