Turning nuclear waste into diamond batteries | Hacker News Reader

Turning nuclear waste into diamond batteries

thebrighterside.news

146 pointsrmason41 comments

A much more practical use of nuclear waste is to make traditional RTG. Nuclear waste could also be used for medical isotopes. There are lots of other interesting things in nuclear waste.

This talk from 2010 is really amazing at understanding what 'nuclear waste' actually is and what it will be.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rv-mFSoZOkE

I've often wondered if neutralising radioactive waste is a lesser technical challenge than fusion.

It is. But fusion is much cooler and doesn't have the bad reputation that nuclear power does so funding is much easier to obtain for it.

Unfortunately society doesn't want safe nuclear, they want zero nuclear.

Massive blunder by humanity IMO and shameful that environmentalist parties that were founded to oppose nuclear continue to do so today for primarily historical/emotional reasons rather than hard facts.

We should have been a nuclear society since the 80s ...

There is also something about "fast-neutron"/"slow-neutron" (I don't recall which one) capture based fission reactors which could give a purpose to a significant part of nuclear waste. If I understood not too badly (but I expect to be very wrong), only China and Russia have such nuclear reactors. In my country, the public research project was cancelled without being able to do the same than China and Russia. I heard that with such reactors, it extends by hundreds of years, if not thousands, the ability of fission reactors to produce "enough" energy, that based on current fuel reserve estimation.

ofc, reducing energy consumption (= reduce worldwide population, reduce heating/AC, stop commuting ...) and switching as much as possible to "stored" "renewable" energy should always be a primary focus (even if nuclear fusion becomes real).

wow, so many "if" and "I don't really know". :(

Breeder reactors research was quite huge (one of the first breeder was built in the US in 1951).

To this day there is no such reactor working industrially satisfactorily.

This architecture has been, for all practical purposes, abandoned by nearly all countries that were researching and developing it. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breeder_reactor#Future_plants

One of the most (if not the most) ambitious project was Superphénix, costed billions and failed flat. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superph%C3%A9nix

The most successful was Russia's BN-800 but "problems ((...)) indicated a redesign was needed", and construction of it's successor (the BN-1200) was put on indefinite hold. Problems related to cost and process/security seem quite difficult(?) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BN-1200_reactor

Russians are back to the drawing board. The sole officially actively pursued (since 2021) pertinent design, BREST-OD-300 ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BREST_(reactor) ) will only (when completed, if ever) be a demonstrator (low power).

French ahead: https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surg%C3%A9n%C3%A9ration

It seems there is a difference between "fast-neutron" reactors and breeder reactors: the article states that russian BN-600 and BN-800 are "fast-neutron" reactors but not in "breeder" mode.

Since I am garbage in nuclear physics, I am wondering if those "fast-neutron" reactors "but not breeders" can reuse a significant part of current nuclear waste?

I'm not a specialist. If I understand correctly "breeder mode" depends upon fuel composition (which actinide/isotope, in which proportion...). Non 'fast-neutron' mode is dubbed 'thermal' and seems less interesting as it obtains less energy (however some fuel, such as thorium, may enhance its performance), however it has benefits (less difficult to design/build/exploit(?)).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fast-neutron_reactor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal-neutron_reactor

I believe the only way to do this is to create breeder reactors which have an obvious downside of producing nuclear weapons material as a byproduct.

> the Bristol team warned that their radioactive diamond batteries wouldn’t be suitable for laptops or smartphones, because they contain only 1g of carbon-14, meaning that they provide very low power —only a few microwatts, which is less than a typical AA battery. Therefore, their application so far is limited to small devices that must stay unattended for a long time, such as sensors and pacemakers.

I assumes that more research can make or more usable in the consumer market?

> I assumes that more research can make or more usable in the consumer market?

No. The energy output is constrained by the decay rate of C14. Increasing the amount in use would help somewhat, but it's still many orders of magnitude away from being useful.

(The description of a few microwatts as being "less than a typical AA battery" is a massive understatement. Even a cheap AA-sized carbon cell can deliver a milliwatt -- a thousand microwatts! -- continuously for a few months.)

