Or else build your own, it’s only a KG or two of plutonium you’ll need, and the facilities to not die while you’re working with it. This means that after I turn the power off, the static charge decays very slowly compared to an inert test sample, which gives me a ring-curve on the oscilloscope. gerard wrote a comment on project log Adjustable Mechanical Slit 3D-Printed for Raman Spectrometer . Merlin explains to me that this device must be primed initially by being connected to the flyback transformer. Much cheaper than diodes. It’s in the same location as the reply button on reddit for crying out loud! In other words, you get power when you need it, none when you don’t — a true battery. :) Then when I watched NurdRage’s video on the Soxhlet Extractor where he was removing the plastic shell from the tritium key chains I thought “Those would be perfect for my old idea of a nuclear/solar cell battery. @macona: you may be detecting bremsstrahlung x-rays generated when the beta’s hit something in the tube. A staple of science fiction and comic books of the 1950’s & 60s, but not of real life. An obvious question for a bright kid to think of is, “If there are solar cells that convert light to electricity, and radioactive waste puts out gamma rays for thousands of years, and radiation is just light, then why aren’t there panels to get electricity from that?”, Growing up, I finally got a chance to ask a real nuclear physicist that question, and he immediately answered, “because gamma rays are REALLY hard to stop.”. If you’re shaking your head at this point in disbelief, it’s time for a quick reality check: beta-decay (Betavoltaic) cells have been around for years, and it’s a well understood technology. Yes you can. The cross-section is highest for slow neutrons. Electrolyte injection: Liquid electrolyte is injected into an open battery pouch. If you’re really building a 20+ year device. You can stack eight or nine cups to make a ~12 Volt DC battery. I had considered that as well, sandwiching the source with two solar cells. Nuclear batteries. Steve Scott has updated components for the hackerspace titled CHAMP Makerspace. I asked Bob if he’d ever considered building a nuclear battery with any of them. I don’t have the specific numbers myself, but you can predict to within a few percent the power output at any point in the 50+ year future by taking into account the decay rates of the nuclear material, the phosphor and the solar cell. “Oh, they work,” he says, “Here’s one that I’ve been tinkering with for the last few months”. ilo liked Automated Soldering Robotic Arm. It doesn’t do any harm. We’re in the suburbs, but I feel strangely cut off from the modern world — hidden from the busy street by an abundance of sun-bleached weeds growing through cracks in the driveway. We don’t worry about the half life of the dangerous radioactive elements in the Earth’s crust, we just sit secure in the absolute fact that they are not going anywhere. Who exactly is claiming that you can speed up nuclear decay using a high-voltage field? Such an advanced semiconductor device will produce much higher power outputs than are possible with existing state-of-the-art devices. Same here, milliamp range is read on the voltage input. I’ve just finished telling him about my encounter with businessman and inventor Michael McDonnough, and a remarkable new technology that I’ve heard about. He gets 1.23 microwatts, not much, but it is in fact more than the output of commercial units at 0.84 microwatts, for a ten percent of the cost. Maybe I should read the article before commenting… :-). From smartphones to electric cars to home energy storage devices, rechargeable batteries power our modern lives. More power from a lemon cell. If I get a chance I’ll try it out. The basis for stimulated beta-decay technology comes from the theoretical research of Dr. Ruggero Santilli, who claims that with a specific static-charge applied to a nuclear isotope it can be made to break down at a sustained rate in comparison with a control sample. NDB is a universal life-long self-charging green battery which is developed by nanotechnology using recycled IL & HL waste and when it’s fully used it converts to environmentally friendly byproducts. I know that Merlin also realizes this, because the inside of the reflective metal-ball that the isotopes sit inside is lined with at least 1/8th inch thick lead-shielding. The lifetimes of betavoltaic devices depend on the half-lives, ranging from a few years to 100 years, of the radioisotopes that power them. In 6 days, a 1μA betavoltaic source could charge a 1.5 mAh Li-ion cell discharged by 10%. This basement is the “secret lab” of experimenter Merlin Del Orion — a white-bearded gentleman in his late 60’s that bears more than a little resemblance to his namesake from the age of Camelot. Betavoltaic technology is over 50-years old and was developed for use in outerspace and medical implant applications. You can daisy chain the power and ground pins of EPROMs to make a low output solar cell. I bought one and 3Dprinted a parabolic case over it. Not by much it would seem, He tried it with