‘Diamond-age’ of power generation as nuclear batteries developed

It would be more credible if the Cabot Institute linked the paper on their "All Research Papers" page (http://research-information.bristol.ac.uk/en/organisations/c...) or if they described how they are getting electricity out of beta decay (is it simple a thermo-electric generator? How much heat differential can they push? Or is it just bodging together chunks of radioactive material in a casement that has reasonable head conductivity and absorbs 99% of radiation.

My favorite "invention" of that form is the water heater "booster" ball. Basically you take a kilogram of spent fuel rod, encase it in a austenitic stainless steel ball, and suspend that bad boy in the center of your water heater holding tank. Hot water for the next 500 years without using gas or electricity :-).

I can see that they are emphasizing on the #DiamondBattery hashtag so that general public will be hooked and share it more, but why haven't they given any hints (mildly technical) to the capabilities of the 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.//

When I read the "small electrical current", the physicist in me was naturally assuming a very small current of the order of pico to nano amperes (without being conservative) - essentially useless. Metrics like the half life of the battery doesn't make any sense at all if the power or current rating is not specified. Current rating is something you could trust, that it will end up as a viable product.

This would appeal more if they can give a direct link to their research paper.

This will sound like neckbeard cynicism, but I actually mean this and in a positive way:

"There are so many possible uses that we’re asking the public to come up with suggestions of how they would utilise this technology by using #diamondbattery.”

It's cool how they're engaging the public in their research in this way. Of course it's a transparent ploy to get social media mentions, but scientists of all sorts (and I kind of am one myself) would do themselves a favor by doing more to get the general public to know about their/our work. This particular thing 'feels' sort of slimy (to me at least, but I suspect to others on this site as well), but I think that's a bad reflex on my part, and that easy, low-friction things like giving people an opening to send a quick tweet or FB post reaches a different audience than having a stand at the 'open science fair' or having a lecture open to the general public; those tend to self-select in the audience they attract, to put it mildly.

> In fact, diamond is the hardest substance known to man, there is literally nothing we could use that could offer more protection.

With such nonsense it is hard to believe the rest of the article. Heat a diamond and it will burn releasing CO2 into the air, smash it with a hammer and it will burst in million parts. Small particles and gasses are very easy to ingest.

Sounds cool. One annoying bit of breathless (and brainless) enthusiasm stuck out though: "In fact, diamond is the hardest substance known to man, there is literally nothing we could use that could offer more protection."

While diamonds are extremely hard, they are brittle, and shatter relatively easily.

From #diamondbattery tweets: https://twitter.com/search?q=%23diamondbattery

Could be used in underground seismic monitors https://twitter.com/Keminoes/status/803297734694465541

Car keys that require batteries. If we don't have a spare battery with us and our keys die, we're stranded. MP3 players, too https://twitter.com/tysongeisler/status/803438384052129796

To power a low-power-mode Arduino for gas detection (CO, CO2, Low O2, etc), fire detection, radiation detection, etc. https://twitter.com/noalear/status/803389146433626112

Could diamond batteries be used to power medical nanobots? https://twitter.com/weirbe/status/803418222972125184

Power clothes that contain sensors, as well as clothes that electrically regulate the temperature. https://twitter.com/CIMCloudOne/status/803440800759574528

how about in cell phones to give a little charge to the battery while the phone is not in use. https://twitter.com/W_Haas/status/803352403512872961

Is there the potential to power watches as a fair amount of waste is generated from depleted watch batteries each year. https://twitter.com/Merrett72/status/803297788163289088

This is no diamond-age. These devices are all well and good, but think of the scales involved. To generate enough power to do something like power a home, let alone a vehicle, we are going to need kilos of this stuff. Kilos of diamond. It's also going to get rather hot. That is the point.

Using numbers from patch_collector: 1 x 50watt lightbulb / 0.0013 Watts/gram = 38Kg = 83lbs of diamond per bulb.

Diamonds are far from indestructible. They shatter. More importantly, they burn. We don't see it very often but put enough of them together, add heat and electricity, and you better hope there isn't any oxygen nearby. Imagine a couple pounds of these things, on fire, pumping out radioactive carbon dioxide. At least when uranium burns it produces something heavy that can be filtered. Filtering radioactive CO2 would be a nightmare. These things will never find there way into any consumer product.

If civilization ever falls, future generations would think using crystals for energy must have been a fairy tale.

Haha this sounds straight out of Asimov's Foundation novels where a civilization was driven to innovate miniaturized nuclear power.

