Altered Carbon: The Diamond Age
November 29, 2016 5:14 AM   Subscribe

Turning radioactive waste into diamond batteries. A team of physicists and chemists from the University of Bristol have grown a man-made diamond that, when placed in a radioactive field, is able to generate a small electrical current. They've built a prototype using Nickel-63 as the radiation source. The next step is to take nuclear waste and turn it into diamonds to create radioactive diamond batteries.

Roughly speaking the process is as follows:

1) Take a chunk of radioactive graphite from a defunct nuclear reactor (there are 95000 tons of this in the UK alone)
2) Boil off the most radioactive bits, and smush them into radioactive diamonds.
3) Stick some nice clean diamond around the outside to absorb the excess radioactivity.

The result:
A diamond which produces (presumably) a very very small amount of electricity for a very long time.
Using carbon-14 the battery would take 5,730 years to reach 50 per cent power.
posted by Just this guy, y'know (54 comments total) 29 users marked this as a favorite
 
From a comment on one of the blogs:
"Carbon-14 has a mean decay energy of 49 keV or 7.85e-15 Joules and activity of 165e+9 bq/g which gives you a power output of 0.0013 Watts per gram.
So a gram-sized lump of carbon-14 - about half a teaspoon - assuming perfect conversion, will produce 1.3 Milliwatts, or about 1/20th of what it takes to light up a common red indicator LED."

I'm not physicist enough to verify these figures though. I have to admit I was expecting a much lower yield.
(An AAA battery weighs about 15g, In case you wanted to work out if a perpetual remote control was possible.)
posted by Just this guy, y'know at 5:16 AM on November 29, 2016 [9 favorites]


"Radioactive diamond batteries" is just another reason why any historical summary of 2016 will be indistinguishable from randomly generated strings of words.
posted by ardgedee at 5:40 AM on November 29, 2016 [52 favorites]


The physics is there I guess. Diamonds normally are an insulator bur when you dope them with phosphorus or boron (oh this sounds familiar) they become semiconductors.

It's probably the same principle as PV but using electrons directly from the beta decay instead of using photons to push electrons out of the lattice.
posted by Talez at 5:55 AM on November 29, 2016 [5 favorites]


There are designs for processor chips intended for contactless payment cards that only need power on the scale of hundreds of microwatts. A diamond battery might conceivably keep it powered until its transistors wore out, which could potentially be a very long time if the chip is deliberately designed for longevity.

For an example application, you could embed tiny sensors into megastructures like dams or tunnels, right into the concrete, which could then monitor for stresses and cracks for the centuries such a structure might last.

Though I can't help worrying, when you're designing things that may last longer that your current civilisation, you might end up in the situation of people digging these things out of the ground without knowing what they are. Imagine your own post-apocalyptic morality story here.
posted by Eleven at 5:57 AM on November 29, 2016 [11 favorites]


If you made tiny tiny signal emitters you could mix them in with the concrete and read the signal externally.
Signal strength at any point would give you a 3D view of the internal density of the structure.

You could do a real time dynamic analysis of every single part of the structure.
Like, in a bridge, watch the deformation pattern of support beams as vehicles drive over them.
posted by Just this guy, y'know at 6:04 AM on November 29, 2016 [12 favorites]


So in terms of usage these would be like very small RTGs? For satellites and such? Or would they be sufficiently safe they could have more general uses?
posted by Artw at 6:08 AM on November 29, 2016


...you might end up in the situation of people digging these things out of the ground without knowing what they are. Imagine your own post-apocalyptic morality story here.

That problem already exists with radioactive waste storage today. There's no reliable way to mark the dump sites in a way that is guaranteed to be understandable thousands of years from now.
posted by Thorzdad at 6:09 AM on November 29, 2016 [4 favorites]


In terms of safety, they claim that it would emit less radioactivity than a banana.
This is mainly due to the fact that radiation is energy. If any is getting out then you're generating less power than you otherwise could.

The proposed design is a core of radioactive Carbon-14 jacketed with a clean non-radioactive diamond.
The Beta radiation produced by the Carbon core would all get absorbed by the diamond coating and turned into electrons.*

In terms of post apocalypticness, that's one of the upsides. You take existing nuclear waste, and take the vast majority of the irradiated carbon, then you wrap it up tight in a chunk of diamond.
The diamond coating means the nuclear bit is all stored away (which you'd have needed to do somehow anyway).


