Nuclear – don’t over react!
27 October 2009
I am curious to discover how far a project goes that is researching the potential of nuclear batteries.
The work is being done by a team at the University of Missouri and the goal is to find a solution to portable power problems that is appropriate, literally, to the nuclear age.
Portable power has always been a problem and there were some priceless moments from early nineties films where thrusting young city execs roamed the streets with handbag-sized phones attached to suitcase-sized batteries. Mercifully it was a phase that technology ensured lasted for a only a year or two, but even the phones that replaced them, for all that they were at least recognisable as modern mobile phones, are the objects of ridicule for the youth of today on account of their brick-like form factor.
Whatever the portable application, there is constantly a demand for longer battery life and yet more functionality – the demands on the battery becoming greater as time goes on. There are three main ways to remedy this. Firstly to get additional power from another source, like harvesting solar energy, for example, or radio frequency charging. The other main focus of the electronics industry has been to reduce power consumption. Improving processor architectures, reducing the number of passive and heat generating components and so on – the amount of power required, by using clever design, has been reduced considerably. Such strategies have been the subject of many articles in EPD over recent years.
The third option is just to make better batteries – and I suppose the definition of a better battery is one that is smaller yet can produce more power for longer. This is where the University of Missouri (MU) comes in. It is developing a nuclear battery that has ‘power density’ six times greater than a conventional chemical battery. The battery is no bigger than a coin. Apparently the problem with nuclear batteries is that the radiation affects the structure of the power semiconductor, breaking down the lattice framework. The MU team get round this problem by using liquid semiconductors and they believe that further development will yield a battery with the thickness of a human hair.
Of course one obstacle is the ‘N’ word. ‘Nuclear’ is still a word that will bring a certain amount of distrust with it. I don’t think many people will worry too much about the chances of a nuclear meltdown starting in their trouser pocket, but the thought of radiation radiating around you may take a bit of getting used to. In reality, nuclear power has been used in pace-makers, so maybe we shouldn’t worry too much.
Maybe a bigger concern would be if one of the ‘unstable’ countries developed a manufacturing facility for mobile phone batteries based on this technology – surely hard evidence of a weapons of mass destruction development programme!
The details about how MU are making this technology work and how it can be usefully employed will probably only start to emerge when the patents have been filed, but I will bring you more as soon as I can.
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