Does anyone have details? Like what is the nominal voltage, power density, etc?

Even if this is true I think this is such a public safety hazard, that the authorities will never allow its public adoption.

Just think in terms of domestic terrorism and dirty bombs. Exploding a few such batteries would release radioactive powder, which is a quite dangerous if inhaled, and cleaning it up is very difficult.

WOW. I always expected that we would see mobile phones that lasted for days or weeks before needing to be recharged. I never once considered the idea that we may have mobile phones and laptops that NEVER need to be recharged during our lifetime. That is an incredible thought.

I wonder how hard it will be to convince people to put nuclear batteries in their pocket. Many people are still afraid of microwave ovens.

I'm not sure if this will lead to a new revolutionary battery.

But I'll say this, the man/woman who creates a company that builds a new revolutionary battery that will keep your laptop humming for a week; will be very rich. Probably the next richest person on earth.

> 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.

So, they are replacing the thermocouples as used in RTGs with this diamond-like stuff? And low radioactivity sources (as opposed to plutonium)? That would indeed be revolutionary if it worked.

Suspicious: sounds like a con, in every breathless undocumented wild claim.

Every few years there's a proposal for a new nuclear battery. This was the last one:

https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/190555-this-nuclear-batt...

The problem is none of these approaches solve the disposal problem or the dirty bomb problem. You can buy 1,000 of these and build a dangerous device that would require serious clean-up and, obviously, can hurt a lot of people.

So, this will never be in a smartphone or laptop, but perhaps power industrial items that can't be practically charged often like remote robots or sensors. Or applications in space to replace aging, expensive, and heavy RTG's.

> diamond is the hardest substance known to man, there is literally nothing we could use that could offer more protection

Weird, I was under the assumption that density (and other more exoteric chemical properties) shielded from radioactivity, not hardness. /s

> Obvious applications would be [...] high-altitude drones

This made me wonder about the funding for this research, but then I found that Dr. T Scott is involved with[0]:

> Radiation Mapping Using Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

> Following the events at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant, the Interface Analysis Centre has been developing an unmanned aerial system capable of mapping radiation in regions inaccessible to humans.

[0]: http://www.bristol.ac.uk/physics/research/iac/casestudies/

Normally with nuclear power you use the heat generated to drive a heat engine of some sort with strict limits on the theoretical efficiency. But many pulse fusion designs look at using the momentum of emitted charged particles directly through their interaction with magnetic fields at far higher efficiency than could be achieved with the energy going through a heat stage. Carbon-14 emits only beta particles which are, of course, all negatively charged. I wonder if they've managed to turn those into a very high voltage, very low current continuous source directly?

IMO the headline here isn't the minimally powered batteries, it's that this is a potential solution to the (very) secure storage of nuclear waste. In the US, for example, the proposal to store essentially all of our nuclear waste at one site (Yucca Mountain in Nevada) is a truly terrible idea that would create the world's most coveted terrorist target. Encapsulating the waste in small diamond shells that could be distributed among several sites seems like an ideal solution if they can get it to work at scale.

(Note this math is a thought experiment ... completely off the cuff and utter non-sense.)

Based on their numbers:

AA is about 700J/g @ 20g gives about 14000J and a 24 hour drain gives us 580J/hour.

DiamondBattery is about 15J/day or ~0.5J/hour

Ignoring voltage issues (among other things), we come to 1.1kg of DiamondBattery being able to supply something that would drain their 20g AA in 24 hours.

The math here is complete off the cuff non-sense, but an extra kg or so here is not unreasonable for some fixed applications ...

The part where they list "airplanes" as something it could potentially power was where it became silly... that's gonna be a lot of spent fuel rod mass.

Given that Bristol researchers did not explain the physics behind their diamond battery we can only speculate but considering some recent developments we can make some good guesses.

It probably functions similar to a betavolatic cell. (See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betavoltaic_device)

In a typical configuration you have a P-N semiconductor junction placed next to beta emitter. The beta particles impact the PN junction and create electron-hole pairs that are pulled apart by the junction to produce a current.

The use of diamond seems like a could be a significant innovation: 1) Carbon-14 is an efficient beta emitter and could make op part of all of the diamond material. 2) Diamond has a wide band-gap which is necessary for high efficiency conversion to electricity. 3) Has strong resistance to radiation damage.

