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Forums > Home› Ten Forward

Real Live Dilithium Crystals. 5,000yrs of battery life!

garaks31garaks31 Member Posts: 2,845 Arc User
in Ten Forward
Mentioned in the latest p1 podcast.

https://www.rt.com/uk/369020-nuclear-battery-diamond-scientists/
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https://forum.arcgames.com/startrekonline/discussion/1249570/axanar-locks-in-start-date-for-filming

Comments

  • starkaosstarkaos Member Posts: 11,556 Arc User
    So how many are required to power a house and how much nuclear waste is removed from this process?
  • angrytargangrytarg Member Posts: 11,009 Arc User
    edited December 2016
    I have no clue about this stuff on a technical level, but from an environmental science point of view if it is actually feasible to produce nuclear batteries that are safe and don't leak more radiation into the environment in the process this could be the breakthrough for electromobility that is desperately needed. Or, as starkaos wrote, it could be a way to store energy in private households, if of course there would be a realistic way of mass producing those batteries. If one turns out to cost a few million it'll be a slow process.

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  • jorantomalakjorantomalak Member Posts: 7,133 Arc User
    angrytarg wrote: »
    Perfect example how much humanity could evolve if we'd forget about the economy and just make sure all of us AND our habitat survives.​​

    Problem is humanity is a greedy creature so much so that it will destroy the environment and charge a kings ransom to those who are sick and exploit everything in the name of profit.

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  • jonsillsjonsills Member Posts: 10,476 Arc User
    starkaos wrote: »
    So how many are required to power a house and how much nuclear waste is removed from this process?
    No clear figures on the amount of radioactive waste consumed, but in the current configuration you'd need five of these things to equal one AA battery, so a whole mess of them for household power. On the other hand, this is brand-new technology, still in its first iteration - it remains to be seen how far it can be refined. Perhaps one day this will become a viable power source. (Its other benefit is that, since it also sequesters carbon in the process, it's also a [very minor] greenhouse-gas fighter.)

    Almost fifty years ago, while discussing what to do with nuclear waste, engineer (and SF author) Dr. Jerry Pournelle stated that we wouldn't want to "throw it into the sun" because since it was still energetic, it still had potential uses - he had no idea what they might be, but then again until Henry Ford standardized it as the fuel for his cheap cars, gasoline was mostly regarded as a waste byproduct of kerosene production. Now, if this battery can be made more useful and practical, we may have discovered what that use is.​​
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  • lilchibiclarililchibiclari Member Posts: 1,193 Arc User
    It'll be only a matter of months before some idiot grinds a few of these to powder and puts them in a "dirty bomb", at which point the public and the politicians will become so afraid of them that they will be banned.
  • markhawkmanmarkhawkman Member Posts: 35,236 Arc User
    yeah, there's a nuclear reactor design someone came up with that can be fueled by pretty much ANY form of radioactive matter. the primary reason it's not used is that nuclear energy regulations forbid reusing "spent" fuel. (for fear that people will extract usable amount of plutonium or something...)
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  • jonsillsjonsills Member Posts: 10,476 Arc User
    lilchibiclari wrote: »
    It'll be only a matter of months before some idiot grinds a few of these to powder and puts them in a "dirty bomb", at which point the public and the politicians will become so afraid of them that they will be banned.
    If they've got the equipment to grind diamonds to dust, they can probably purchase radioactives on the international black market.​​
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  • dalolorndalolorn Member Posts: 3,655 Arc User
    jonsills wrote: »
    lilchibiclari wrote: »
    It'll be only a matter of months before some idiot grinds a few of these to powder and puts them in a "dirty bomb", at which point the public and the politicians will become so afraid of them that they will be banned.
    If they've got the equipment to grind diamonds to dust, they can probably purchase radioactives on the international black market.​​

    Unless, of course, they wanted to get the technology banned... but that's another matter entirely.
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  • themadprofessor#9835 themadprofessor
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         Member Posts: 1,203 Arc User
    edited December 2016
    jonsills wrote: »
    lilchibiclari wrote: »
    It'll be only a matter of months before some idiot grinds a few of these to powder and puts them in a "dirty bomb", at which point the public and the politicians will become so afraid of them that they will be banned.
    If they've got the equipment to grind diamonds to dust, they can probably purchase radioactives on the international black market.​​

    Diamonds are actually remarkably fragile. A toddler with a hammer can break one. A diamond dropped on a hard surface can shatter. Yes, a diamond is the hardest mineral substance due to the tightly woven lattice of carbon atoms, but its overall structure is not that durable.

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  • markhawkmanmarkhawkman Member Posts: 35,236 Arc User
    heh, people often confuse hardness and general durability. a lot of things will just shatter. You can't scratch them with ordinary materials, but chipped or cracking? easy...
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  • jonsillsjonsills Member Posts: 10,476 Arc User
    There's one other problem with that concept, which I didn't realize until I reread the article the other day: The radioactive element used as a power source here is Carbon-14. That occurs naturally pretty often - in fact, it's one of the methods used to date ancient organic remains (the percentage of carbon-14 that's decayed into the more stable isotope carbon-12). So trying to make a "dirty bomb" out of this would be much like trying to build a nuke using potassium instead of plutonium - they're both somewhat radioactive, and they both start with "p", but that's where the resemblance ends.​​
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  • jorantomalakjorantomalak Member Posts: 7,133 Arc User
    Here the real question

    can we refine more then 8K of these RL dilithium crystals a day? lol
  • lilchibiclarililchibiclari Member Posts: 1,193 Arc User
    jonsills wrote: »
    There's one other problem with that concept, which I didn't realize until I reread the article the other day: The radioactive element used as a power source here is Carbon-14. That occurs naturally pretty often - in fact, it's one of the methods used to date ancient organic remains (the percentage of carbon-14 that's decayed into the more stable isotope carbon-12). So trying to make a "dirty bomb" out of this would be much like trying to build a nuke using potassium instead of plutonium - they're both somewhat radioactive, and they both start with "p", but that's where the resemblance ends.​​

    Unfortunately, public policy reactions are not based on science, but on perceptions. Just the fact that it is a radioactive substance that will be dispersed if put into a bomb is enough to make alarmists panic, since their point of view is that "any radiation at all = gives people cancer" (the Zero-Threshold model).
  • wombat140wombat140 Member Posts: 971 Arc User
    Hmm. I'm not sure how they can claim BOTH that this is a way of cleaning up some nuclear waste AND that it doesn't contain any hazardous nuclear waste. They can't have it both ways.
  • markhawkmanmarkhawkman Member Posts: 35,236 Arc User
    wombat140 wrote: »
    Hmm. I'm not sure how they can claim BOTH that this is a way of cleaning up some nuclear waste AND that it doesn't contain any hazardous nuclear waste. They can't have it both ways.
    Yeah that really doesn't make sense. They're reusing a very specific form of waste. This doesn't seem to contain all that much really.
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