*That was a super sci-fi sounding sentence right there
posted by Just this guy, y'know at 6:22 AM on November 29, 2016 [9 favorites]


If you could do it cheaply enough, these could power sensors along roads for more accurate driverless cars in situations like snow covered roads or back roads that aren't mapped well.
posted by jason_steakums at 6:24 AM on November 29, 2016 [1 favorite]


They're gonna design dystopias around this thing!
posted by thelonius at 6:44 AM on November 29, 2016 [6 favorites]


So this is some kind of radioactive diamond battery?
posted by scalefree at 6:46 AM on November 29, 2016 [11 favorites]


...a core of radioactive Carbon-14 jacketed with a clean non-radioactive diamond.

He went to Jared!
posted by Thorzdad at 6:46 AM on November 29, 2016 [23 favorites]


This is so cool that I will ignore the fact that some kind of regalia made out of these would be the ideal evil space emperor getup.
posted by PMdixon at 6:52 AM on November 29, 2016 [9 favorites]


Ignore it? That's part of what makes it cool!
posted by nickmark at 6:59 AM on November 29, 2016 [6 favorites]


It occurs to me that the 1.3 Milliwatts figure above is for a gram of pure C14.
It's more likely to be a lot less than that (C14 occurs at about a rate of 1% naturally, so, let's say 50% in these irradiated inanimate carbon rods, after refining) and then it needs to be wrapped in non radioactive carbon, so let's say for argument that you use the same amount again coating the radioactive core .
So that gives you something more like 0.4mW per gram.

Just as a back of the envelope figure to be working from.
posted by Just this guy, y'know at 7:00 AM on November 29, 2016 [2 favorites]


No highly esteemed deed is commemorated here.
posted by rocketman at 7:02 AM on November 29, 2016 [13 favorites]


Interesting idea.

Also, props for including not one but two sci-fi novel titles in the post title... :-)
posted by Nice Guy Mike at 7:06 AM on November 29, 2016 [7 favorites]


What is all this 'use them to power sensors' shit? Give me a couple kilos and make me a fucking quad-pack that'll fly me around.
Because that's the future. Nuclear Diamond Batteries is very very promising, but to really make it sing, that handful of Nuclear Diamond Batteries should power something really really important like a jet-pack for me. Or a car. Or robot rovers for Europa or Titan or Pluto.
Maybe robot suits so we could like, jump up the sides of buildings and stuff.

How far off are these things as practical, useable things anyway? Ten years, say?
posted by From Bklyn at 7:08 AM on November 29, 2016 [1 favorite]


The problem, as ever is energy density.
Like RTGs these are going to be long term, but heavy and low power.

Unlike RTGs they probably won't produce much in the way of heat. So they may end up not being all that useful in space vehicles, because you still have to keep your electronics warm.
posted by Just this guy, y'know at 7:15 AM on November 29, 2016 [1 favorite]


...they claim that it would emit less radioactivity than a banana.

*eyes banana suspiciously*
posted by Floydd at 7:16 AM on November 29, 2016 [6 favorites]


Banana equivalent dose
posted by Artw at 7:17 AM on November 29, 2016 [9 favorites]


When the cockroaches or tardigrades or whatever replaces humanity eventually evolve into a sentient, tool-making species, then large numbers of radioactive diamond batteries lying around buried in the human age's ruins may go some way to mitigate the fact that the humans used up all the easily reachable fossil fuels.
posted by acb at 7:24 AM on November 29, 2016 [4 favorites]


Maybe this is how the fossil fuels got there in the first place.
posted by JohnFromGR at 7:31 AM on November 29, 2016 [1 favorite]


C14 occurs at about a rate of 1% naturally

For others who might have been curious about where it's being produced, the answer seems to be "Mostly by cosmic rays striking high-altitude nitrogen."
posted by ROU_Xenophobe at 7:33 AM on November 29, 2016 [4 favorites]


For others who might have been curious about where it's being produced, the answer seems to be "Mostly by cosmic rays striking high-altitude nitrogen."

This sounds like local news of my dreams.