In one configuration the diamond would be layered on top of a silicon P-N junction so it works like a conventional betavoltaic device. (see: http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2013/ph241/harrison2/)

A recent patent shows that diamond is a very efficient moderator for injecting electrons into the junction. (see https://www.google.com/patents/US9064610)

Considering that diamond is itself a semiconductor we could also do away with the silicon. For example diamond is being considered for highly efficient photovoltaic cells. (see: http://exploration.vanderbilt.edu/news/news_diamond.htm)

It is also being considered for production of next-gen schottky diodes. (see: http://www10.edacafe.com/nbc/articles/view_article.php?artic...)

The diamond could be stacked next to a conducting metal to create a Skottky barrier which is a type of P-N junction. The beta particles would excite the electrons with enough energy to push them over the barrier and create a current. (see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schottky_barrier)

Would anyone care to explain how this works? The crystalline structure of the diamond and the directionality of the radiation source doesn't give me a clear idea about where to add terminals to this battery.

in a diamond battery what serves as anode and cathode, how do you connect wires to a diamond?

this diamond making process would be quite hazardous.

I wonder if they should just create a layer of diamonds and and sandwich that between C14 rather than try and rely just or those diamonds to power spacecraft (would save having to develop the non-radioactive diamond layer).

would a standard diamond also do that trick, I don't see why a radioactive diamond would be different if it is in the presence of C14?

Reminds me https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toshiba_4S

Damn. I was hopeful if used gamma radiation. That would have been truly revolutionary.

10:1 odds that this is just a use of the photoelectric effect with a clever dielectric. Based on the press-release description, it is probably not a radiothermal generator (like that used in deep space probes).

1) Have an ionizing radiation source.

2) Get a robust dielectric, with metal plates on both sides of it. Call the plate near the radiation source the cathode and the far one the anode.

3) As the ionizing radiation impacts one side of the cell, the released electron travels only a short distance through the cell. Ideally, the first interaction is with a cathode and the far side an anode, imparting a negative potential to it.

4) A potential difference now exists between the far-side anode and the near-side cathode, from which you can draw current.

Strictly speaking, this is a more like a capacitor which is trickle-charged by the radiation field rather than a battery. There is a design tradeoff between thickness of the metal and dielectric layers in that the initial and final ionizing interaction must be of a (cathode/dielectric -> anode) or (cathode -> dielectric/anode) to get any energy out of it. Ideally, the dielectric has an extremely small cross-section for interaction with whatever the ionizing radiation source is, while the metal plates interact very strongly. However, there will always be some losses due to internal ionization of the dielectric itself. I'm not sure how you would build an effective multi-layer structure, either.

Is this preferable to an RTG? Almost certainly not. The vast majority of the radiation energy in an ionizing photoelectric-effect cell is still released as heat. Very little energy can be captured this way, so it is quite inefficient in terms of energy produced relative to the radiation emitted. You can extract some more electric work by pre-charging the cell such that the freed electron is slowed in part by the electric field gradient, but in practice the bulk of the energy is still lost as heat.

Sea story time! The internal electric field within the dielectric will produce some weird mechanical stresses, too. When my ship's reactor plant went through a refueling overhaul one of the things they replaced was the reactor compartment windows. There are a couple of leaded glass windows that allow Mk. 1 eyeball inspection of the reactor compartment during operation. They are quite thick, electrically insulating, and they build up a large internal electric field along with internal stresses. Standard maintenance was to replace them well before the stress could fracture the glass.

So... could the press release be ...excessively breathless? My guess is a qualified "probably". The physics behind the photoelectric effect are well known and understood. Diamond is special in part because it has a fantastically high dielectric breakdown strength. So, you can extract more work out of the ionized electrons by supporting a very high potential gradient between the anode and cathode, which could be seen as a breakthrough for this type of energy conversion device. BUT it also would enable a new generation of high-density ultra-capacitors. The energy density in a capacitor is limited (in part) by the breakdown strength of the dielectric, since the stored energy is a volume integral of the squared electric field strength. Since ultracaps are technologically much easier to commercialize, and much more investor-friendly than anything involving an ionizing radiation source, but that isn't what the press release points to, I think it is likely to be ... exaggerated.

I could also be wrong, and we'll soon have a new generation of ultracaps!

How much is it? same as diamond?

mm, I remember from a lecture that 'nuclear waste' is actually a label used by the nuclear industry but non all of them can be disposed, some by products can be used as a base atomic weapons.

So all countries with nuclear power plants have to return/control the 'nuclear waste'.

Dilithium crystals, anyone?