Can a bigger brain than mine help me out with something?
There's these new diamonds, see. They're radioactive. So to stop the radioactivity from seeping out, they put the radioactive diamonds in ones that aren't radioactive.
Each of these diamonds spits out very little power individually per day, but they will continue to spit out precisely that much power for the next 5,000 years.
How many of these would you need in series to produce as much power as an AA? Or even a single watt of electricity?
Blake Stewart
bout tree fiddy
Ryan Flores
lol what? it depends on how you harness the radiation this
Jaxson Powell
I did a quick Google search. In order to equate the nominal energy a 1.5V AA outputs, you'd need to know the resistance you have. If we assume they're both 1 Ohm, then you'd need about 1,200 diamonds. To put it simply, a shitton.
Xavier Myers
This all sounds too good to be true. What's the catch?
Jayden James
and I suppose despite being safer to handle than a banana, thousands and thousands of nuclear diamonds would be rather unsafe to be around.
Well, fuck.
Owen Brown
How are they generating electricity from it? You can't just magically turn gamma rays or whatever into electrons.
Parker Martinez
Are you suggesting it would be unsafe to be around thousands and thousands of bananas?
Carson Evans
First - Let's define the groundwork.
There's a difference between 'energy' and 'power' right - The AA battery has a set amount of energy, stored in the form of chemical energy, which is converted to electrical energy. The rate of this conversion is the 'power'.
The 'power' that a battery can put out is hard to define. You can draw a hell of a lot of power from a battery, but the quicker you drain it, the less efficient it is. So if you double the power draw, you /more than half/ the amount of time that you can sustain that draw before the battery dies. And since the 'wasted' power turns to heat, there is a thermal limit on power draw as well.
With the Diamond battery, the amount of power is more or less set, and the power is stored as mass, which is converted to (electrical) energy.
Even a reasonably small diamond battery probably has a lot more energy to give over its total lifespan than any AA battery (energy content). The power output however, is obviously much smaller.
But to answer the question quantitatively, we need some figures on these diamond batteries, and also to decide on a 'standard' for AA batteries to compare it to.
PS: The hardness of diamond isn't a foolproof protective shell. Diamonds are very easy to shatter afterall!
Joshua Reyes
>C-14 has been chosen as the source of radioactivity mainly because it emits a short-range radiation which is easily absorbed by any solid. Such a radiation will be effectively absorbed by the diamond (one of the hardest solids on earth) which will not only increase the quantity of current generated but will also prevent dangerous radiation from leaking out of the battery.[9]
>C-14 undergoes Beta decay giving non-radioactive Nitrogen and high energy Beta particles .
>These Beta particles having an average energy of 50keV on inelastic collisions with other carbon atoms create electron-hole pairs which then contribute to electric current. This statement can be restated in terms of band theory saying that due to high energy of the Beta particles, electrons in valance band of carbon crystal jump to its conduction band leaving behind holes in the valance band where electrons were earlier present. [11] [12]
Hudson Thompson
They're radioactive diamonds that just output electrons. So, yeah, it depends on the resistance if you want to know the voltage like said.
Wyatt Reed
well, bananas are minutely radioactive thanks to the potassium. I guess I am saying if you sat 5,000 bananas in your basement for 30-40 years, that radiation might accumulate and seep out a little. Five thousand bananas worth of radiation emitted around the clock, every day, in your basement, causing things to decay and potentially making them radioactive too.
Betaboltaics. Turning radiation into electricity more directly than boiling water to turn a turbine.
Joshua Perez
so what, you wrap the diamond in copper wire and it'll produce a very small current?
Luke Peterson
>Can a bigger brain than mine help me out with something? Your problem with getting thru doors easily?
Michael Wright
not really, your tv, monitor, phone, the sun, your car, airplanes etc, etc all give off way more radiation. Also I fucking hate that kitcshy kickstar-esque music that every fucking video like this has, it drives me nuts. But ya unless they're making diamonds the size of houses, I can't see this going anywhere. They also aren't anywhere close to 100% efficient, it probably takes more energy to make one of those than they'd provide over the entirety of their 10000 year lifespan.