Back to you, Steve

Thanks, Adam
posted by ethansr at 8:17 AM on November 29, 2016 [3 favorites]


I don't think you're going to do much flying at milliwatts/gram densities. At best you could trickle-charge a secondary cell or BFC* for short bursts at long intervals.

For comparison, MIT has reported making experimental photovoltaic cells that can produce six watts per gram (although they're extremely light, they're rather inefficient so that would be a big surface area).

* BFC - standard engineering term for a capacitor whose major characteristic is bigness. "We're still getting ringing on the power rail. I'll slap some BFCs across the bus."
posted by Devonian at 8:40 AM on November 29, 2016 [1 favorite]


Watch this get mangled into "Crystal healing energy is real, scientists baffled" on your coworker's facebook.
posted by MuppetNavy at 8:57 AM on November 29, 2016 [14 favorites]


Also, could someone make a badass super-expensive wristwatch with this? Digital clocks use tiny amounts of power, and I love the idea of a watch battery that'll outlive me.
posted by MuppetNavy at 8:59 AM on November 29, 2016


We're going to end up in a situation where your fancy embedded road sensors have 4,900 years of battery life left but due to a firmware security hole they're just going to be used for DDOS attacks and penis pill spam until the adoption of IPv8 knocks them off the net for good.
posted by Western Infidels at 9:04 AM on November 29, 2016 [20 favorites]


More seriously, growing synthetic diamonds is energy intensive. How does the output of the battery compare to the energy invested in its construction? For many small scale applications (implants like pacemakers, satellites) it's not important, but if this is actually going to be exciting in a "turn toxic waste into energy" way then it's obviously very important.
posted by Western Infidels at 9:10 AM on November 29, 2016 [5 favorites]


I'm wondering if the beta emissions from the carbon decay would be enough to light up phosphorus, like Tritum Illumination. You could make a tiny diamond light that would burn longer than recorded civilisation.
posted by Eleven at 9:16 AM on November 29, 2016 [5 favorites]


C14 occurs at about a rate of 1% naturally

The natural abundance of C14 is about a ten-billionth of 1%.
posted by jamjam at 9:42 AM on November 29, 2016 [3 favorites]


Bring on the ten thousand-year radioactive diamond batteries. I don't even care what they're used for, I just want them.
posted by tobascodagama at 9:43 AM on November 29, 2016 [1 favorite]


Are there more intensely radioactive materials that could be similarly safely encased, for higher outputs vs. shorter battery life, or is this pretty much the only avenue?
posted by maxwelton at 9:54 AM on November 29, 2016 [2 favorites]


Watch this get mangled into "Crystal healing energy is real, scientists baffled" on your coworker's facebook.

The handful of real “healing energy crystals” are actual radioactive diamond batteries left by the Atlanteans/Lemurians/Lovecraftean Elder Beings/some other highly advanced, now extinct civilisation.
posted by acb at 9:55 AM on November 29, 2016 [4 favorites]


These are obviously the inertial dampeners on the starship.

Make it so.
posted by mule98J at 10:48 AM on November 29, 2016 [5 favorites]


Diamond batteries - what incremental game is this again? Are my kittens ok?
posted by oceanjesse at 10:49 AM on November 29, 2016 [5 favorites]


Thinking further about this, diamonds aren't the greatest containment option for radioactives. They're hard, of course, but they're also quite brittle, crushable with hammers, and will burn with a bit of persuasion. Oh, and they evaporate under UV.

The 'Diamonds Are Forever' thing was just a marketing slogan - an extremely effective one, as was the whole 20th century diamond cartel scam - but it was never close to true.
posted by Devonian at 10:57 AM on November 29, 2016 [4 favorites]


These are obviously the inertial dampeners on the starship.

Make it so.


C, decay, hot
posted by Celsius1414 at 10:58 AM on November 29, 2016 [4 favorites]


Are there more intensely radioactive materials that could be similarly safely encased, for higher outputs vs. shorter battery life, or is this pretty much the only avenue?
Well, shit. I actually did the math on this, decided nobody on Metafilter would care, and deleted rather than submitted my comment. Let me see if Lazarus saved it.
posted by roystgnr at 12:32 PM on November 29, 2016 [1 favorite]


An AAA battery weighs about 15g, In case you wanted to work out if a perpetual remote control was possible
I suppose what we want isn't Carbon-14, it's Strontium-90? Still just beta-minus decay, but with three times the energy per decay, at forty times the rate; this is followed by Yttrium-90 beta decay, at the same rate (because it's much faster but it's rate limited by the Sr-90) and at about 12 times the energy. That gives us about .4 watts per gram, or 6 watts per battery. That's about five times what we need from a AAA, so even if efficiency is poor we're in the right ballpark. The half life is only decades, not millennia, but batteries which work continuously for decades sound nice too, right?

