Coin-sized nuclear 3V battery with 50-year lifespan enters mass production
Attention Required! | Cloudflare
The company plans to launch a more powerful single-watt version this year
If it’s a small battery intended to be used a long time, pretty much a guarantee these are going to end up in the general landfill waste stream.
I wonder how much contamination one of these will cause if it goes through a waste incinerator. If they have 50 Curies of activity, that’s more than a million times what’s in a smoke detector.
They’re probably going to be used in medical devices like pacemakers. So they’ll be in the land but not necessarily a landfill
Eh, it's likely not an issue. There's radioactive material in water runoff and all kinds of places. A small amount is not noticeable. Even in the worst case, these aren't an issue. If they can be near your body 24/7 without causing problems, them getting spread out into even smaller pieces can only be less significant than that.
People are too scared by radiation. It usually isn't an issue and you're constantly interacting with it. It's only in very rare circumstances where you need to worry.
They decay into copper, which can be easily recycled.
Yeah, but it’s radioactive nickel-63 for many decades until it all decays.
There's radioactive and then there's radioactive. It beta decays with particles that would only penetrate 5 cm of air or .01 cm of tissue.
You could get a thousand of these batteries, grind them up into a powder, explode them in a crowded place as an improvised dirty bomb...and you would still cause less harm than if you did the same with countless chemicals you can buy at the hardware store.
There are many forms of radiation. Something like this going into a landfill is perfectly safe.
And that nickel-63 can be recycled to make new batteries.
Yeah, that’s how the battery works.
Which is why your suggestion of simply recycling copper won’t work. You don’t have copper, you have a radioactive alloy.
Not after 50 or so years. Then it’s just non-radioactive copper.
Patience is a virtue (and profitable!)
A half life of 100 years means that after 100 years half of it is copper while the other half is still nickel 63. It does NOT mean that after half that time all of it will be copper
That’s not how radioactive half lives work.
Learn about radioactive decay and what half life means.
Prove it. Prove that the manufacturers claim that it can be recycled after it degrades into copper are false.
Your link doesn’t do that.
It can indeed be recycled after it degrades into copper, but it will take far longer that you claim for it to do so.
The half life of nickel-63 is 101.2 years which means that after 101.2 years approximately half of the core will have degraded to copper, then after 101.2 more years approximately half of the remaining will have degraded, leaving approximately a quarter, then after 101.2 more years there'll be approximately one eighth, and so on. This is how radioactive decay works.
The battery, they claim, functions for 50 years or so, which is probably because after 50 years the radioactive decay has slowed by over 25% (can't be bothered to work out the actual amount but its at least this much). This 50 years doesn't mean that all the radioactive material has decayed, just that a portion of it significant enough to render the battery dead/less effective/etc.
There’s a lot of radioactive thorium to be found in coal ash leftover from power plants. I am not worried about this.