one solar panel at first. Unlike solar cells, both leakage current and efficiency are important for photo-diodes so they work well in low light. I believe that’s exactly what the betavoltaic panels are desisgned to do, as mentioned in the video. By preference, you will want the older Motorola brand transistors, which have relatively large diode substrates (about a cm square), and not the newer ones which have smaller diodes and maybe passivation layers. XenonJohn has updated the project titled The Digi-Gurdy. Epoxy surely blocks light more than air does. A single crystal diamond large area thin membrane was assembled as a p-doped/Intrinsic/Metal (PIM) structure and used in a betavoltaic configuration. I’ve popped open a few older soldered metal top CPUs that are really big die but those might be worth more as collectibles than as science experiments…, This was my idea when I was a kid, except it was with glow sticks instead of tritium tubes. In science, K40 is stable enough that it has little scientific use other than in studying biological systems using a highly bio-available and generally stable isotope. The 2N3055 is a silicon device. you wouldn’t be hacking a nuclear battery yourself and you’d buy a proper one. That minuscule amount of power is actually not easy to measure, and he does a great job explaining the circuit he used to measure the current. A common source used is the hydrogen isotope tritium. An electrode stack is inserted into the resulting form to create a pouch cell. Nuclear batteries in the microwatt range are used in clock circuits of critical computer systems and in some medical implants. Some might mistake it for a junk room, but I know exactly where I’m at: a tinkerer’s workshop, filled with a lifetime of dreams. This photocell idea is not a ‘battery’. The trick is sourcing enough K40 for commercial applications, but McDonnough is actively working on sources for that. Therefore a 1.0 uA Also be careful with epoxy, it can crack the glass!! Use your pliers to break off a few individual headers. Oh absolutely. His only puts out about a microwatt. If he turned the solar panels AWAY from the Tritium, they would produce more power :). Using these isotopes to create a “Betavoltaic” nuclear battery isn’t hard to do — according to Bob Lazar, it’s about as simple as putting a rock inside a … I’ll give them a try! If someone removed the ‘glass’ from an EPROM…. I realize this is an old discussion but it occurs to me you could possibly see *some* gain by encasing the whole thing in clear epoxy (vibrating out any bubbles) to transmit the light more directly to the PV cells. in watch lume while still remaining long term radioactive and still useful were the phosphor not irradiated to death. Building On That Battery. id say make a phosphorus silicone composite to replace the tritium casing / glass and the monocrystalline layer on the panel attach everything directly. Betavoltaic devices use a semiconductor junction to produce electrical energy from energetic beta particles ().A commonly used source is the hydrogen isotope tritium.. Betavoltaic devices are particularly well-suited to low-power electrical applications where long life of the energy source is needed, such as implantable medical devices or military and space applications. Or at least provide a popup asking for why you are reporting it, with the option to cancel. Like if you need something that can work at -100 celsius. Hmm, so 1.23 µW over 15 years equals 0.16 Wh. It is more viable and compact to use the heat from the decay instead. But instead of absorbing photons from the sun to create energy, betavoltaics absorb radioactive particles, he said. Build a million of them and you’ll have 1 watt. Denture Synth, OLED Keycaps, And SNES Raytracing, Bare-Metal STM32: Exploring Memory-Mapped I/O And Linker Scripts, New Part Day: Hackboard 2, An X86 Single-Board Computer, Netscape Communicator And SHA-1 Written Into Brexit Agreement, 3D Printed Server Case Holds 14 Raspberry Pis, Retrocomputing With Modern Hardware, No Emulation Required. However, putting a radioactive rock in a jar doesn’t generate usable current and there’s no off-switch, making it commercially useless. Well, tritium decay also emits a neutrino, but good luck capturing that energy. Is the phosphor necessary? A chemical battery SHOULD last 10 years. you could ballpark-it by comparing it to the Amps range ie 172mA vs 0.16A miiight be around 166mA, or just permenanently solder tweak-resistors while borrowing someone else’s meter to compare. Dr. Santilli believes that isotopes can be utilized with such a normal low decay rate that they are considered for all intents and purposes to be “inert materials”. The only radiation to escape those tubes is electromagnetic, so solar panels are a pretty good choice. After taking into consideration the possibility that I might want to actually have children in the future, I decide not to ask him for a demonstration of the device — at least not today. For this battery, you will need one unopened can of soda (any type will do), one plastic cup (6 to 8 ounces), and one 3/4-inch-wide strip of copper