The trouble is two-fold:

1. Those 6 watts are coming out whether you're using the battery or not, whether you want them or not, whether you're ready for them or not. Best case scenario, you store all your batteries in a very-well-ventilated fireproof box and you don't have too many of them. Worst case scenario? There's got to be something wrong with my math here: Strontium's heat capacity is apparently .3 J/g-K, so if you lock these batteries in a perfectly insulated box, then we're adding .4 joules per gram per second, and we get more than 1 Kelvin hotter every second. Within 15 minutes our batteries are basically red-hot diamond balloons full of liquid strontium. Within another 15 they're bursting, spraying radioactive strontium vapor into the air.

2. Regardless of how the strontium gets out of the battery, eventually somebody's going to break a battery and let the strontium out. Strontium is a biochemical disaster - absorbs into the bones, stays in the body for decades, causes all kinds of cancers.

And problem 2 is pretty much a tautology with any attempt to "solve some of the problems of nuclear waste", though, isn't it? If you pick an isotope that's a real danger in nuclear waste, then it's too dangerous for most uses. If you pick an isotope (samarium-151?) based on safety, then it's unlikely to also be a significant component of nuclear waste. The first list of pure beta emitters I found wasn't long, and if you define "pure" to exclude isotopes whose decay chain isn't also all pure beta emitters then it gets shorter still.
posted by roystgnr at 12:32 PM on November 29, 2016 [17 favorites]


this is a very compelling subject, but to maximize the viral potential, they should've written about radioactive diamond kittens
posted by the_blizz at 2:33 PM on November 29, 2016 [1 favorite]


If their radioactive, how can I steal them.
posted by clavdivs at 2:45 PM on November 29, 2016


Every few days you'll see this kind of stuff popping up on reddit and facebook: the big new breakthrough that's going to save the world! I'll believe it when one of these new technologies actually breaks the fossil fuel monopoly. From a pure research perspective it's cool and novel, but I remind myself that other countries are already well on their way to being carbon neutral. The best example I can think of is France, which gets about 75 to 80% of its power from nuclear plants and is a net exporter of electricity to its neighbors. So I get tired of reading about these reddit-baiting, world-saving sci-fi prototypes, because giving this so much attention ignores the fact that carbon-neutral energy technologies already exist and that most of the world's industrialized states have been using them for decades. The USA really is an anomaly in that its government and citizens remain so stubbornly opposed to scientific consensus.

Unfortunately, oil and gas have some gigantic short-term advantages over alternative energy sources: they can be transported and stored and burned as needed (and yes, that is a critical component of any large power grid), and their extraction start-up costs and regulatory barriers are pretty small compared to nuclear or even solar energy. Their short-term advantages always take precedence over their long-term consequences because humans have a lot of trouble understanding long-term, diffuse threats as opposed to immediate economic gains and losses.

More seriously, growing synthetic diamonds is energy intensive. How does the output of the battery compare to the energy invested in its construction? For many small scale applications (implants like pacemakers, satellites) it's not important, but if this is actually going to be exciting in a "turn toxic waste into energy" way then it's obviously very important.

Yup, those are the sorts of questions that often get ignored. Two of the popular, buzzed-about technologies these days have similar problems; electric cars do not do a whole lot of net good if their batteries are charged by burning coal at a power plant, and carbon sequestration technology consumes energy, requiring that more coal be burned to power it. Its additional cost and reduced efficiency means that a coal-fired power plant equipped with carbon sequestration technology will not be economically competitive compared to a standard coal-fired power plant -- unless the government penalizes pollution or incentivizes clean power.


large numbers of radioactive diamond batteries lying around buried in the human age's ruins may go some way to mitigate the fact that the humans used up all the easily reachable fossil fuels.

