This needs to be a thing

[red assassin]

I guess I would like to see some specifics on C14 itself in this context. If I'm understanding the principle of Bremsstrahlung correctly, because carbon has such a low atomic value, the energy of any potentially generated x-rays would be negligible.

Mailo is a) a working nuclear physicist and b) right. The 156 keV figure he cites is specific to carbon 14 decay. Additionally, the acceptable quantity of x-rays your mobile phone can routinely emit is effectively zero given you and the rest of the world have it on their person pretty much permanently; you can add three or four orders of magnitude of error and magic x-ray absorption to Mailo's calculations and still get something which is too dangerous to use.

[Vertigo 7]

I guess I would like to see some specifics on C14 itself in this context. If I'm understanding the principle of Bremsstrahlung correctly, because carbon has such a low atomic value, the energy of any potentially generated x-rays would be negligible.

Mailo is a) a working nuclear physicist and b) right. The 156 keV figure he cites is specific to carbon 14 decay. Additionally, the acceptable quantity of x-rays your mobile phone can routinely emit is effectively zero given you and the rest of the world have it on their person pretty much permanently; you can add three or four orders of magnitude of error and magic x-ray absorption to Mailo's calculations and still get something which is too dangerous to use.

Uhmmmmm he said specifically the figure was not 156 keV. And I didn't see any claim that he is a nuclear physicist. He may well be but I didn't see him say that.

Besides, I'm asking for sources. I don't just take people's word for it on a forum post. The simple fact is we are all exposed to radiation on a daily basis of every type, including x-ray. Just because something emits radiation, that doesn't make it dangerous. If you're claiming it is dangerous, prove it, don't just assume so.

[red assassin]

Uhmmmmm he said specifically the figure was not 156 keV. And I didn't see any claim that he is a nuclear physicist. He may well be but I didn't see him say that.

Besides, I'm asking for sources. I don't just take people's word for it on a forum post. The simple fact is we are all exposed to radiation on a daily basis of every type, including x-ray. Just because something emits radiation, that doesn't make it dangerous. If you're claiming it is dangerous, prove it, don't just assume so.

This is what he said:
"That electron carries a significant amount of the energy released in the decay ... on average 49keV, up to a maximum of 156keV"
He's provided sources and worked through the maths for nearly everything, but nonetheless here are sources for carbon 14's maximum decay energy:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/me ... /carbon-14
https://www.ldeo.columbia.edu/~martins/ ... rbon1.html
(These use 158 keV rather than 156.)


Edit: reading this interview, they claim "When it comes to mechanical safety, diamond is one of the strongest materials in the world. 11.5 times stronger than steel. So again, that itself makes the battery tamper-proof and safe." This is just completely untrue, and I'm extremely surprised to see somebody who's supposedly a research physicist making that claim. Diamond is harder than steel, it isn't stronger - you can break a diamond by hitting it with a steel hammer if you're so inclined. (As pointed out earlier in the thread you can also just burn them.) Later in the interview they imply they've done something to make their diamond stronger, but I don't like the confusion in that quote and don't see what could make it strong enough to be safe.

I can definitely see applications for better radioactive decay batteries, especially if they can get it working with lots of different isotopes to tune lifetime. But something that's safe, has a higher power output for its mass than lithium ion, is cheaper, and runs without recharging for a decade to thousands of years? Their claims just don't add up.

[Vertigo 7]

Uhmmmmm he said specifically the figure was not 156 keV. And I didn't see any claim that he is a nuclear physicist. He may well be but I didn't see him say that.

Besides, I'm asking for sources. I don't just take people's word for it on a forum post. The simple fact is we are all exposed to radiation on a daily basis of every type, including x-ray. Just because something emits radiation, that doesn't make it dangerous. If you're claiming it is dangerous, prove it, don't just assume so.

This is what he said:
"That electron carries a significant amount of the energy released in the decay ... on average 49keV, up to a maximum of 156keV"
He's provided sources and worked through the maths for nearly everything, but nonetheless here are sources for carbon 14's maximum decay energy:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/me ... /carbon-14
https://www.ldeo.columbia.edu/~martins/ ... rbon1.html
(These use 158 keV rather than 156.)

That's not what I was asking for. None of those address the potential for x-ray emissions from C14 decay. However, in my own searches, I frequently find information such as this:

Bremsstrahlung
An important consideration in shielding beta particle radiation is the ability of beta particles to produce a secondary radiation called bremsstrahlung . Bremsstrahlung are x-rays produced when beta particles or other electrons decelerate while passing near the nuclei of atoms. The intensity of bremsstrahlung radiation is proportional to the energy of the beta particles and the atomic number of the material through which the betas are passing.