that's slightly longer than the height of the cup. Certain nuclear isotopes emit electrons when they break down — these are called “beta-emitting” isotopes. I recall an old 80s BBS file or usenet post about painting a beta source into what was very similar to a large electrolytic capacitor and directly harnessing the emitted electrons though loosing their kinetic energy, maybe a mention of alpha emitters in balanced amounts on the other side of a dielectric, the late 80s were 30 years ago. Or get someone to nick a space probe before NASA get a chance to launch it. We are making a betavoltaic battery. Detecting the reaction is ordinarily very difficult, however. Its a cool hack, but I wonder in what case would it be better than just a simple lithium primary cell like CR123? RTGs work on a different principle. Ever. I wanted to make an arduino GPS logger to attach to each container to automatically log the source movement (rather than the current paper method) as it’s, understandably required by law. Good proof of concept though! Merlin twists at a seam in the middle of the metal ball and lifts off the top portion for me to look inside. It doesn’t generate enough electricity to completely self-power, and that’s mostly because of inefficiencies in the feedback-circuit. “It’s a nuclear battery,” I tell him, “using a method of stimulating the decay of a nuclear isotope with a high-voltage to produce abundant, safe and clean electric energy. So Why Hasn’t It Been Done? “You know,” he said, “I could send you one of the little nuclear batteries that I’ve built — I think that you might get at least a couple of milliamps of high-voltage current from it. One technology is a nuclear battery. The DVM I use most reads up to 2A before shunt needed. The schematics i’ve found for GPS loggers only have a limited battery life, so I was wondering if the radiation from the isotope could be used as a power source to aid and recharge the battery. A Betavoltaic cell is a device that uses a radioactive source of beta particles and a semiconductor p-n junction to generate electricity. I was thinking of photodiodes but i was unsure about them. first dye-sensitized betavoltaic cell… achieves unprecedented radiation-to-electricity conversion efficiency Scientists at Daegu Gyeongbuk Institute of Science and Technology (DGIST) in Korea have found a way to improve the efficiency of betavoltaic devices, a type of power source that uses an internal radioactive material. It’s only the extreme cases where this might be viable. Doing anything with tritium gas other than it’s intended product is a big no-no. Some Assembly Required Step 1 - Gather Materials. :D, EPROMs are just big silicon die with a bunch of diffused transistors. But you might have gotten the bad batch that lasts 6 years. The betavoltaic battery isn't doing anything other than recovering the losses within the cycle so the fuel cell can create more power. “Wait a second”, I tell him, “this nuclear battery technology is totally new stuff — even the person who was telling me about it doesn’t have a working prototype yet. In this case, Merlin’s done something different, and wired it up to a round metallic ball rising from the circuit board on a post, almost like a miniature airport traffic-control tower. Just make sure the betavoltaic nuclear battery casing is more than a couple of millimeters thick — and don’t drop it. But you are right, for most people, even most professionals, a bunch of ultra-long life lithium batteries with some ORing diodes will give plenty of capacity and reliability for most projects which only need to last a few years at most. A nuclear battery is extremely predictable. Rather than being measured in hours or days, their potential lifetimes can be decades or even centuries. That’s also what makes the device Merlin showed me so incredibly intriguing: by using stimulated beta-decay, it produces more current on-demand, and the output drops to almost nothing when it’s turned off. They are quite good at converting infrared to low voltage and the ones I found are maybe 0.8V >1mA under moderate flux. But back in the day we only got about 10% efficiency.Plus I was lazy, so I dropped the idea. Everything down here appears to be at least a few decades old, but at least I’m not smelling that thick damp musk that accompanies the interior of a lot of the older homes in the Pacific Northwest. http://gizmodo.com/5132765/soviet-atomic-lighthouses-are-both-spooky-and-deadly/. D. No, it wouldn’t, it’d be massively impractical. Never got around to developing this because of the half life of a glow stick in comparison…. It’s OK, reports go to a human being, who’ll only zap the post if there’s a reason to. