The race to commercialise nuclear-powered batteries | Hacker News Reader

The race to commercialise nuclear-powered batteries

chemistryworld.com

41 pointscrescit_eundo19 comments

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https://archive.ph/oCbF7

I can already hear 50s music playing on a stereo with not enough bass.

Cue the intro to the national anthem TV closedown on Soviet Central Television

I wonder how much they cost and how efficient they are compared to other ways to produce electricity.

It's not so much the cost efficacy that makes these attractive, it's the 100 year lifespan.

> ‘You could embed a tiny nuclear chip with a sensor into concrete, come back a decade later and query the sensor about humidity on certain days,’ says Peter Cabauy, chief executive at City Labs, a Florida-based company developing micronuclear batteries. ‘Put it down. Forget about it. Use when necessary.’

Yeah, I hope those construction workers remember where the nuclear chip is embedded a few decades later, wouldn't want to smash it.

Not very, at all, because they produce miniscule amounts of power. The main practical point is they keep going for a very long time, well beyond the point where a chemical battery, which might be able to hold more energy, would self-discharge.

Sounds like another recycling nightmare to me. To the endless stream of electronic thrash come radioactive materials polluting everything for hundred years. The use cases do not convince me either. Why eternal battery when cheap electronics will fail earlier anyway.

We already use radioactive materials in our smoke alarms. And they aren't eternal batteries either. To longlived a isotope wont output enough power (long lived means less decay events to release energy in a given amount of time), conversly you probably dont want to energetic an energy source as it will decay to quickly. And the batterys energy output will decrease by 50% every halflife so you either have a device that has more energy than it needs early in its life cycle or it will need the power source replaced before its estimated end of life, or third possibility your device like voyager space probes gracefully looses functionality as it ages to consume less power.

The radioactive material in ionization smoke detectors (Americium 241) is present to create ionizing radiation, not to create power. An alpha particle source is a less discretionary use for radioactive materials than generating electricity to run the devices, which typically run on lithium or alkaline batteries if they aren't hardwired.

i am aware they aren't used as batteries in the smoke alarm. I was referring to the part of the gp's comment that radioactive batteries were eternal batteries destined to be horrible radioactive e-waste that far outlive the device they are built in. I was pointing out we already have radioactive elements in widespread use in home electronics and that they weren't "eternal batteries"

I got the sense you knew that. It was just ambiguous in your post and I was clarifying for anyone that might have misread it in the way that I did. No offense intended.

It is interesting and I wish I were more of an expert in this area to be able to evaluate the claims in the article made by parties with commercial interests in the topic. I have a sense that the amount of Am-241 in smoke detectors would be many orders of magnitude smaller than in batteries.

Solutions are already being made for spent nuclear fuel, no reason why that wouldn't apply in this scenario. In fact its massive overkill for this particular situation but still an option if its needed:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoy_WJ3mE50

> These tunnels are designed for 100,000 years

Reminds me of:

"Arctic stronghold of world’s seeds flooded after permafrost melts" (19.05.2017)

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/may/19/arctic-s...

https://www.wired.com/2017/05/arctic-doomsday-seed-vault-flo...

https://www.independent.co.uk/climate-change/news/doomsday-a...

"Perma" means not "just" 100000 years, but forever. The reality is different and unpredictable. Doomsday-proof architectures fail already nowadays.

Yet there are places which have been geologically stable for 100's of millions of years or more.

Change does happen but the risks can be made negligible compared to the various risks associated with other sources of energy. The damages of worse case nuclear waste leakage would also likely be very localized and manageable.

Meanwhile fossil fuels have enormous environmental impacts across huge areas. Even solar and wind have large ecological impacts and aren't (likely) capable of replacing fossil fuels in time to prevent potentially catastrophic effects from global warming.

It's all about weighing the risks.

it doesen't need to last forever though just long enough that it doesn't raise radiation levels a unsafe amount over the natural background radiation load. those elements are already present in the ground thats where we get them after all.

Here’s an interesting cautionary tale on radioisotopes. The goiania incident: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goi%C3%A2nia_accident

Not saying the batteries would be this bad, but having widespread sources of radiation in the hands of people who know nothing is a bad idea. Even relatively benign ones like Ni-63 can go sideways if someone ingests it.

These batteries seem to be intended only for very specialized niche applications, which is as it should be.

The USSR "commercialized" nuclear-powered batteries to power the navigational beacons in the Arctic. And we're still cleaning up the consequences.

A pacemaker is better served by a modern rechargeable battery with inductive transcutaneous charging.

For space travel

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