Atomic Batteries — Mass Production is at hand

Atomic Batteries

Mass Production is at hand

Bryan Zepp Jamieson

January 23rd, 2024

www.zeppscommentaries.online

Betavolt, a Chinese battery company, this week announced it was beginning mass production of a battery about the size of a microdisk and about 3 mm thicker that can produce 100 microWatts at three Volts—for 50 years.

While the concept behind the battery isn’t new—the US was making ‘atomic batteries’ in the early 1960s—it is the first to meet Chinese health and safety regulations, such as they are, for mass production.

This particular battery uses an isotope of nickel, Ni-63, encased in a proprietary wafer of diamond dust as a semiconductor. According to Betavolt, the unit won’t leak radiation even if punctured or gunshot. Preliminary tests indicate that the units, intact, are at normal background levels.

The units can be run in groups, either serial or parallel configurations. So, according to Betavolt, they can be used for such things as “aerospace, AI devices, medical, MEMS systems, intelligent sensors, small drones, and robots – and may eventually mean manufacturers can sell smartphones that never need charging.” Betavolt intends to have a much beefier model available in 2025 that can produce a full watt at 3 volts.

This is a breakthrough and has a strong potential to be what the tech bros like to call “disruptive.” It packs an energy density ten times that of lithium batteries, and isn’t affected by temperatures. “Unlike traditional batteries, this nuclear battery operates safely under extreme conditions, from temperatures of 120 to minus 60 degrees Celsius (248 to minus 76 Fahrenheit), and is resistant to punctures and gunfire without catching fire or exploding,” according to Science and Technology Daily. Tesla owners in the northeast will probably be interested to hear that.

The building blocks are plentiful. Ni-63 is easy to make from Ni-62, which is very plentiful, and there’s no shortage of diamond dust, which can be found naturally or synthetically. So mass production is feasible. Ni-63 has a half-life of 100.1 years, so the 50-year lifespan of the battery assumes about a 20% loss of power over that time period. Ni-63 decays into copper.

Of course, there is a downside. While considered a “low-level” contaminant by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and thus safe for near-surface disposal, it is Class C, which is the highest level of that overall designation. The NRC adds, “Class C waste is waste that not only must meet more rigorous requirements on waste form to ensure stability but also requires additional measures at the disposal facility to protect against inadvertent intrusion. The physical form and characteristics of Class C waste must meet both the minimum and stability requirements set forth in § 61.56.”

Physical Characteristics

  • Half-life: 100.1 years
  • Emissions: Beta particles with a maximum energy of 66 keV and an average energy of 17 keV
  • Maximum Range: 5 cm in air; < 0.01 cm in tissue

Dose Rate and Shielding

  • Dose rate to the skin at 10 cm: negligible (for an unshielded point source)
  • Dose rate to epidermal basal cells from skin contamination of 1 µCi/cm2: negligible
  • Shielding: None needed.
  • Annual Limit on Intake (ALI): 9000 microcuries via ingestion and 2000 microcuries via inhalation. The ingestion of one ALI will produce a dose of 5 rem.

Detection

A wipe survey using liquid scintillation counting is the preferred method for detecting Ni-63. G-M detectors will not detect Ni-63 contamination.

Precautions:

Ni-63 contamination cannot be detected with a G-M meter, and special precautions are needed to keep the work environment clean. The regular use of wipe testing, using a liquid scintillation counter, is the only way to insure that your work space does not contain low-level removable contamination.

Radiation Monitoring Requirements: Radiation monitoring badges are not required for Ni-63 users, since the monitoring badges will not detect Ni-63.

Waste Disposal:

  • Solid Wastes/Liquid Scintillation Wastes: through the Off-Site Radioactive Waste Disposal Program
  • Liquid Wastes: through the Sewer Disposal Program. The laboratory disposal limit for Ni-63 is 3 mCi per month.

     

A paper by Chinese physicists (Effective separation and recovery of valuable metals from waste Ni-based batteries: A comprehensive review by ie Wang, Yingyi Zhang, Laihao You, Kunkun Cui, Tao Fu and Haobo Mao and curated by The School of Metallurgical Engineering, Anhui University of Technology, Maanshan, 243002, Anhui Province, China, and School of Civil Engineering and Architecture, Anhui University of Technology, Maanshan, 243002, Anhui, China) states flatly, “On the one hand, waste Ni-based batteries cause serious harm to the environment and human health. On the other hand, they contain many valuable metals such as Ni, Co, Mn, Zn, and rare earth elements (REEs). These valuable metals and REEs have very high strategic value and are widely used in high-temperature structural materials to improve their mechanical properties and oxidation resistance.”

The paper goes on to detail several methods of disposal/recycling that can be used to mitigate what otherwise would be a significant environmental and safety hazard. These vary in both cost and effectiveness.

So while this is a significant step forward, it isn’t without challenges and drawbacks. Yes, the batteries as units seem safe and effective, but in mass production present major possible problems.

Expect to be hearing much more about this.

Sources:

Princeton Environmental Health ^ Safety

https://ehs.princeton.edu/laboratory-research/radiation-safety/radioactive-materials/radioisotope-fact-sheets/nickel-63

 

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1385894722012670

Chernobyl – Stunning HBO Docudrama about nuclear disaster

[Note: Portions of this also appear in my review of HBO’s Chernobyl, available at Electric Review ]

The glowbugs aren’t going to be happy. Any time there is an online discussion of nuclear power, they show up, insisting that everything we think we know is a result of anti-technology hysteria and ignorance. The tone often is extremely condescending; I’ve been asked if I knew the sun was radioactive, or if I knew the difference between an atom and a molecule. Some are just trolls, others are there to try to massage the conversation about nuclear power, make it more industry-friendly.