Its a neat idea I guess, just you'd need way more energy output to actually be useful
Christian Johnson
I looked up the stats, and if wikipedia is to be believed:
voltage – 2V estimated (Ni-63 1.9V measured) [4]
energy – 15.8 MJ over first 5,000 years or total of 4.4 kWhours [5]
prototype size – 10 x 10 x 0.5mm (plus electrodes) [6]
That means that a single battery produces (by converting 15.8MJ to Joules and 5,000 years to seconds and dividing the former by the latter)
0.00010020294 W average over the first 5,000 years.
Considering the average AA battery can handle 1W pretty easily, that means you'd need
1 / = 9979.74710123 of these 10x10x0.5mm batteries. That's neglecting the electrodes, mind you!
That's a 5m stack, 1x1cm wide of these things. On the bright side, it'll last 5,000 years. The battery will last probably 2-3 hours. Does that answer the question?
Sebastian Howard
Reasonably enough.
Your average A battery pumps out about 2 watts on its own. So likely, 20,000 of these little nuclear diamonds in series would equal one AA battery.
Kind of sad. You'd need a literal mountain of these things to power any common home appliance. But at least it could power them longer than a great many human civilizations have been around.
Hunter Martinez
Unironically this to be senpai
Easton Carter
Makes one wonder what the practical application is. What do we need running 5,000 years without maintenance?
Ryder Perry
>start video >hear usual libtard music and see childish cartoon
dropped
Brayden Thompson
Doing some other calculations. Google says your average washing machine uses between 500 and 1000 watts.
At nearly 10,000 diamonds per watt, that's nearly 10 million nuclear diamonds to run a washing machine forever.
Dish washers require between 1,000 and 2,400 watts to work. Presumably if you just run it once a day, you could just produce 2,400 watts an hour, have it collected into a battery and then that'll suffice. But, lets assume you want 2,400 watts on hand all day every day. In addition to running the washing machine forever.
24 million diamonds now.
Between 120-260 watts for the television. 2,600,000 more diamonds.
1,550 to run a microwave? 15,500,000.
A decent work computer? Another 1,500 watts or so. So 15 million more.
10 + 24 + 2.6 + 15.5 + 15 = around 68 million nuclear diamonds
This sort of thing might only really be super useful in some wealthy person's or American politician's nuclear fallout shelter.
Bentley Taylor
Security lights. Boobytraps. Watches. Wireless sensors and instruments in far off, hard to reach areas. Anything you need even a smidgin of power for where external power sources like solar panels or wind turbines are impractical or don't work.
You could even make them into little solid state noisemakers to navigate areas. Imagine if the sea flood had a bunch of these things stationed down there to chirp hypersonic waves.
Sebastian Edwards
I don't know of any building designed to last 5000 years or more. Most structures have design lives of less than 200 years. So security lights seems like it's not very practical.
I suppose if you're designing a Temple of Doom and really do need booby traps that can last up to 5000 years to kill archaeologists then there you go. However, most tombs are robbed within decades of being sealed.
How far off and hard to reach is it? RTGs normally fulfill this role for deep space probes and do so longer than most space programs last.
Maybe they'd work for some sort of relay holding position in interstellar space where there's not a ready source of solar power. Such as a radio relay to mitigate the cost of interstellar communication.
Dominic Edwards
There are radioactive batteries already out there. The produce about 50-350 nanowatts. A nokia takes about half a watt.Yeah.
Oh, and they are expensive as balls too.
Josiah Foster
Well you also need to consider that in wartime, possible conflicts, intervening with solar power or wind may be an issue. Drilling for oil and refining gasoline may be an issue.
So I could see these being a last ditch effort sort of blue chip commodity, or something. The sort of thing you reserve for emergency power in places you may not want to alert of your presence, but you still want electricity, necessitating burning things or making it look like civilization is/has been there.
Sebastian Bell
Why don't they make bulletproof vests etc. out of diamond if it is the hardest metal?
Elijah Thomas
that's not actually true, metallic hydrogen is the hardest metal. Unless you count metallic muonic hydrogen I guess, but I'm not sure that actually exists.
Gabriel Parker
It's way too heavy. 1 gram of diamond weighs 15 grams.
Kayden Morales
Is metallic hydrogen brittle or tough? Like, is it flexible or does it shatter like ceramic?
Grayson Robinson
>1 gram of diamond weighs 15 grams.
Every fucking time.
