We have an insatiable need for energy. When we need to operate something that cannot be simply plugged in, power is going to have to come from a battery, and the battle for a better battery is being fought in labs all over the world. Hold that thought for a moment.
Nuclear waste — it's the radioactive detritus from nuclear power plants that no one wants stored near their homes or even transported through their towns. The nasty stuff is toxic, dangerous, it takes thousands of years to fully degrade, and we keep making more of it.
Now a company from California, NDB, believes it can solve both of these problems. They say they've developed a self-powered battery made from nuclear waste that can last 28,000 years, perfect for your future electric vehicle or iPhone 1.6 x 104. Producing its own charge—rather than storing energy created elsewhere—the battery is made from two types of nano-diamonds, rendering it essentially crash-proof if used in cars or other moving objects. The company also says its battery is safe, emitting less radiation than the human body.
NDB has already completed a proof of concept and plans to build its first commercial prototype once its labs have resumed operations post-COVID.
Waste not
NDB's battery as it might look as a circuit-board component
Image source: NDB
The nuclear waste from which NDB plans to make it batteries are reactor parts that have become radioactive due to exposure to nuclear-plant fuel rods. While not considered high-grade nuclear waste—that would be spent fuel—it's still very toxic, and there's a lot of it in a nuclear generator. According to the International Atomic Energy Agency, the "core of a typical graphite moderated reactor may contain 2000 tonnes of graphite." (A tonne is one metric ton, or about 2,205 lbs.)
The graphite contains the carbon-14 radioisotope, the same radioisotope used by archaeologists for carbon dating. It has a half-life of 5,730 years, eventually transmuting into nitrogen 14, an anti-neutrino, and a beta decay electron, whose charge piqued NDB's interest as a potential means of producing electricity.
NDB purifies the graphite and then turns it into tiny diamonds. Building on existing technology, the company says they've designed their little carbon-14 diamonds to produce a significant amount of power. The diamonds also act as a semiconductor for collecting energy, and as a heat sink that disperses it. They're still radioactive, though, so NDB encases the tiny nuclear power plants within other inexpensive, non-radioactive carbon-12 diamonds. These glittery lab-made shells serve as, well, diamond-hard protection at the same time as they contain the carbon-14 diamonds' radiation.
NDA plans to build batteries in a range of standard—AA, AAA, 18650, and 2170—and custom sizes containing several stacked diamond layers together with a small circuit board and a supercapacitor for collecting, storing, and discharging energy. The end result is a battery, the company says, that will last a very long time.
NDB predicts that if a battery is used in a low-power context, say, as a satellite sensor, it could last 28,000 years. As a vehicle battery, they anticipate a useful life of 90 years, much longer than any single vehicle will last—the company anticipates that one battery could conceivably provide power for one set of wheels after another. For consumer electronics such as phones and tablets, the company expects about nine years of use for a battery.
The company's prospective investor video explains their process in greater detail.
Maybe a very big deal
"Think of it in an iPhone," NDB's Neel Naicker tells New Atlas. "With the same size battery, it would charge your battery from zero to full, five times an hour. Imagine that. Imagine a world where you wouldn't have to charge your battery at all for the day. Now imagine for the week, for the month… How about for decades? That's what we're able to do with this technology."
NDB anticipates having a low-power commercial version on the market in a couple of years, followed by a high-powered version in about five. If all goes as planned, NDB's technology could constitute a major step forward, providing low-cost, long-term energy to the world's electronics and vehicles. The company says, "We can start at the nanoscale and go up to power satellites, locomotives."
The company also expects their batteries to be competitively priced compared to current batteries, including lithium ion, and maybe even cheaper once they're being produced at scale—owners of nuclear waste may even pay the company to take their toxic problem off their hands.
One company's waste becomes another's diamonds.
Humanity's huge appetite for energy has led scientists to attempt harnessing nuclear fusion, the power inherent to the sun and other stars. Now, a new study from Princeton physicists found a method that can aid the safe creation of fusion on Earth, potentially leading to a limitless supply of electricity.
