nuclear batteries for drones

[khessels]

Here is an article on the msn about nuclear batteries being able to power a drone
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/startup-says-its-coin-sized-nuclear-battery-could-fly-drones-continuously/ar-AA1mWJm5?cvid=0d7ceacba2bc4735b07dc777a97c8ef4&ocid=winp2fptaskbarhover&ei=4#comments

Had to think about Dave, he might enjoy it

[Haenk]

https://www.betavolt.tech/359485-359485_645066.html

Well, I was about to post that

Diamonds included, no batteries needed for 50 years on your smartphone. Which somewhat collides with "This 15 x 15 x 5mm battery delivers 100 microwatts at 3 volts." I assume your smartphone draws more power than this, when being switched off.

I'll believe, when I see it as an actual product.

[BrokenYugo]

Quite plausible a typical quadcopter size box of nuclear battery could continuously power a coin sized drone, on a tether. Maybe they got upside down in the calculations and ran with it.

[SiliconWizard]

It's a big pile of bullshit of course.

But the idea of "nuclear batteries" is nothing new, it was actually trendy a few decades ago. There once even were implantable devices such as pacemakers with "nuclear" batteries. That didn't survive regulations for long.
Beyond the technical issues, I don't see this coming anytime soon for at least political and safety reasons.

[Andy Chee]

Russians don't particularly care about nuclear safety, so maybe they'll use them as drone charging stations?

[Infraviolet]

In the end it all comes down to the fact that a milliwatt, which seems easy to handle in an electrical device, corresponds to a terrifying number of sieverts when supplied in the form of ionising radiation, even if you had 100% efficient conversion of radiation to electrical power. And all the lead shielding in the world can't help if the device itself gets broken open by mechanical forces.

[msuffidy]

Someone slept on a Soviet RTG because it was warm and died.

[Andy Chee]

Someone slept on a Soviet RTG because it was warm and died.

You might be referring to the RTG that was cracked open in ex-Soviet state Georgia.  Here's a video of the training and retrieval of the core:

[Psi]

if you had enough of them you could have a drone that can sits idle for a few hours/days/weeks/months charging up its LiPo battery from the nuclear batteries and then can fly for 10min or so. 

I'm making the assumption that the future 1W version becomes available and that it's small enough to have at least 20 of them on the drone without getting too heavy. 
(They say the company plans to launch a 1W battery in 2025 but we don't know if this is something the same size/weight but 1W or something just that many times bigger than the current one so it outputs 1W.  The 1W version is also highly likely just BS to get investor money)

But it is a cool tech and will undoubtable get cheaper and higher power.
It may suffer the fate of being regulated out of existence by the govt if anyone finds a way to weaponize it somehow. Dirty bomb out of a shipping container full of them etc.. I'm not entirely sure how radioactive they are.

[msuffidy]

You might be referring to the RTG that was cracked open in ex-Soviet state Georgia.

That is probably it. There are cases of people taking apart chemo machines here and there like in South America where that were all decorating their homes with sparkles.

[Connecteur]

Unfortunately, when it comes to converting atomic energy into electricity, we are still living in the age of steam.
What's needed is a better way to convert the power of radioactivity into electrical potential directly.
I'm not sure if anyone has really tried to do that so far.

[msuffidy]

What's needed is a better way to convert the power of radioactivity into electrical potential directly.
I'm not sure if anyone has really tried to do that so far.

I heard there was maybe something being reviewed that was a one way collector for kinetic vibration. So without a temperature gradient, like electricity could be produced from heat period, but I guess it would cool down whatever had heat.

[SiliconWizard]

Solar panels.

[Psi]

[Neepa]

That is probably it. There are cases of people taking apart chemo machines here and there like in South America where that were all decorating their homes with sparkles.

Ahem...there was an Incident involving a decades old supposed to be decomissioned Cobalt-60 radiotherapy source in Bangkok, Thailand, at the beginning of the millenium.

Essentially a Cobalt-60 rod source found its way to a normal scrapyard due to corruption (what else) and the lead and stainless steel container around it was opened with an angle grinder.
The guys opening it found nothing inside as the little thumb sized rod had fallen out as they busted it open. The container itself was irradiated enough on the inside to cause radiation burns on their hands.

The Cobalt-60 rod source meanwhile was currently busy pumping 10 full Sieverts per hour into the scrap pile it had landed under. That was what the Thai agency measured once the people came in with radiation sickness into hospitals and the backtracing began.

"Into the Shadows" did a video on it.

[Gyro]

There have been several such 'incidents' over the years involving abandoned radiotherapy machines, such as the Ciudad Juárez cobalt-60 contamination incident, where the pellets ended up going to the steel foundry and ending up in rebar...  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ciudad_Ju%C3%A1rez_cobalt-60_contamination_incident.