"diamonds are forever" my ass! diamonds are metastable and weather easily. no such luck.
posted by Vic Morrow's Personal Vietnam at 2:48 PM on November 29, 2016 [4 favorites]


If you pick an isotope that's a real danger in nuclear waste, then it's too dangerous for most uses.

IIRC the only plausible plan for nuclear waste is to use the hot stuff to generate energy*, and then we're left with C^14 (e.g.) which is too radioactive to leave around but too slow to use as power-plant fuel. So this is mostly promising as a way to encapsulate, and then get some good from, a very lingering small-but-real risk.

* Most methods to do this are disturbingly exciting and also require refining the waste into its various hot components, which is difficult, contaminating, dangerous, and not directly profitable.
posted by clew at 2:59 PM on November 29, 2016 [1 favorite]


Can I wear one on my wrist and be an intergalactic policeman?
posted by Sparx at 3:13 PM on November 29, 2016 [3 favorites]


2) Boil off the most radioactive bits

Do what now?
posted by alex_skazat at 3:32 PM on November 29, 2016 [1 favorite]


Vic Morrow's Personal Vietnam (what really?) made a mostly great comment, especially as he/she points out how other countries are so far ahead of us here and the US has ceded most of this industry to other nations, but then there's this:

Their short-term advantages always take precedence over their long-term consequences because humans have a lot of trouble understanding long-term, diffuse threats as opposed to immediate economic gains and losses.

Who sez? Because we see the threats and want to do something about them, easily. Conflating humans with powerful monied executive humans working with right-wing politicians does nobody any favors.

We have a bunch of astoundingly stupid people in charge, and as we saw recently, you can be ahead by two million votes and still lose an election, because of how screwed up our systems are.
posted by JHarris at 3:44 PM on November 29, 2016 [6 favorites]


Two things.
1) these aren't a replacement for mainstream power. They won't run houses or cars. They'll run tiny sensors or long life space probes. This isn't for grid generation.

2) This is being developed in the UK, not the USA.
posted by Just this guy, y'know at 6:30 PM on November 29, 2016 [2 favorites]


You fools are missing the obvious implication that we have finally solved the age-old problem of self-powered chandeliers.
posted by um at 7:33 PM on November 29, 2016 [3 favorites]


nobody on Metafilter would care

Has this ever been true of anything?
posted by flaterik at 9:24 PM on November 29, 2016 [5 favorites]


You fools are missing the obvious implication that we have finally solved the age-old problem of self-powered chandeliers.

That's long-solved: Wooden chandelier. Match. Boom. (Or 'phoom', maybe.)

A self-powered chandelier that I'd want to swing from, on the other hand...

Sorry. I spent 10 minutes thinking and that was the best Sia joke I could come up with.
posted by PMdixon at 11:59 PM on November 29, 2016


The 'Diamonds Are Forever' thing was just a marketing slogan...

"Diamonds Are Forever" is meant to convey that you can't sell it for what you paid for it, so you might as well keep it.
posted by StickyCarpet at 3:22 AM on November 30, 2016 [5 favorites]


My wife and I were talking about this and between us derived this beautiful fictional image of one day having a 2 meter tall column of diamond, sitting in the engine room (we live on a boat), at it's heart a continuous display of scintillating golden radiation. All day every day it's constantly charging up the batteries of the boat, a spectacular heart of gold diamond powering the ship.
(I know none of this is how this stuff works, no reason for it to glow, probably you couldn't do it in a big column, nor for it to actually be cut to sparkle, or even be optically clear, but still, it was a futurist fantasy )


*Calculations after the fact.
Column is 2m tall, half a meter diameter.
Therefore volume is 0.392 cubic meters
Diamond has a density of 3539 kg/m3
So that gives us 1390 kg of diamond (let's say 1400 for math neatness, just assume the column is slightly bigger)
Our theorised power output is 0.4 mW per g
So that's 0.4W per kg
So that gives us 560W from the column 24/7/ So 13.44 kw/H
Which would juuuuust about cover my summer power usage at the moment.

Or, about as much power as is provided by 3 square meters of solar panel.
The glimmering diamond heart is prettier though, and works at night.
posted by Just this guy, y'know at 4:15 AM on December 1, 2016 [1 favorite]


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