Fusion reactors work by combining light elements like hydrogen into plasma – a superhot and charged state of matter. During the fusion process, two lighter atomic nuclei are combined into a heavier nucleus, releasing energy.
The resulting plasma can be employed into generating a tremendous amount of energy but the fusion facilities, called tokamaks, face the hard task of trying to keep impurities out of reactions. These can lower the efficiency of the fusion, while the goal of the scientists is to keep the plasma as hot as it can be, actually ten times hotter than the sun's core. This maximizes fusion reactions and leads to the creation of the greatest amount of electricity.
What scientists from the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) discovered is a way to inject boron powder into plasma, allowing for greater control, lowering greenhouse gases, and getting rid of long-term radioactive waste.
PPPL physicist Robert Lunsford was the lead author of the paper, published in Nuclear Fusion, that outlined the accomplishment.
"The main goal of the experiment was to see if we could lay down a layer of boron using a powder injector," said Lunsford in a press release. "So far, the experiment appears to have been successful."
Michio Kaku: Energies of the Future
The method devised by Lunsford and his team uses boron to prevent tungsten in tokamak walls from interacting with the plasma. The tungsten can cause the plasma particles to cool, lowering reaction efficiency. The so-called boronization of surfaces that face the plasma is easier to accomplish with the powder, as it's something that can be done while the machine is already running. This can allow the fusion device to be an uninterrupted source of energy. "This is one way to get to a steady-state fusion machine," remarked Lunsford.
The powder method is also cheaper and less dangerous than the current practice of injecting potentially explosive diborane gas into the plasma.
The scientists envision further investigating the uses of boron powder, optimistic that this approach can allow them to understand the behavior of plasma in unprecedented depth.
PPPL physicist Robert Lunsford.
CREDIT: Elle Starkman / PPPL Office of Communications
This just-announced grain spirit is called "ATOMIK," an excellent name given its source. It's made from water and rye from the Chernobyl exclusion zone in the Ukraine. This is an area surrounding the ill-fated nuclear plant that's considered so radioactive that no one is supposed to live there. It's currently a wildlife refuge in which visible mutations are less common than one might expect. Environmental scientist Jim Smith of the University of Portsmouth and his colleagues are making a statement by introducing their beverage: Some areas we've ruined can recover given enough time. The same point could be made for the effect of climate change — eventually, the Earth will survive. It's less clear that we will.
What’s it taste like?
Image source: Chernobyl Spirits Company
There's only one bottle of ATOMIK so far, but the company producing it, Chernobyl Spirits Company, expects to distill 500 of them by the end of the year. The liquor is said to have a fruity taste and work well in a martini. As a grain spirit, ATOMIK is a bit more flavorful than commercially produced vodka. The company is shooting for a more refined version of samagon, a homemade vodka brewed since the 12th century in the villages of Ukraine, Belarus, Poland, and Russia, using either potatoes or grains.
Checking the label
Image source: Chernobyl Spirits Company
The Chernobyl disaster threw into the air upwards of 100 radioactive elements. Some of it, such as highly carcinogenic iodine-131, has a short half-life, and is long gone. Other dangerous isotopes last for far longer and are still present. Strontium-90 and cesium-137 have just about reached their half life date, and so remain at about 50% potency. Others, like plutonium-239, with a half life of 24,000 years, aren't going anywhere.
Still, swaths of the exclusion zone are much like anywhere else, at least in terms of radioactivity — their plants and animals may still contain genetic surprises. As Smith teold IFL Science, "Natural radiation worldwide varies — if you're living at high altitudes, you get more cosmic radiation. For most of the exclusion zone, the doses that you would get living there are within that range of variability of radiation doses worldwide." Some areas immediately around the ex-power plant remain uninhabitable. The "Red Forest" is still unsuitable for a picnic, for example.