I agree. Some numbers:

It varies from model to model, but with a few search in Google I got that a smartphone use approximately 5 watts, that's 5000000 microwatts. Let's assume that "a few" in the quoted text means 5, so you need 1000000 of these batteries to power a smartphone.

Each battery weight like 1 gram, so the total weight would be 1000Kg = 1 metric ton = 2000 pounds = 1 small car.

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)

> like 1mW with the size factor of a normal battery

It seems like Carbon-14 is just not very radioactive, and if I read the Wikipedia article right, Geiger counters can't even detect the radiation for small amounts, which makes me wonder if they would even trigger around the 1 gram in those batteries.

Looking at a bit more sources, Carbon-14 radiation has a maximum distance of 22 cm in air and 0.27 mm in body tissue. The half-distance layer in water is 0.05 mm. In addition, Carbon-14 in nuclear waste tend to also include tritium, which is even weaker.

If we wanted powerful batteries, low-level waste seems like a bad choice. If the material don't even need shielding to be around, it is unlikely to carry a lot of energy. Intermediate-level waste and high-level waste would likely be better suited, especially Intermediate-level waste since those do carry a lot of energy but does not require cooling.

Could be useful for things that wake up very infrequently and run for a short amount of time.

Nearly all of the devices you would want to power / we have the ability to build have a lifespan orders of magnitude shorter than the lifespan of the battery. It just doesn't make sense any way you look at it. The top comment is right. There's much better, more cost effective solutions for powering the proposed device, and better, more practical uses for the 'spent' nuclear fuel.

Pacemaker?

The pacemaker is probably only designed to last for 50 or so years. I'm not an expert, looking up the statistics, that seeems to be a very generous estimation. So you want to put a power source that can last hundreds of thousands of years in a device that's going to last 50, at great expense?

Well, there aren't many reliable chemical battery designs that can last for a few decades. We have stuff that lasts for at most one decade or two, and we have the nuclear stuff.

Of course, if you are using the nuclear stuff, you will prefer something shorter lived, so you can use a smaller battery. But I don't see why that huge objection on using the longer lived stuff too.

After death, the person will be giving back his/hers "water of life", like in Dune, to be reused by others :)

What could possibly go wrong?

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).

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.

That's what they forget to mention every time there's a new article about battery tech breakthroughs.

The bigger the claim, the damper the squib it proves to be.

Folks interested in this, might be interested in the already available Tritium Batteries [1] that last for ~ 20+ years.

SparkFun did a DIY Kit[2], but have since discontinued it.

[1] https://citylabs.net/products/

[2] https://www.sparkfun.com/products/retired/14773

Could it be useful to use these to charge long term batteries to be used millennia from now? So that future generations living centuries from now can have easy power when the fossil fuels run out?

No. Batteries only last a few years before the chemistry degrades.

And anyway, microwatts are useful in certain restricted circumstances, but are easy to come by. A solar cell illuminated by starlight gives you more. Needles in a lemon gives you way more more.

> Nuclear power is considered a clean energy source because it has zero carbon dioxide emissions;

This is flat out wrong. Containing, mining, recycling and long term storage are so extremely costly and energy hungry that it does not make any economically sense in mid term to use nuclear power. And do not forget. Nuclear is not renewable. It has to be mined. There are mines which will be empty sooner than generally expected. And any kind of mass produced „nuclear battery“ which will eventually end up in land fill is a risk not worth taking. It reminds me of the story about leaded fuel. Yeah maybe a few cars are no problem. But scale up the pollution and boy will you be in trouble.

Nuclear has the lowest net CO2 emissions per unit of energy besides hydroelectricity [1]. Waste recycling would make known terrestrial reserves last for several thousand years. Furthermore, seawater extraction would make nuclear effectively unlimited [2].

You can pedantically point out that nuclear isn't truly unlimited. But once you're getting to the point of energy sources lasting millions of years, the term "renewable" becomes academic. You could just as easily point out that the sun will eventually run out of hydrogen.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life-cycle_greenhouse_gas_emis...

