Anything that is at least tangentially connected to the technology, social media platforms, informational technologies and tech policy.
1. English only
Title and associated content has to be in English.
2. Use original link
Post URL should be the original link to the article (even if paywalled) and archived copies left in the body. It allows avoiding duplicate posts when cross-posting.
3. Respectful communication
All communication has to be respectful of differing opinions, viewpoints, and experiences.
4. Inclusivity
Everyone is welcome here regardless of age, body size, visible or invisible disability, ethnicity, sex characteristics, gender identity and expression, education, socio-economic status, nationality, personal appearance, race, caste, color, religion, or sexual identity and orientation.
5. Ad hominem attacks
Any kind of personal attacks are expressly forbidden. If you can't argue your position without attacking a person's character, you already lost the argument.
6. Off-topic tangents
Stay on topic. Keep it relevant.
7. Instance rules may apply
If something is not covered by community rules, but are against lemmy.zip instance rules, they will be enforced.
!globalnews@lemmy.zip
!interestingshare@lemmy.zip
Icon attribution | Banner attribution
If someone is interested in moderating this community, message @brikox@lemmy.zip.
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
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.
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!)
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.
LOL I’m not your chemistry teacher, kid.
So you admit that you made claims which you could not back up with evidence.
Just as I thought
I’m not going to play chess with a pigeon.
All you had to do was back up your claim with evidence, and you couldn’t even do that.
No chess was involved here.
Edit: it’s not my fault that you’re a liar. Stop acting like a victim just because you got called out.
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.
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
There’s a lot of radioactive thorium to be found in coal ash leftover from power plants. I am not worried about this.
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.
The company plans to launch a more powerful one-watt version later this year, with uses ranging from consumer electronics to drones capable of flying continuously without recharging.
The idea of using this for a drone is laughable. Their coin-size battery produces 100 uW of power, so a small drone drawing a couple dozen watts would need to somehow carry hundreds of thousands of these batteries. Even if they're only a gram each, that's still hundreds of kilograms of weight.
Use in consumer electronics is also a terrible idea. Ionization smoke detectors are already regulated due to their americium content; imagine how hard it would be to get regulatory approval for something 100,000 times more radioactive.
I'm confused - they don't seem to be talking about using the 100 uW version in a drone, they explicitly mention a 1 W version. What's laughable about that?
I guess that the 1W battery might be proportionally heavier, if it's using the same material?
That's correct.
Yeah but the drone might still work. What if a second drone (armed with the same battery) follows around the first drone and supports the battery through use of a tether? Then the weight isn't relevant.
Four elephant-shaped drones. Which can in turn be supported by a Turtle drone.
Then you can make a third drone to support the second drone, and a fourth to support the third, and so on to infinity! Genius!
For comparison, the Betacel boasted 25 microwatts per cubic centimeter, and this Betavolt battery appears to have 88 microwatts per cubic centimeter. This will also have a longer lifetime also.
The Betacel was successfully used to power pacemakers. I suspect there will be more applications for power sources in this range today.
Casio G-Shock / Fallout Collab?
Casio F-91W☢️
I wonder what it tastes like...
I want this in a four function calculator
Why not Solar? I have fairly recent Casio (FX-260 Solar II) and it works in dimmer lighting conditions than I’m comfortable working under anyway. Under normal lighting (for being able to see while doing math with pencil and paper) it’s rock solid!
coin sized
Perfect. You know how hard it is to find replacements for those? Now I can just have my watch be nuclear powered and not have to worry about that. Only thing I have to worry about is having my arm mutate into getting time control powers.