Consequently, bremsstrahlung radiation is generally not a concern for lower energy beta emitters such as carbon-14 and sulfur-35, but the higher energy betas from phosphorus-32 can produce significant bremsstrahlung, especially when passing through shielding materials such as lead. Lower atomic number materials such as Plexiglas are preferred shielding materials for high energy emitters such as phosphorus-32.

https://www.murraystate.edu/headermenu/ ... dule1.aspx

[Mailo]

Small correction, I'm not a nuclear physicist, I got my PhD in elementary particle physics That's nitpicking though, they belong to the same field. Sorry, I did not think to mention that, I frequented this forum quite a bit during my PhD.
Since 2008 I've been working in the R&D department at two companies developing XRF (X-ray fluorescence) analysis devices, so any type of interaction between electrons, X-ray photons and matter is basically what I do every day.

Yes, I did say that one figure was not for an isotope with a decay energy of 156keV, it was for one with ~1.2MeV. The general shape though will stay the same. The figure shows how much energy electrons emitted by beta decay have. Since it is a decay of one particle (proton) into three (neutron, electron and neutrino, one of which has immense mass compared to the other two), the energy of the decay is mostly divided between electron and neutrino. That graph shows that most of the electrons will have about 15% of the maximum energy (so ~23keV out of the total 156keV), on average each electron will have ~45%, and only very few will have the maximum amount possible.

With regards to the Bremsstrahlung, the shape of the spectrum (meaning the energy distribution) is mostly independent on the atomic number of the target material (so it doesn't matter if it is Carbon or Tungsten), only the intensity does. Heavier elements are produce more X-rays per incident electrons than ligher ones. So no, C14 does not emit only low energy X-rays. It will emit X-rays of up to 156keV (for comparison, almost all XRF devices on the market are limited to 50keV amongst others for safety reasons, dental X-rays are usually up to 70keV, even computer tomography devices top out at 140keV.

Don't get me wrong, I would love for this to work, getting rid of nuclear waste and powering all kinds of devices for basically forever sounds fantastic ... unfortunately I don't think it pans out.
Assuming these guys aren't out for a quick scam like 95% of the other "free energy / perpetuum mobile / disproving Einstein or Quantum Mechanics" types out there, maybe they are on to something ... in which case they need to provide extraordinary proof, as contradicting known physics is an extraordinary claim. I'll be glad to be proven wrong though, that's how science works. Not via glitzy youtube videos and press releases though, which is all I've seen from these guys so far.

Edit:
I've just seen the link you posted. Note though that the quote says

Consequently, bremsstrahlung radiation is generally not a concern for lower energy beta emitters such as carbon-14 and sulfur-35, but the higher energy betas from phosphorus-32 can produce significant bremsstrahlung, especially when passing through shielding materials such as lead.

Generally, radioactive samples used in labs, especially university labs which need to consider reckless students, are of low activity. The video linked in my first post showed a shopping webpage where one could buy samples with ~5mCi of activity, which corresponds to about 0.25g. I found an (old) safety manual from the ESRF, the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility (a particle accelerator lab) limiting the use of C14 standards to a maximum activity of 3.7 MBq, or 3.7*10^6 decays per second. Which corresponds to 0.000023g of pure C14. A university lab will definitely not have C14 blocks of 1kg weight lying around, so they have no need to care about the X-rays created by these tiny samples.

[Vertigo 7]

Don't get me wrong, I would love for this to work, getting rid of nuclear waste and powering all kinds of devices for basically forever sounds fantastic ... unfortunately I don't think it pans out.
Assuming these guys aren't out for a quick scam like 95% of the other "free energy / perpetuum mobile / disproving Einstein or Quantum Mechanics" types out there, maybe they are on to something ... in which case they need to provide extraordinary proof, as contradicting known physics is an extraordinary claim. I'll be glad to be proven wrong though, that's how science works. Not via glitzy youtube videos and press releases though, which is all I've seen from these guys so far.

I'm completely onboard with you there. I've seen a lot of claims of perpetual motion and so forth that all ended up debunked.

All of this is hanging on the caveat "if", as I stated in my very first word of my very first post on this topic. I want to see a working model, I want to see proof of this in action, and not just a claim. I'd love to hear from the folks at Cambridge and wherever else it was they ran the proof of concept tests. I mean, these PhDs are putting their own reputations on the line, and could potentially face criminal charges if they're trying to run a scam. I would hope that's not the case.

[Vertigo 7]

@mailo

I'd love to get your take on this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9fgf0bLuDFk
This is a presentation given by Professor Tom Scott at the University of Bristol on this topic.