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betavoltaic_device, https://www.nist.gov/news-events/news/2016/06/physicists-measured-something-new-radioactive-decay-neutrons. Could a deadly mushroom help battle cancer? It is weak, but it is there. It's possible to light an LED with a betavoltaic battery. I can recognize an electric typewriter and several other pieces of electronics test-equipment on the shelf, but what he pulls out of a shadowy area is unrecognizable. It had a useful volume of 1.5cm3. Enjoyed your article. Probably a little dangerous but it could be polymerised to make it stable then you could seal the assembly in a glass tube with the ends heated and closed off like a valve or light bulb. If you want a light source that lasts for years but do not want to use radioactive tritium, consider the TritiLED. If Betavoltaic makes it work, they’ll be holding the key to an entirely new energy technology that has the potential to revolutionize our world through an inexpensive and efficient method of creating and storing electrical energy. Rather than use Gamma rays and converting them directly, they take the brute force approach and stop all the radiation and let them produce heat. Essentially, when they break down a high-energy electron is released, which can be captured and used to create a small, high-voltage current. Along the walls is a series of metals racks, filled haphazardly with a various assortment of tools, equipment, knick-knacks, and other oddities. IIRC he put 3 or for chains of them in parallel. You’re actually telling me what you’re holding actually works?”, “Yeah,” he responds, “It works. You turn it on and it applies a high-voltage to the nuclear material inside, and that causes the isotope to beta-decay & release electrons faster than they’d normally be emitted. In a sense, these little cup batteries act like legos. Learn about the compelling quest for a true portable, pocket-sized nuclear battery…. Have you tried this with germanium? In a hybrid design using both a NanoTritium™ battery and a lithium-ion battery, the Li cell would remain fully charged and last longer, even at high temperatures where the self-discharge can be 3% or more per month. The beta particles from tritium decay are blocked by the glass envelope. You get about 100mSv of radiation at the edge of the container. Filters or lenses cannot shift the wavelength of light. like spreading them across 4 panels. Technically it is illegal to even take apart a tritium exit sign to remove the tubes. Might have managed to get a volt out of it. The space between the pillars is filled with a radioactive beta emitter such as tritiated water. Those exit signs can be a total of 20 curies in each sign… quite a lot. By using our website and services, you expressly agree to the placement of our performance, functionality and advertising cookies. Jul 6, 2010 #3 wil3. If you simply bury radioactive wastes where nobody can get to them, the problem is solved. Lazar owns United Nuclear, which manufactures Geiger counters for use by the government and several commercial organizations, and one of Bob’s hobbies is collecting naturally-occurring radioactive rocks in the desert. Would exposing the bare solar panel to beta rays maybe also result in some power or is the penetration depth too large (probably…)? Kohn called the idea of a commercially-available betavoltaic “intriguing.” “I’m skeptical it will be a market-maker, but it certainly has some niches it could fill,” he said. It’s the middle of August and I’m standing in the basement of an aging brick house a few miles outside of Redmond, grateful to be in a cool area on a hot, muggy day. I do exactly that to make alpha detectors, and alphas are much more easily blocked than betas. Those vials can be bought separately on ebay. There are no viable gamma ray range photovolatic panels due to their extreme penetration depth. They then convert the *heat* itself into electricity using thermoelectric elements (peltier elements). From their dull-gray metallic color, these could be made of lead or pewter, but I know better as I realize that they are the Americum-241 pellets used to provide ionizing radiation in smoke detectors. Maybe safer to use nail varnish that sets under blue light. The answer is to utilize silicon carving technology to fashion multiple three-dimensional diode junctions that look like pillars, on top of a silicon carbide substrate, within a sealed device. photon has an easier path to photo-voltaic… in that it is not a beta particle which is easily shielded. [NurdRage] has just created a nuclear battery using tritium vials from key chains. After getting rid of the plastic containers, he sandwiches the vials between two small solar panels. To make stopping the radiation even easier they use Plutonium 238 which releases most of its energy as alpha particles that are easier to stop. A friend won a prize in a high school science fair doing that with a dozen or so BIOS EPROMs he’d taken from dead and obsolete PC motherboards. (then change function). The electrons that are released during this natural decay process can be collected to provide electrical energy. The lifetime of a nuclear battery, on the other hand, is based not on its reactivity, but the half-life of its decay. You won’t know until you wait that long and try it. The nifty bit is the condition of the chip dies doesn’t matter, just that the power and ground are still connected to them. The ball contains a collection of maybe 20 or 30 small pellets.
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