2. https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2016/07/01/uranium-s...

The more we obtain uranium (prospecting, mining, milling...), the more we add to the associated carbon footprint. Therefore a sustained growth of installed nuclear capacity will lead us to exploit mines at always lowering ore grades => more emissions. The media may be 110g CO‐eq/kWh by 2050.

Source: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2051332

The same issues apply to the materials needed to manufacture wind turbines, solar panels, and the batteries needed to mitigate intermittency.

Uranium's incredible energy density means increases in raw uranium costs is negligible (enrichment is a much more expensive part of the overall nuclear fuel cost). From the previously linked article:

> Over the last twenty years, uranium spot prices have varied between $10 and $120/lb of U3O8, mainly from changes in the availability of weapons-grade uranium to blend down to make reactor fuel.

> So as the cost of extracting uranium from seawater falls to below $100/lb, it will become a commercially viable alternative to mining new uranium ore. But even at $200/lb of U3O8, it doesn’t add more than a small fraction of a cent per kWh to the cost of nuclear power.

True, however those materials needed to manufacture wind turbines, solar panels... can be recycled, most of them infinitely (at human scale), and it more and more becomes either legally or economically unavoidable.

Uranium isn't recyclable: there is no satisfactorily running fast-breeder.

My point was not about costs but about emissions. Extraction and immediate post-processing (before enrichment), and therefore ore grade, have a major impact on emissions: see figure 5 in the referenced communication (Werner, Heath).

Seawater: "pumping the seawater to extract this uranium would need more energy than what could be produced with the recuperated uranium" Source: http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2017/ph241/jones-j2/docs/e...

As per my original post, the total emissions from nuclear (including fuel extraction) is lower then wind and hydro: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life-cycle_greenhouse_gas_emis...

Uranium recycling is not the same thing as breeder reactors. It's essentially the same nuclear enrichment we do to natural uranium to bring it up to concentrations of U235 as usable fuel, just used on spent fuel rather than virgin uranium.

Also, for uranium sea water extraction the plan is to drop buoys with the absorbtion material and let natural currents bring water into contact with it. Pumping all that water out of the ocean would of course be stupid.

Emissions: those are present (now) emissions. The paper I quoted (read above) is about future emissions (median up to 110g CO‐eq/kWh by 2050), bumped up by lowering ore grades.

Recycling: however breeders are AFAIK the most efficient way to tackle this (however it is so difficult there is no adequate industrial reactor, after ~70 years of prototypes and research). Other ways don't seem very appealing, for example France ceased to recycle in 2013.

Yes, since the 1980's a fair amount of Grand Plans aimed a extracting uranium from seawater. Nothing industrial yet. I won't hold my breadth.

https://youtu.be/0kahih8RT1k

>> Nuclear power is considered a clean energy source because it has zero carbon dioxide emissions;

> This is flat out wrong.

No, it's not: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26673987 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26603464.

Every energy source does require some sort of energy to make it possible to harvest it. And nuclear is no exception. We do not have any sustainable way to filter out enough carbon dioxide with any of the hypothetical excess energy. So saying there is a any energy source without any carbon dioxide emission is wrong.

> Every energy source does require some sort of energy to make it possible to harvest it. And nuclear is no exception

Indeed, and neither are solar, wind, hydro or any other - they all have environmental impact for producing the panels, turbines, dams, etc. So there are actually no exceptions at all, anywhere, which makes the classification completely useless. Could we get back to the topic now?

Following that there does not exist an energy source that is zero carbon dioxide emissions. Just mining iron cost a lot of energy, pollutes the environment and cost a lot of energy. All current built wind and solar panels that include steel are built using processes that burn fossil fuel. If we look at plastic used in those the picture get even worse.

Isn't it still miles ahead of coal in terms of "clean energy-ness", despite all the costs and flaws? Honestly curious, I'm not at all an expert.

Its mostly carbon friendly, but not even slightly environmentally friendly.

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