[HN Gopher] Scientists Turn Nuclear Waste into Diamond Batteries...
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       Scientists Turn Nuclear Waste into Diamond Batteries Lasting 1k's
       of Years
        
       Author : rmason
       Score  : 7 points
       Date   : 2022-04-22 19:44 UTC (3 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.thebrighterside.news)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.thebrighterside.news)
        
       | 2ctJoke wrote:
       | Oh wow: batteries that will last longer than the human species.
        
       | steeve wrote:
       | 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).
        
         | cogman10 wrote:
         | 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.
        
       | gus_massa wrote:
       | 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)
        
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       (page generated 2022-04-22 23:01 UTC)