Ain’t the modern world grand? pl
RSS- Supreme Court oral arguments to be heard on April 25 about presidential immunity for official acts
- Nasa’s Voyager-1 sends usable data from deep space
- The Wondrous Oak
- Three Seas Summit: Vilnius 2024
- Tit for tat until it all goes boom
- Deadly H5N1 avian influenza strain detected on mainland Antarctica
- “BYD is launching its next-gen Blade EV battery soon with more range and even lower cost”
- Iran launches air attacks on Israel
- ISW on the developing Ukrainian defense industrial base and Russias strikes on the Ukrainian energy infrastructure
- Britain? Kaput! By Walrus.
I love the way media releases stories about things that are “under development” as if they are today’s reality. I see nothing in that article that assures me that the product will, in fact, ever reach the market, and much that leads me to believe that this is another “cold fusion” device. I will believe this device is real when I see it actually powering an automobile for the second year.
Bill H
Whaddaya think? Is Musk just another nut?
Some of his things have been stellar. (Pun unintended, but I’ll keep it.) They don’t talk about his flops, but there have been some. No great man, and he is, has an unblemished track record.
What I love about this is that it’s based on bad old, highly energetic nuclear waste. There is no way that stuff ain’t good for something. Reaching through my assortment of quite fashionable hats, made of metallic foil, I find the one that represents “why haven’t they buried all that terrible nuclear waste, yet -?”
I think it is a great idea, they should open a factory close to a source of radioactive waste, say Chernobyl. Kidding aside the University of Bristol was focusing on Carbon-14, which has a 40 year half-life. Intriguing idea though. The French language write-up says they expect a commercial production within two years.
https://www.ouest-france.fr/high-tech/une-start-up-invente-des-batteries-en-diamant-qui-pourraient-durer-jusqu-a-28-000-ans-6959212
Pre-IPO puff piece or the real deal? So much to like, so much still to be proven.
More info – company based in San Francisco, but uses University of Bristol development. How did the UK lose control of this?
https://ndb.technology/
Lets keep in mind the day they issued this.
April 1 notwithstanding, it appears they haven’t lost control of the patent. Arkenlight holds it. Here’s their take on NDB’s claims. Some of NDB’s claims are quite shaky. Powering things like phones and cars particularly so, but there’s some truth in it.
https://newatlas.com/energy/arkenlight-nuclear-diamond-batteries/
I do my layman’s best to understand the article you have linked to, and the interview with the people at Bristol who invented this embedded within the article you have linked to.
The Bristolians themselves consider this to be a microbattery providing micro amounts of power to tiny little applications where micro is all that is needed. They don’t see how this could be scaled up to macro battery banks providing macro amounts of power to a heavy-user machine like a car.
But they anticipate a world where many tiny little sensors, micro”brains”, etc. will only need micro amounts of electricity to do what they do. And huge networks of these tiny batteries and their tiny battery users will have a huge diffuse ability to do huge overall spread-out things. So they expect to eventually do a huge business with huge numbers of tiny applications, and the non-ability to power electric cars is not a problem for what they are planning to do.
Have I understood this correctly?
Nano Diamond Battery is a private company based in San Francisco. They are aggressively looking for partners so I would have to wonder why Musk hasn’t bought them out by now. Is the USA or other governments willing to sell nuclear waste? They say their batteries are tamper proof but I think if one can make it, someone else could take it apart, I’m figuring this stuff is dangerous as all get out.
I’ll hope it’s feasible as it would solve a lot of our energy problems.
The Pioneer (10 & 11) and Voyager probes used this technology:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioisotope_thermoelectric_generator
The technology is old but, this version has better technology.
The Bidenistas will never allow anything that takes profits away from their donor base so this technology will probably go away.
Another failed (?) technology was this competitor to Bidenista donor class:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloom_Energy_Server
IMHO, we lose one third of the energy generate by using an obsolete power grid, we should try to fix that problem first.
forgot to add this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_modular_reactor
The article linked-to describes these Bloom Boxes as already working and already being a viable enough technology that any problems they have would be worth trying to solve. If this technology is that potentially good, then Bidenistas can only suppress it as long as they remain in power, and “otheristas” may well lift the suppression and get out of the Bloom Boxes way at some later time.
The article mainly talked about them using methane, though the first sentence or two hinted that solid biomass fuel could be used. If that is true, then this technology could be readjusted just enough to run profitably on dry bio-mass . . . wood chips, wood pellets, high-starch high-oil low-protein corn kernels, corn cob pellets, etc. And if that could be done, then the CO2 release from solid biomass fuel-friendly Bloom Boxes should not be a problem because it would be going back into the same atmosphere from which the biomass source-plants pulled it out of to begin with. The CO2 would be the “same” CO2 going round and round as part of the carbon cycle, not “net-increase-causing” CO2 from ancient fossil carbon thrown back into the game after having been benched for hundreds of millions of years.
Or have I misunderstood what I read?
Quite a shock here, EVs to be phased out by 2035, too much environmental cost:
https://www.electronicdesign.com/markets/automotive/article/21157722/epa-proposes-phasing-out-all-batterypowered-evhevs-by-2035?fbclid=IwAR3PubsiTaquOBAmvLPxCFznboqESN2wwqk4MdxIFzLTyIC29Izb6Nwb2Vc
Well, it is April 1st, who knows.
This reads like a poker-faced April Fool’s story to me, though I could be wrong about that.
Some interesting background on wiki for “diamond battery” and “betavoltaic device” of which this appears to be a type. It uses a beta emitter (said to be Carbon 14 isotope from reactor moderators) to generate a current across a semiconductor junction. Wiki says “low energy density” but doesn’t give any indication of actual numbers. I guess the “diamond” in question must effectively capture the entire beta emissions.
Though it’s also April 1 so there’s that.
pretty sure april 1 joke