Nano Diamond Battery – A Lifelong Self-charging green battery
ndb.technology
ndb.technology
Do they have any serious claim to have somehow improved the density ? (it seems to not be applicable to, say, an EV.)
Even if they did improve the density, talk about stuffing these into phones as they imply is premature. I don't want Florida Man cracking open these "to get muh diamonds" and turn some of the C-14 into a fine mist in the process. While beta decay is okay as a lump, I don't want that as an inhalant.
If we developed some kind of unobtainium armor that cannot be breached without say, some cooperation by friendly high-energy physicists, then I'd maybe be comfortable handing these out at the local convenience store or putting them in mass consumer devices (that also last thousands of years).
A comment in that YouTube video pointed to in this thread puts numbers on the density problem:
The Nuclear Diamond Battery can make 11,400 electrons. That's hardly enough to power anything. It takes 6.24 x 10 to the eighteen to make 1 amp of useful current. One microamp of current is 6.24 x 10 to the 12 electrons. That's 6240000000000 electrons to make one microamp of current which can hardly power anything. The electricity produced by the nuclear diamond battery will not power any device we currently use.
The 11,400 electrons figure comes from this:
https://ndb.technology/news-releases/
That 11,400 is the "up to" figure of "energetic electrons released from the enegetic electron decay could scatter and deposit energy to the [C-14] diamond". No detail on how thick the graphite and diamond are for that example, I can't locate their patents, and I can't find better specs to get a feel for the power density. Nor can I find any references to "Orano Call" that don't point back to NDB, so I have strong doubts that event really exists. There is an Orano SA, but they don't mention NDB on their site.
But 16 orders of magnitude still make for an unwieldy battery. And there is the purification problem as well, which will generate a mountain of radioactive waste to put back where they got the C-14 from in the first place. And the physics prof in the YouTube pointed out the C-12 itself is also slightly radioactive (I would have to evaluate the medical implications to satisfy myself).
I agree with the flagging, unless NDB comes out with real specs, metrics, and a prototype independent engineers can poke and prod.