Nicholas Butler
No that's what we already use conventional radioactive batteries for Basically pacemakers, anything that expensive to replace the battery because in all other cases, a replaceable or rechargeable battery is a better option
Adam Wood
It would take like 10,000 carats to get 1 watt amplified output for electronics. The diamond would cost 50 million dollars to produce and the only reason its worth it is because it would take 50 million AA batteries to match its output over 1000+ years.
Basically this is only useful for satellites or deep space probes or space drones.
Justin Jenkins
That isotope of potassium could also be used for power generation in this same method and might be cheaper than a diamond battery.
Isaiah Morris
well it's made with lasers and diamond anvils, so it's gotta be pretty insanely tough.
Eli Hughes
They didn't publish anything about it, so we have no numbers.
This
Zachary Nelson
So I did some X Y Z calculations.
If you had a perfect cube shape of these diamonds in some sort of stack, 410 rows long, 410 rows wide, 410 rows tall, you'd have enough watts to run virtually all the appliances in your house at once, permanently.
Could just make it an even 500. 125 million radioactive diamonds.
It'd net you 6,250 watts. The diamonds themselves aren't that big, so they'd probably only take up an area a few meters across, tall and wide. Something the size of a large freezer, I suppose.
Thomas White
Can I get a 1000 year loan to finance that? That's a lot of money even if each diamond is only a penny apiece.
Ryan Martin
You couldn't run a single appliance with that
Brayden Stewart
...
Dylan Price
Well consider it this way:There's a reasonable argument to be made that making these could actually be sort of a pro-bono thing.
Think about it. We have nuclear fission reactors making tons and tons of nuclear waste every year. We otherwise have no use for this waste. It's going to get loose somehow. It needs to be dealt with. It needs to be rendered inert until the halflife is over. This means environmentally, we have industry pooping out stuff that we can't do anything with.
Logically speaking, if we had a business subsidized by the government, we could make this billions of tons of radioactive nuclear waste into these diamonds, until the process itself was able to power itself. It doesn't matter how much nuclear waste there is; millions of tons is literal billions upon billions of nanodiamonds. All of them pulsing, every second, to produce energy that isn't being used for anything.
Why is glass so cheap to create? Because we refined the process. The materials to do it are near ubiquitous. You can get the tools and supplies needed at any corner store. For the coming age, there's absolutely no reason why we couldn't replace common soda glass with diamond. We're moving on to mastering forming things with carbon anyway.
These diamonds wouldn't just be pretty, but 20,000 of them acting in concert is the same as an AA battery. When you have nothing else in your life, you still have a little power to do mechanical work.
Considering a block of them equal to an AA at maximum amprage would just be a cube of 35 * 35* 35s worth, and they last for 5,000 years, I think something like this would pay for itself many times over.
It would actually be in the nuclear industry and public sector's interest to make these things as cheap as real batteries. And if that happened, they should be cheap as fuck.
Cooper Moore
What appliances do you own that consume thousands of watts a minute, let alone a second?
Isaiah Ward
none of my appliacens can run on DC
Dylan Ross
XD UPVOTED SO GLAD WE ON LEDDIT RITE XD
Adrian Nelson
So essentially it just works as a good RTG? That diamond battery doesn't put out energy in the form of electricity, it releases energy in the form of thermal radiation. For which you'd need to make an RTG to get any power out of.
I'd think if you could make a quartz watch that pulls so little power it can run off one of these it would be nifty.
Luke Nguyen
you know such a thing as converters exist.
I mean.. dude. Once you have enough to run all the appliances of a standard American home every second, then every second they're not being used they can send electricity into the grid.
You can get AC from DC current. You can fill up batteries. You can passively electrolyze water to make hydrogen for a fuel cell vehicle.
Lucas Fisher
>>watts per minute >>watts per second
William Sanchez
The problem with making something like that as cheap as fuck is they would only sell them once, nobody would ever need a replacement, this no long term profit. Its in the interest of Jews to hold the technology back
Noah Taylor
What if the long term profit is free storage of radioactive material from more conventional nuclear powers stations and nuclear weapons?
Robert Morales
But what would happen if you crashed it into a 100mph while going 1000 walls per steel
Zachary King
The laws of energy conservation or whatever the fuck they're called dictate that you're always going to need more energy to produce a thing than the energy that thing will be able to produce ya dip.