He does go into a lot of detail of a detector used to measure radioactivity of waste tanks as an anecdote to this for about the first 30 minutes. But interestingly, he discusses how they've managed to harvest x-ray and gamma radiation rather simply to generate a small current to power sensors. But afterwards he goes on into using beta radiation from c14 to generate electricity and how they're producing the diamonds using a closed loop CVD system to grow c14 diamonds or irradiate c13 diamonds.

I did notice, however, the ambitions outlined here are limited to small devices that can be powered by a standard watch sized battery, but he did demonstrate a working model.

[Mailo]

I just finished watching the video. You are correct, here he only talks about small batteries far removed from something that could power a smart phone ... though he did say at least once "could power a smart phone", but strangely without context of how actually.
Some notes:
- My PhD advisor would have kicked him out of the building ... showing graphs without axis labels was a big no-no ... which this guy does exclusively. On one graph he even says he was not allowed to show labels ... then don't show the graph, because it becomes meaningless. Using graphs without labels, I can "prove" anything as well.
- He claims to have invented the first real time dose measuring device? I highly doubt that, that is decades old technology. He might have built the first one using a diamond, but that's it.
- He claims to have invented the first gamma voltaic device ... sounds unlikely, but I did not spent too much time researching this. There are publications going back to at least 2011 on this though, and not by him.
- The calculations on the previous page of this thread seem to be somewhat on point. His "commercial" example says 5.2g for a 50 μW battery .. if that scales up, we're back to a 20kg battery for a smart phone using 200000 μW.
- He does admit at one point that diamonds can burn, but then proceeds to ignore that throughout the rest of his presentation. I think one person in the audience asks a question at the end regarding this (the audio there is atrocious). His answer basically is "the amount of C14 is so low it doesn't matter". Which is correct ... unless you plan on powering a smart phone or anything else using more than μW.
- His main focus seems to be commercialization, not research, which was rather off-putting to me. That might be a bias on my side, still it encourages over-promising much more than pure research, where a result of "this does not work" is a valid result.
- The working battery at the end is a rather low-powered one, coming in at ~1 μW ... keep in mind a lemon battery could give you about a thousand times that.
- Actual coin cells don't compare too badly to the "Diamond Coin Cells" shown here. According to Wikipedia, a Zinc-Air button cell has ~620mAh with a weight of 1.9g. The lighter of the two Diamond Coin Cells weighs 1.8g and produces 10.5 μW of power, meaning the normal coin could match this power for 12.1 years. The stats of the normal coin cell were from 2009, they might be better now.
- The video of the cloud chamber in the beginning was gorgeous ... I never saw one in action, I only evaluated pictures of one in a physics lab. By the way, at one point in the video there appears the text "We can see some V trails" ... which is antimatter creation in action What happens there is an high energy photon turning into an electron and a positron, which is the anti-matter equivalent to the electron. They are emitted in opposite directions still going in the direction the original photon was going ... leading to two trails forming a V shape. Sorry, elementary particle physicist geeking out

[Vertigo 7]

I could forgive him for not having the labels on the one graph. Besides, he was demonstrating the effectiveness of the detector as it passed through the tanks, not the specific amounts of radiation present which was tangential to the overall presentation. And if the government says he couldn't label them, I mean, it is what it is. I've been in a similar situation where I had access to every tech manual for the Mk15 Block 0/1/1A Phalanx CIWS except for 1 which was replaced with non-descriptive diagrams because that was the only tech manual that was classified. When I did get my hands on the manual, it was a whopping 5 pages long and didn't provide any additional context to the overall design and function of that component or the rest of the system. It was just some specific frequencies that were redacted from what I had in training. It was rather boring, actually =p

I would still say it's promising. Even if the power output is less than what's available on the market today, the fact that it'll run for well longer than any of us will live sounds great. Surely we could engineer smaller/portable electronics to run on low wattage. And it sounded like they're experimenting with mixing in other beta emitters (he hit on Tritium quite a bit) that will boost the power output significantly though at a much reduced half life, comparatively (years vs centuries). Still, a battery that lasts 12 years sounds freaking lovely to me.

[Mailo]

I would still say it's promising. Even if the power output is less than what's available on the market today, the fact that it'll run for well longer than any of us will live sounds great. Surely we could engineer smaller/portable electronics to run on low wattage. And it sounded like they're experimenting with mixing in other beta emitters (he hit on Tritium quite a bit) that will boost the power output significantly though at a much reduced half life, comparatively (years vs centuries). Still, a battery that lasts 12 years sounds freaking lovely to me.

