[HN Gopher] Scientists Turn Nuclear Waste into Diamond Batteries... ___________________________________________________________________ Scientists Turn Nuclear Waste into Diamond Batteries Lasting 1k's of Years Author : rmason Score : 7 points Date : 2022-04-22 19:44 UTC (3 hours ago) (HTM) web link (www.thebrighterside.news) (TXT) w3m dump (www.thebrighterside.news) | 2ctJoke wrote: | Oh wow: batteries that will last longer than the human species. | steeve wrote: | Every now and then this comes up. There was a thread from a | french nuclear scientist explaining why this isn't what you think | it is. | | I can't find it but the gist was that the power density is low | and the price is several orders of magnitude too expensive (like | trillions of dollars). | cogman10 wrote: | IDK about trillions of dollars, but it certainly would be | expensive. The entire process appears to involve creating | artificial diamonds in an environment where radioactive | material has been gassified in order to capture it in the | diamond structure. | | All this for a battery that provides an (effectively) infinite | microwatt supply. | | The article tries to say that you could use this for a | pacemaker (yeah right...) Really, this would only really be | useful in something like a remote sensor where it can take a | day/week/month to charge a capacitor that ultimately triggers | report signal. | | The article mentions space missions, but again, this is far | less practical than doing something like an RTG. | gus_massa wrote: | It was heavily discussed a few years ago, for example in | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13060159 | | They last for a log time, but the important detail is that they | have very low power, like 1mW with the size factor of a normal | battery, so you need like a dozen for a (old) wrist watch and s | few hundred to turn on a led. | | More details in: | | http://nanoscale.blogspot.com/2020/08/diamond-batteries-unli... | | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uzV_uzSTCTM (EEVblog) ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2022-04-22 23:01 UTC)