Perhaps the saddest and most memorable of all was the Goiânia accident in Brazil, where they had kids playing with the powdered Caesium-137 salts because they produced a pretty glow!... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goi%C3%A2nia_accident

[Kleinstein]

Unfortunately, when it comes to converting atomic energy into electricity, we are still living in the age of steam.
What's needed is a better way to convert the power of radioactivity into electrical potential directly.
I'm not sure if anyone has really tried to do that so far.

There are alternative version for the conversion of the energy to electricity. Steam is only used in the large power plants. For the small scale there are 3 techniques that are/were used:
1)  thermoelectric conversion from a heat difference. This is the classic way, used in space probes.
2)  run the radioactive part rather hot and use a low bandgap photovoltaic cell to convert the thermal radiaton to electricity. AFAIR this is under investigation by NASA.
3) use a more high bandgap diode structure to directly convert the radiation to electricity. A solar cell (e.g. also normal Si types) also react to ionaizing radiation. With the high particle energy a single high energy electron can produce more than 1 electron / hole pair. AFAIR it takes something like 3-4 eV of energy to produce a pair. So the conversion is no very efficient, but still no that bad. This also works with alpha and gamma radiation, though alpha may be more prone to cause damage and needs to be right at the surface. Gamma has the problem if often just going through.

Also with the beta radiation it need the right configuration with a thin source film on top of the diode structure, just like they show from the Chinese site. With a more massive source a large part of the beta radiation would be absorbed in the source.

[iMo]

EEvblog should recall a "100uW@3V" challenge..
Like what could be designed with such a power, the most useful design could get a prize from Dave then..

[SiliconWizard]

Well, that's about 33µA@3V, one can power many kinds of low-power stuff with that. Watches of course, even pretty advanced ones, all sorts of sensors. We now have many low-power MCUs that can run at honorable speeds with this kind of current.

If the claim of 50 years is real, meaning continuous delivery of 100µW for 50 years, that would be nearly 15Ah, which is gigantic relative to the size of this battery. Sure the amount of power it can deliver is limited, and the technology wouldn't scale all that well as Dave pointed out, but that's still pretty impressive. Would this even run for 50 years straight without failing though? Allow me to have some doubts.

And of course, as I said before, I'm curious to see when authorities would allow any kind of "nuclear" battery outside of very niche and heavily regulated fields, at least outside of China. Let me know when that happens.

[Psi]

Well, that's about 33µA@3V, one can power many kinds of low-power stuff with that.

If you can store it for 1 day you can draw 1A for ~2.6 seconds.
If you can store it for 1 month you can draw 1A for ~80 seconds.

(Assuming 100% efficient storage conversion of course.)

[iMo]

A DIY nuke battery.. 

[Helio_Centra]

Even old slow charging phones need 2.5W to charge. Today's slow charging is 5W. So even if they can get 10,000 of those 100uW units in parallel without it exploding to produce 1W it won't yet charge a phone. A drone a whole different ballpark. Even the small ones can take 100W while climbing.

[CatalinaWOW]

It is fairly easy to do the math that makes this pretty obviously BS.  The only hard part is knowing how many carrier pairs a single beta decay generates.  That depends on the energy of the electron which could be found since they have identified the isotope of Nickel they are using, and on the capture efficiency of the structure which could be anything.  But it seems to me that it is very unlikely to get more than ten pairs per beta event.  That lets you trace back from current to numbers of beta decays, and with the known half life of the isotope and Avogadro's number you can get the mass of radioactive material.  Which gets ugly as you grow out of the microwatt power range. 

The half life of the nickel isotope is 96 years, so there will be substantial drop of in power production after 25 years, even if the conversion mechanism is totally unharmed by all those electrons plowing into it.

[Kleinstein]

Even with silicon PV cells the conversion from fast electrons to electricity is not that bad. When at university they were looking at PV cells with an electron beam. AFAIR it takes some 3-4 eV to generate an electron hole pair. With some 60 kV for the max. beta energy and thus maybe some 20 kV on average this would be some 5000 generated electrons. The claimed 8.x % conversion efficiency sounds at least reasonable.

[iMo]

The powering a watch would be pretty sexy with it, enabling a "forever sealed case" and the adjusting the time/date would be done remotely.. So a watch fully isolated of the external environment..
It cannot be a mechanical watch, as such a watch needs cleaning/oiling from time to time, so perhaps just an electronics with an LCD display. The backlight illumination of the display done with the residual battery radiation. Provided the electronics and LCD would be happy with, say, 4uA current, it could run for aprox 3x halftimes long..