Please note, those 12 years were from a regular coin cell you can currently buy at Walmart, NOT the Diamond Coin Cell.
He showed the data on two Diamond Coin Cells. I took the smaller one, as that had a similar weight to the commercially available Zinc-Air coin cell (from 2009), from which I found data on Wikipedia.
Diamond Coin Cell: Voltage 1.8V, Power 10.5μW, which means a current of 5.8μA.
Commercially available normal coin cell: a capacity of 620mAh, which means it can supply a 1mA current for 620 hours, or a 5.8μA current for 106286h, which comes out as 4429 days, or 12.1 years

[Tamina]

I can't count how many times someone showed up with the next "Super Battery" just to disappear after and never be heard again from. So I am extremly sceptical when those topics come up.

I have no idea about the stuff Mailo is talking about - I am reading his posts with much interest, though. So apart from the physical stuff, just logically speaking: If it scales up as they claim and is as financially efficient, why don't they build a reactor out of their super battery? Would be more cost efficient in production & operation, safer and they would make money directly, without selling a product to an intermediate chain link (costumer). Except of course they want to sell their product to an intermediate person holding the financial risk, as their battery is just not doing the math alone. At best a consumer who is unable to understand the financial risk, someone... like an average consumer... of a button cell.

[Vertigo 7]

I can't count how many times someone showed up with the next "Super Battery" just to disappear after and never be heard again from. So I am extremly sceptical when those topics come up.

I have no idea about the stuff Mailo is talking about - I am reading his posts with much interest, though. So apart from the physical stuff, just logically speaking: If it scales up as they claim and is as financially efficient, why don't they build a reactor out of their super battery? Would be more cost efficient in production & operation, safer and they would make money directly, without selling a product to an intermediate chain link (costumer). Except of course they want to sell their product to an intermediate person holding the financial risk, as their battery is just not doing the math alone. At best a consumer who is unable to understand the financial risk, someone... like an average consumer... of a button cell.

Well this seems to be garnering a much different type of attention than a Billy Mays special TV offer. Again, these are PhDs putting their reputations on the line. Especially in the case of Professor Scott, I would find it hard to believe he would jeopardize his career if this was just some scam or gimmick. He is a published physicist and teaches classes. Not saying he is infallible but I know more about him than I do about Mailo, meaning I can actually verify his credentials and establish his credibility and not just take his word for it. The only thing I can confirm about Mailo is that he's clearly highly intelligent. And that's fine, I'm not asking for his credentials.

As far as trying to build a reactor, I could only speculate but if they're going to build something large, they would be better off converting the closed loop steam generators into high energy voltaic capacitors and try to capture everything from alpha to gamma emissions from heavy metals. Converting the radiation to heat in order to produce steam to spin a turbine to generate electricity is horribly inefficient. I forget but it's somewhere in the 30% efficiency range due to a butt load of energy loss in the conversion processes. I don't believe the technology exists yet that would be capable of efficiently capturing and converting the various types of radiation at such high energy levels. If that comes about, I'm sure that'll be one of the first things it's used for.

This is attempting to make use of the graphite that's used in reactors as a moderator that helps the reactors efficiency. That process ultimately transforms the graphite carbon-12 into radioactive carbon-14 (which has drastically lower energy output than say Uranium-235) which eventually has to be replaced and disposed of. But directly converting the beta radiation from the carbon-14 to electricity would be incredibly efficient, possibly in the 90% range.

The cost saving idea is that the governments will pay to have some of their nuclear waste stock pile taken off of their hands. So it's a give/take kind of deal; the expense of production being offset by the funding to make use of the spent graphite.

Anywho, not saying you need to invest in this. Hell, I'm not going to invest. I'm just excited about the potential of this. Who knows where this may lead?

[Mailo]

I can't count how many times someone showed up with the next "Super Battery" just to disappear after and never be heard again from. So I am extremly sceptical when those topics come up.

I have no idea about the stuff Mailo is talking about - I am reading his posts with much interest, though. So apart from the physical stuff, just logically speaking: If it scales up as they claim and is as financially efficient, why don't they build a reactor out of their super battery? Would be more cost efficient in production & operation, safer and they would make money directly, without selling a product to an intermediate chain link (costumer). Except of course they want to sell their product to an intermediate person holding the financial risk, as their battery is just not doing the math alone. At best a consumer who is unable to understand the financial risk, someone... like an average consumer... of a button cell.

Well this seems to be garnering a much different type of attention than a Billy Mays special TV offer. Again, these are PhDs putting their reputations on the line. Especially in the case of Professor Scott, I would find it hard to believe he would jeopardize his career if this was just some scam or gimmick. He is a published physicist and teaches classes. Not saying he is infallible but I know more about him than I do about Mailo, meaning I can actually verify his credentials and establish his credibility and not just take his word for it. The only thing I can confirm about Mailo is that he's clearly highly intelligent. And that's fine, I'm not asking for his credentials.

