Diamonds are forever? World-first carbon-14 diamond battery made
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We should be processing spent nuclear reactor fuel and extracting Strontium-90 ( sr-90 ) in mass.
Sr90 is a heavy beta emitters, orders of magnitude more energetic than carbon14, with a 28.8 year half-life. This lower half-life means a higher specific activity, which allows for more practical uses.
Of course, higher energy beta emitters are more dangerous, but we've been playing with fire for a long time now, so that shouldn't stop anyone.
At 10% beta emissions capture, a beta-voltaic device can be built now with sr90 that emits roughly 5w in a form factor slightly larger than a AA battery. With the current price and availability of sr90, this battery would cost around $3 million on raw materials alone.
By increasing the use of nuclear energy and reprocessing fission byproducts, sr90 could be made significantly more plentiful.
If you couple an sr90 betavoltaic with a power reservoir, such as a lithium ion battery, you would drastically increase the lifespan of the li-ion battery and be capable of peak-power outputs greatly in excess of what the sr90 micro generator can provide.
With more developments in betavoltaics, efficiency would likely increase significantly -- beta emissions are electrons, after all, they just need to be captured and utilized. If photons can be capture and used at such a high efficiency in solar panels, you better believe electrons can as well.
Reality check, because everyone always gets excited about this: the power density of these devices is on the order of 10 µW/cm^3 - about eight orders of magnitude lower than a lithium-ion battery. Technical advances may improve that somewhat, but it will never be competitive with conventional power sources.
Inevitably someone will do that, but only because they've somehow avoided deleting themselves from the gene pool through any of the more available options. And even then they'll probably still manage it some other way before the carbon-14 can do its work.
The more likely use case would be for extremely long-lived stationary devices - for example, a remote monitoring system that is only accessed once every few years.
> Due to its very low power density, conversion efficiency and high cost, a 14C betavoltaic device is very similar to other existing betavoltaic devices which are suited to niche applications needing very little power (microwatts) for several years
I get it. It's a joke, but given that those devices are supposed to be worn on the body several energy recovery options exist that far exceed the power you can expect to get from an isotope battery in a compact device before the blue effects come from Cherenkov radiation instead of CGI and require frequent user changes instead of battery changes. Unless you have a copy of APOLLO stowed away changing batteries is easier than training new users ;-).