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One such place is the monitoring of military equipment. "Everything the Department of Defense puts out has to have antitamper protection so that if someone gets their hands on the seeker head of a missile, or an entire aircraft, it would be very difficult to reverse-engineer it," says Christian Adams, a chemist at Lockheed Martin Missiles and Fire Control. The memory chips that control such antitamper systems, says Adams, require very low continuous power over a long time. Military specifications also require that these devices withstand extreme conditions that normal batteries can't tolerate: they must operate in temperatures from -65 to 150 ˚C and withstand high-frequency vibrations, high humidity, and blasts of salt. "If the battery freezes out or dies out, the memory circuit loses its configuration," and the device fails, says Adams.
"Widetronix is the first out of the gate with something that can be tested to military specifications," says Adams. Lockheed received the company's prototypes last week. If the betavoltaics pass the test, Lockheed will probably have them in antitamper products in about a year's time, he says. Lockheed is also working with the company to develop higher-power betavoltaics for remote monitoring of missiles. Sending out a radio signal to say "I'm healthy" requires microwatts of power, says Adams. Widetronix is also testing its batteries with medical-device company Welch Allyn. It expects to sell the batteries for $500.
City Lab's Cabauy says that though the prospect of nuclear batteries, especially for medical implants, may raise eyebrows, tritium is safe. Besides the beta particle, other products of tritium's decay are an antineutrino and an isotope of helium that is not radioactive. "A piece of paper can stop the radiation from tritium," says Cabauy.
The future promise of betavoltaics might be in very cheap sensors embedded in buildings and bridges where "you don't ever want to change the battery," says Amit Lal, professor of electrical and computer engineering at Cornell University. However, this would require companies such as Widetronix to move to longer half-life materials, such as nickel isotopes that last 100 years. While tritium has a half-life of only 12.3 years, one of its chief advantages, besides safety, is that it can be secured cheaply from Canadian nuclear reactors that produce heavy water as a by-product. Longer half-life isotopes such as nickel-63 must be purchased abroad at high prices. "Since the end of the Cold War, there is no government support for radioisotope infrastructure in the United States," says Lal. "Making batteries that last forever is probably good reason to build that infrastructure."
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Depend on kind of nuclear waste. If you asking abaut depleted nuclear fuel, yes, it is possible but would be expensive. Enrichment process is needed.
Secondary activated wastes - like gloves, tools, clothes and etc. (used by NPP workers)is inpossible to use as fuel.
Actually even enriched nuclear fuel would be useless for this technology. To see why, we must consider the actual obtainable power:
Whenever a radioactive atom decays and emits radiation, we have a chance (30% for tritium, quoted from the article) to change that into electrical charge. So an element like tritium, with a low half-life, decays quite quickly, producing a reasonable amount of power. Uranium however, has a half-life measured in billions of years. The amount of electrical power produced per unit time is therefore extremely low.
Mind you, if you wanted a battery to produce attowatts (10^-18 W) for a billion years, nuclear waste might come in handy. ;)
i agree but at the same time woutent shorting it to a year for publick use be more biabul it would contain less readio ative icatopes and brack dowen i do know that they have develuped a process to compleatley couse readoative deacay they could use this to power plasmacation witck is used to cous decay and
recuralate the system witch would solve all or the readio ative wast if we re use this decay
but at the same time readio ative decay is allso dangrous
While the decay products of tritium are safe, tritium itself is toxic. As an isotope of hydrogen, it can be incorporated into the body chemically, where its decay can produce damaging radiation. Presumably no tritium leaks or tunnels out of these batteries?
Tritium is chemically hydrogen, and thus easily and strongly bound to various kinds of surface including many metals. You could remove it if you try, but the passive safety within the multilayer foil sandwich should be good.
"silicon carbide ... can convert 30 percent of the beta particles that hit it into an electrical current"
I assume you mean that 30% of the incident beta particle energy is captured as electrical energy? Your phrasing might suggest that each incident beta particle, i.e. electron, on average produces .3 x 1.6 x 10^-19 amp-seconds of current.
I think what the author meant is that the conversion of captured beta particles is 30%, ie that all of the free electrons are absorbed in the silicon carbide layer, and 30% of those adsorption events create a unit of charge. The analogy useful here is solar cells - virtually all of the incident radiation (light in this case) is absorbed, but only some fraction of this radiation is converted to electricity.
It is more likely that all electrons reaching the SiC are absorbed, but only 30% are travelling in the right direction to get there. The tritium decays in all directions plus there will be some electric potential difference to deflect electrons not travelling "up" enough. The beta decay (according to Alpha) has an 18.6 kV potential so the charge difference across the gap should be quite large if they want to maximize efficiency. A tiny trickle of current at high voltage. But that voltage will turn electrons away if they are on shallow trajectories.
i know at one point they were exparatamenting with salt cooled nuckler genaratior but the salt wore dowen the pices and coused a magor dazaster coudent the put the layer that broke in a persherized cover ant this world fix the ware dowen problem as it is recycled throw sodim un like watter dosent lose heat as fast
they mete even be able to spin a turbine with liquid led sence it dosent tack readio ativity
why dont dont you a quntosomack antamiser in your phosonick resanator chamber
To answer your question about the nuclear waste: Yes, the vast majority of it, 95% of it can be reprocessed, and used again as fuel. This 95% includes The spent fuel, which is still contains about 2% enrichment, and the Pu-239 created from U-238 absorbing neutrons. Pu-239 is a ready fuel and easy to separate out, the Uranium fuel would have to be enriched, which isn't that hard, and in the future, fast reactors will be able to burn U-238 as fuel, or use it in a breeding process.
Another 2% of the waste, consisting of the Actinides, could be burned in a fast reactor, in the end leaving only about 2% of the total waste that would need to be stored, and that with future technology could be reprocessed further.
- Tritium
These "batteries" are actually radio-isotope generators. There is no chance of tritium leakage because the tritium atoms are embedded in the silicon carbide lattice. Yes tritium is very toxic, and while dead skin is enough to shield the body from beta particles, an ingested beta emitter can cause issues. However, tritium has been used for years in special lighting applications such as instrument displays, exit signs, ect.
Overall this is a pretty cool idea, and seems like it would be much more efficient than current radioisotope thermal generators (RTG's), however the life span isn't as long.
The title is a bit misleading, a nano-generator is a better description I think than calling it a battery.
Thanks for all this info spad12, but I want to point out a small detail--the tritium is embedded in a metal film layered with the silicon carbide, not in the silicon carbide itself.
Ohhh, ok, my mistake. The primary thing that I was trying to point out is that it doesn't exist in a gaseous state, it is embedded within another substrate, and thus significantly easier and safer to work with and handle.
Some of the commenters have asked about the safety of tritium. Tritium is already in a few products on the market for illumination including glowing green exit signs, watch hands, and gun sights. When beta particles from the tritium hit a phosphor that's mixed with the isotope, the phosphor emits visible light.
You can leave all of the Uranium and Plutonium isotopes in the recycled fuel - we use "recycled" soviet nukes to produce ~10% of our electricity.
The short half life alpha emitters are the most dangerous if ingested (polonium-210 poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko)
ATOMIC WEIGHTS OF THE ELEMENTS 2007
read more in this link
http://www.chem.qmul.ac.uk/iupac/AtWt/
why should you not stick a fosonick antimiser in a foconick resanator chamber
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3 Comments
nuclear waste?
Most nuclear waste is still very radioactive when it's dumped on a containment site. Could at least some of this waste be used for electricity generation?
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