The water in ATOMIK is mineral water from a deep aquifer about 10 km south of Chernobyl which the company believes is located too far down to have become contaminated: "We're currently trying to work out exactly how many thousands of years old this water is, but it definitely wasn't anywhere near the surface in 1986." They describe it as being pure and of high quality, similar to the waters of the limestone aquifer beneath the Champagne region in France, as well as the south of England.
The rye in ATOMIK was harvested from the main exclusion zone and was tested for the presence of radiocaesium. The isotope was present in levels well below the conservative Urainium maximum. The levels of radiostrontium, however, exceeded the legal limit. Nonetheless, when the final grain spirit was tested, no radioactivity at all was found in the beverage.
What's the point?
Some current residents of the Chernobyl exclusion zone
Image source: Chernobyl Spirits Company
Chernobyl Sprits company has a larger message than simply creating a provocative new refreshment. The want authorities to reconsider the exclusion zone now that so much time has passed since the Chernobyl meltdown:
More than thirty years after the accident, we believe that what these areas need most is economic development and management of the unique wildlife resource the abandoned areas represent.
In October 2017, a massive cloud of nuclear radiation floated over Europe, releasing into the atmosphere between 30 and 100 times more radiation than that of the Fukushima accident in Japan in 2011. The source of the leak has remained a mystery, as no nation or organization has yet claimed responsibility. Now, a new study claims to have traced the source of the leak to the Mayak nuclear facility in southern Russia.
The nuclear leak was first recorded on October 2, 2017, when a team of Italian scientists recorded unusually high levels of a radioactive isotope called ruthenium-106 over Milan. Hours later, scientists in the Czech Republic, Austria, Norway, and, soon after, five other countries issued alerts after detecting high levels of ruthenium-106. It soon became clear that a nuclear accident had occurred somewhere in Eurasia — analyses of the ruthenium-106 suggested it was released "at an advanced stage in the reprocessing of nuclear fuel," says the new study. This claim was supported by the fact that ruthenium-106 was the only radioactive substance recorded.
Fortunately, the radiation wasn't dangerous to humans. The Institute for Radiological Protection and Nuclear Safety wrote in 2017 that the "concentration levels of ruthenium-106 in the air that have been recorded in Europe and especially in France are of no consequence for human health and for the environment," but it added that conditions could be dangerous close to the accident site.
The question was: where's that?
Based on weather patterns, an early culprit was Russia's Mayak nuclear complex, the site of the notorious 1957 Kyshtym nuclear disaster. But Russian officials denied an accident at Mayak, suggesting instead that the radiation came from a satellite whose radionuclide battery had burned up upon reentering the atmosphere. This "satellite hypothesis" fell flat after no space organization reported losing any satellites. The source of the leak was never determined.
The new study — published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences — aims to close the case. Using more than 1,300 measurements from 176 measuring stations in 29 countries, scientists traced the source of the accident to the southern Urals region of Russia, where lies the Mayak nuclear complex.
"According to detection time series, a back-trajectory analysis, and chemical considerations, the Mayak nuclear complex in southern Urals should be considered as a likely candidate for the release," the study concludes.
This figure shows the countries in Europe that detected ruthenium-106.
Masson et al.
The study also notes how European countries have established a monitoring network designed to detect radionuclides, due in part to concerns resulting from the 1986 Chernobyl disaster.
"Today most of these European networks are connected to each other via the informal 'Ring of Five' (Ro5) platform for the purpose of rapid exchange of expert information on a laboratory level about airborne radionuclides detected at trace levels," it says. "In October 2017, an unprecedented release of ruthenium-106 into the atmosphere was the subject of numerous detections and exchanges within the Ro5."
State-owned Russian nuclear corporation Rosatom denied the findings of the recent study.
"We maintain that there have been no reportable events at any Rosatom-operated plants or facilities," Rosatom said. "Both the national regulator and experts from an independent international inquiry inspected the Mayak facility back in 2017 and found nothing to suggest that the ruthenium-106 isotope originated from this site, nor found any traces of an alleged accident, nor found any evidence of local staff exposure to elevated levels of radioactivity."
