Personal nuclear power plants: New battery lasts twelve years.

[NNadir]

"A new type of battery based on the radioactive decay of nuclear material is 10 times more powerful than similar prototypes and should last a decade or more without a charge, scientists announced this week.


The longevity would make the battery ideal for use in pacemakers or other surgically implanted devices, developers say, or it might power spacecraft or deep-sea probes.


You might also find these nuclear batteries running sensors and other small devices in your home in a few years. Such devices "don't consume much power," said University of Rochester electrical engineer Philippe Fauchet, "and yet having to replace the battery every so often is a real pain in the neck..."

Personal Nuclear Power: New Battery Lasts 12 Years: http://news.yahoo.com/s/space/personalnuclearpowernewbatterylasts12years

This should make the heads of the radiation paranoid mystics explode. Personally, I'm somewhat dubious about this myself. In another thread (Post # 122 http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=115&topic_id=18893&mesg_id=19317&page=) I examined the world supply of tritium, most of which is in Canada. The quantity, on which any putative "fusion" energy system would depend, is rather small.

http://public.lanl.gov/willms/Presentations/Tritium_Supply_Considerations.pdf

Such applications for tritium powered batteries would only be useful for very low power devices, like pacemakers. Given the high price of tritium, I imagine they wouldn't be too cheap. Pacemakers have in the past been powered both by strontium-90 and plutonium-238, the latter being same isotope that powers 100% of spacecraft that go beyond the orbit of Mars, including the magnificent Cassini mission which has recently taught humanity a great deal about their solar system. (Anti-nuclear Luddites did everything they could to stop this mission, based on their usual extreme paranoia about highly improbable events that, with their very, very, very poor insight to mathematics, they sought to present as certainties.) The strontium-90 and plutonium pacemakers worked quite well, but then a bunch of anti-scientific mysticism about radioactivity became the vogue, and the practice of using these isotopes was replaced by repeated surgeries to replace chemical batteries.

[Coastie for Truth]

1. Some more articles--

This was in an "unread" section of an "unread" chapter - "not on the Final Exam" - in Simon Sze's book--

1) - Careful it's an Adobe PDF file -- from Univ of Rochester

2) Another Adobe PDF - from Cornell

3) on a NASA JPL Contract - another Adobe PDF

Excerpt from

" Betavoltaic Batteries

A betavoltaic battery is a nuclear battery that converts energy from beta particles (electrons) released by a beta emitting radioactive source, such as tritium, into electrical power. The application of tritiated amorphous silicon as an intrinsic energy conversion semiconductor for betavoltaic devices is presented. Thin-film contact potential tritiated amorphous silicon cells have been built. These cells, called tritium batteries, have a specific power of 24 watts per kilogram, a full load operating life of 10 years, and an overall efficiency on the order of 25%. Cheap, long-life, high energy density, low-power batteries. The entrapment of tritium is particularly apt in this application as it is readily substituted for the hydrogen present in hydrogenated amorphous semiconductors with good intrinsic electronic properties. Radioisotopes other than tritium, may also be used as a source of energetic electrons as well as other forms of energetic nuclear radiation such as krypton-85 for example. Tritiated amophous films are mechanically stable, free for flaking or blistering, with good adherence to the substrate and may be simultaneously deposited onto both conducting and insulating substrates and may be simultaneously deposited onto both conducting and insulating substrates using a discharge in tritium plasma. The silicon layer sputtered in a tritium/argon ambient at temperatures below 300'C results in a tritiated amorphous silicon film with the tritium concentration being variable from 5 to 30% depending upon deposition conditions"

and a referenced

[jpak]

2. I use ~30 millicuries of tritium each year (research)

under a US Nuclear Regulatory Commission license.

I had to take a radiation safety course to use these materials.

I have to wear a film badge every time I walk into a rad lab (even if no hard-beta or gamma emitters are present).

I have to do swipes and/or conduct a meter survey at the end of each working day in the lab.

I have to fill out LOTS a rad-related paper work for each research project I'm involved with.

At the end of research cruises, this takes 2 full days of my time - even when I'm not the ship's radiation safety officer.

Licensing and regulating these devices for public use would be ungodly expensive and cumbersome to say the least.

It ain't gonna happen.

[NNadir]

3. Yeah right.

:eyes:

[jpak]

4. And your point is????

n/t

[struggle4progress]

5. The nuclear pacemakers, of which you speak so glowingly, ...

were abandoned in the early 1980's for a number of reasons, and health professionals made the decision.

As surgical science improved, the time for a pace-maker operation decreased from six hours down to an hour and a half, so the argument against multiple operations lost force. After patient death, the pacemakers difficult to recover and presented various public health concerns if (for example) the patient was shot in the chest or cremated without explantation, while licensees were not always diligent about tracking the sources tracking the sources.

Nor did all nuclear pacemakers perform adequately.

[Name removed]

6. Deleted message

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[struggle4progress]

7. The NRC links provided show licensees were not retrieving sources,

and NRC indicates concern about loss of control over ultimate disposition.