I find them annoying, so I’m not entirely upset that they are consternated when something comes along, such as The China Syndrome, or more pertinent to reality, the Fukushima disaster, to mess with their cultish servility to the god of fission.

One of the more legitimate beefs the glowbugs have with the Jane Fonda/Jack Lemmon movie is that the accident happened because a water pressure gauge got stuck, resulting in a reassuring but incorrect reading. Lemmon gets suspicious and taps the gauge, which corrects, revealing the true reading, and at that point it is ON, baby.

Pretty silly, I agree, but that’s Hollywood.

The terrifying thing is that what happened at Chernobyl was nearly as silly. The control rods at the type of reactor at Chernobyl had graphite tips, and in a sequence of events very carefully described in the fifth and final episode, this led to a massive power spike when the system was put in emergency shutdown, resulting in instant vaporization of the coolant and precipitating an ‘impossible’ explosion.

In the 1980s, the Soviet Union was a nation in deep decay: not just the economic, industrial and military sectors, but in the leadership, which consisted of fearful, strutting groups of apparatchiks whose deepest instincts are to lie and downplay news that would upset the party leaders.

Comforting lies, when they become a way of life become a way of death. When the explosion at the Chernobyl nuclear plant happened on April 25th, 1986, valuable time was lost from misinformation; that this type of reactor core could not physically explode, and that the emissions from the ruined plant were a hazardous but survivable 3.6 roentgens per hour.

High-end dosimeters were destroyed or missing in the rubble, so only the low-end ones could measure the radioactivity levels; and those maxed out at 3.6 roentgens per hour. The actual emissions were closer to 20,000 roentgens per hour. Between incorrect engineering theory and the mistaken readings, plant managers initially concluded that the core was intact, and that it was probably a hydrogen explosion. They dismissed highly radioactive chunks of graphite lying in the parking lot, used as cladding for the control rods, as being just charred concrete.

Lies that stem from ignorance, confusion and panic are understandable. As the catastrophe unfolded, the lies became systematic, deliberate, designed to protect a political system deemed incapable of error.

Another, similar plant in Lithuania, the Ignalina plant, very narrowly escaped a similar catastrophe in 1983, and had the people at Chernobyl been informed of this, they might have avoided the steps that led to the meltdown. Had the political system not intervened, the discovery of the graphic-tip design flaw would have been known to the engineers at Chernobyl. But it was classified as a state secret.

Even after people on the ground realized the enormity of the Chernobyl disaster, Moscow kept getting comforting lies from below for another couple of days. In another time and in another place, the national leader might have been hearing happy chirps about how Chernobyl was emitting isotopes of freedom. It’s a matter of blind luck that the meltdown didn’t reach ground water, producing a reaction that would have killed all chordate life forms for 600 miles around and permanently poisoning most of Europe and a large chunk of Asia, making them uninhabitable.

It wasn’t the first nuclear disaster in the USSR. In 1957, a reactor near a small town called Kyshtym had its cooling system fail and blew. Bad as the Soviet government was in 1986, it was even worse back then. The plant was dumping contaminated water and waste directly into a nearby lake. The government refused to acknowledge the accident, even as they slowly began evacuating towns in the area, some as long as two years (!) after the event. They eventually declared the exclusion zone a Natural Preserve (!) that was closed to the public, as it is to this day.

It came to light later that a secret city of some quarter million people, Chelyabinsk, was nearby, and heavily contaminated. In 1977 Soviet dissident and exile Zhores Medvedev wrote Hazards of Nuclear Power which mentioned the disaster and was subsequently derided, not only by the Soviet government but by western nuclear industry ‘experts’ (the glowbugs of that era). Medvedev then wrote Soviet Science, which provided irrefutable proof of the event. The Soviet government lied. So did the American nuclear industry and its government councils.

A statistical analysis made in 1997 revealed that the region irradiated by the Kyshtym disaster resulted in some 8,000 deaths from cancer above what might be expected. Medvedev’s first writing of the accident has anecdotal accountings of hundreds of people suffering severe radiation burns in the immediate aftermath of the disaster. Some estimates put the death toll as high as 20,000.

So the response of the Soviet government in the Gorbachev era was actually an improvement of sorts. They held a show trial to try and blame the event on ‘operator error’ and Valery Legasov, in charge of dealing with the immediate aftermath of the disaster, told the stunned court of the design flaw. The Soviet government responded by ghosting him, leaving him his title and his office but entirely isolating him from all other professionals in his field.

He recited everything he knew on to audio tape and smuggled it out to the scientific community, and that’s the only reason we know exactly what went wrong at Chernobyl. The Soviet government quietly re-engineered the design flaw over the next several years in order to maintain their perfection and restore their virginity.

There are estimates that between 9,000 and 22,000 died as a result of Chernobyl. The official death toll remains 31, and glowbugs here dispute even that low number, clinging to an ideology that nuclear power is incapable of error and that anyone who says otherwise is clearly an enemy to physics. They must maintain their pure virginity, you understand.

There are hundreds of nuclear power plants around the world (including 11 surviving sister plants to Chernobyl) and that while they might be safe, they are not fool-proof, and people with vested interests will disregard inconvenient truths for comforting lies. I expect to hear a chorus of derisive disapproval from western glowbugs, with the industry flaks being contemptible and the sincere believers dangerous.

The western world is rapidly falling into a dangerous mindset of authoritarianism and ideological rigidity, not dissimilar to the Soviet Union under Khrushchev and Gorbachev. That makes the horrible potential toll of accidents far higher than they need to be, and HBO’s Chernobyl serves as a warning that we should maintain a deep, healthy skepticism about any project where politicians have invested power and prestige; if the news isn’t great, then they will start lying.

At your expense.

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