While you could probably find my credentials on here (I think I posted a link to my PhD thesis way back when somewhere on this forum), you don't need to, I gave you all of my calculations, you could reproduce them yourself.
As to the "no PhD would put his reputation on the line like this" ... how many people with PhDs were working at Theranos just as one example? Funnily enough, I can't find the number in a quick online search, only "At that time, the company experienced exuberant growth, reaching a total of 700 employees, including renowned PhD researchers." Also, the Dean of the School of Engineering at Stanford University, Channing Robertson, was on the board of Theranos, and that's pretty far up the academic pole. Much higher than a professor in Bristol University.
Sometimes, cash trumps academic reputation, which, while nice, doesn't pay very well at all.
(edit)That's why in science pretty much any result only counts if multiple independent groups have reproduced and validated it. One guy/group could always be running a scam, make an honest mistake, have a fluke defect in a measuring instrument giving off spurious data, etc. Especially in the times of today where fake research reports are used for political and monetary gains (looking at you, tobacco and oil industry, you are not the only ones, but you started this crap), independent verification is of even higher importance than before. Always look at what other experts in the field say if you hear a wild claim. Also look at where the funding comes from, in the case of oil and tobacco, they didn't even try to hide it.(/edit)

But directly converting the beta radiation from the carbon-14 to electricity would be incredibly efficient, possibly in the 90% range.

Where did you get the value of 90% from? All I found in various papers were values between 9-10% (and a paper claiming the theoretical upper limit when using Tritium and Silicon as materials is only 8%).

The cost saving idea is that the governments will pay to have some of their nuclear waste stock pile taken off of their hands. So it's a give/take kind of deal; the expense of production being offset by the funding to make use of the spent graphite.

This one I haven't really fully understood. So the government has a pile of radioactive stuff that is expensive to store and impossible to get rid of. Then it will pay someone to take it away, enrich the concentration of the radioactive substance, and distribute that enriched part to the general public, which can easily remove the radioactive material from the device (by burning it). Also, what happens to the leftovers of the enriching process? They will still contain significant amounts of C14, making them radioactive as well ... which means they need to be stored safely.
If it is no problem to spread the C14 over the world, why is there actually a problem in storing or getting rid of the nuclear waste in the first place?

[Len5]

If it scales up as they claim and is as financially efficient, why don't they build a reactor out of their super battery?

Maybe selling the batteries to manufacturers of electrical devices is more profitable.
To me it seems to be way more convenient and functional if every electrical device has this kind of a battery. It reduces the need for power lines and cables.

[Observe]

Throw away the cell phone. Problem solved.

[Alan Phipps]

Or, plug your cell phone into the car socket to charge your electric car and not the other way around - as no doubt somebody in marketing will claim can be done.

The thing is that if this works and is as good/affordable as stated then it will become 'a thing' and be in pretty general use as well - at least until something better is discovered and comes along. Of course if the reality is far less advantageous or the downsides are prohibitive then it will sink without a trace except maybe in niche applications where the downsides matter less than reliable power lifetime.

[brucewarren]

If there is as much power left in US nuclear waste as some claim then it begs the question - why doesn't the US reprocess it the way
several other nations do?

It's not a trivial task, but if the UK and several other nations can manage to do it safely it seems a little odd that the US does not.

[Vertigo 7]

If there is as much power left in US nuclear waste as they claim then it begs the question - why doesn't the US reprocess it the way
several other nations do?

It's not a trivial task, but if the UK and several other nations can manage to do it safely it seems odd that the US can not.

Cause they're f'n lazy. There's a loooooooong history of the US screwing the pooch on nuclear waste going as far back as the Manhattan Project, including doing absolutely retarded things like loading it up in oil drums with concrete and tossing the barrels into the ocean just off the coast of New Jersey and then strafing the barrels with machine guns when they floated instead of sinking. And then the politicians get involved and make policy decisions on this stuff with no expertise applied.

Back in the 70's or 80's the US started construction on a centralized storage and disposal facility in the middle of nowhere in Nevada. This facility was designed to deal with the waste from all of our reactors across the country and then some and one senator from Nevada blocked that facility from going live saying that it was "smarter to leave it where it is". Now it sits there unused while every reactor is just stacking its waste in the cooling pools which were not designed for long term storage. They're a major catastrophe waiting to happen, like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima ... r_disaster X 10. This is a thing that US is likely not going to do anything about until it's too late.