this video is sponsored by Nord VPN. Nuclear fission is an energy dense powerful stable and carbon-free
source of energy that provides roughly 10 percent of our electricity but nuclear power has a big
problem it generates tons of radioactive waste that takes hundreds of thousands of years to
Decay and that costs billions of taxpayer dollars on management and Disposal but what
if we could turn this radioactive waste into a battery to power our phones laptops and even
electric cars without needing to recharge them for over 20 years sounds pretty cool right join
me as we dive into nuclear waste batteries okay that is a terrible turn of phrase let's
talk about nuclear batteries and one of the few companies that's actually selling them to find
out if these claims are real or if it's all just marketing hype I'm Ricky and this is Two Bit da Vinci
nuclear batteries aren't all that new they've been around since 1913 but they've been getting
a lot of attention in recent years being touted as the Holy Grail of Battery Technology and as nearly
Eternal batteries that will run for 20 000 years without noticeable loss and power considering that
most of our modern devices and all electric vehicles rely on batteries it's easy to see
why these claims caught the attention of so many people myself included but there's another reason
why this technology made the news recently and it has to do with the fact that it promises to
solve the nuclear waste problem nuclear power plants provide 10.3 percent of all the world's
total electricity generation amounting to over 2 700 tarot hours in 2020. the average household
consumes around 3 500 kilowatt hours of energy per year so nuclear alone generates enough electricity
to approximately Power 800 million homes but all that nuclear energy production generates
waste that has the cost of hundreds of billions of dollars every year a possible solution would
be to reuse that waste but how enter the nuclear waste battery so we've covered many different
kinds of Battery Technology on this channel like all of them from lithium ion to flywheels
and even CO2 batteries I'll leave links in the description but what are nuclear batteries in a
nutshell a nuclear battery is any battery capable of converting the energy produced from spontaneous
nuclear Decay reactions or radioactivity into usable electricity this is in stark contrast to
other Technologies like Lithium-ion batteries that rely on chemical reactions the key selling point
of nuclear batteries is their energy density using nuclear reactions instead of chemical
processes implies that nuclear batteries have energy densities orders of magnitudes greater
than chemical batteries and other energy storage systems for example the highest energy density
of any chemical fuel is hydrogens which is 141.8 megajoules per kilogram or roughly 40
000 Watt hours per kilogram for comparison Tesla's best lithium ion batteries to date hold less than
300 watt hours per kilogram but atomic energy is at another level a pure sample of a nuclear fuel
like plutonium-238 has a specific energy density of wait for it 630 million Watt hours per kilogram
that's almost 16 000 times higher than the energy density of hydrogen and over 2 million times
higher than the Tesla 4680 cell pretty crazy right that's why nuclear energy is mysterious and scary
as it is gets so much attention you know what else is mysterious and scary staying private and secure
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thanks to Nord and you for supporting the show put another way that's the equivalent of over 7
000 Tesla Model 3 Performance battery packs in one single kilogram or 2.2 pounds of
plutonium-238 now granted that is for a pure sample of plutonium-238 and that's not easy
to come by but even if we had a sample people as little as one percent plutonium that's still 100
times more energy dense than hydrogen so energy density is the nuclear battery's most promising
feature it's why nuclear batteries are touted as never ending and able to outlive the devices they
power the question is can we get all that energy out and more importantly how fast to answer that
let's look at how radioactivity works the energy from nuclear batteries comes from radioactivity
which is caused by a process called nuclear Decay nuclear Decay takes place when an atom
has a sub-optimal neutron to proton ratio in its nucleus making it unstable this makes the nucleus
break apart and releases alpha or beta particles or gamma photons leading to Alpha Beta And Decay
respectively Alpha and beta particles emitted during Decay reactions carry kinetic energy
this energy with nuclear batteries transform into electricity they do this in different ways which
lead to different types of nuclear batteries first we have thermal conversion nuclear batteries AKA
radioisotope thermal generators or rtgs these turn radioactive heat in into electricity using
a thermocouple rtgs have powered anything from nuclear pacemakers to many of NASA's deep space
missions like the Voyager spacecrafts and even the Curiosity Mars Rover next we have radioisotope
photovoltaic generators which transforms ionizing radiation into light and then uses a standard PV
cell to transform that light into electricity we can actually make these at home by sandwiching
tritium tubes in between a pair of PV cells which is pretty cool and maybe I'll mess around with
that I don't know finally we have the beta voltage nuclear battery this is where the nuclear waste
Diamond battery comes in so we'll look at them in a bit more detail a beta voltaic battery works
similarly to PV cells only instead of light it absorbs beta particles from radioactive beta Decay
you know the one I was talking about a minute ago poor Rapport from the radio Corporation of America
invented the beta voltaic battery back in 1953 the technology never really took off but a half
century later it made a comeback a company called City Labs founded in 2005 have been manufacturing
cell silicon-based tritium beta voltaic cells from microelectronic applications since 2008 and has
been selling them commercially since 2012. I spoke with the co-founder and CEO of City Labs about the
company's track record and what they're doing down in Florida I'll let him explain how tritium beta
voltaics work as far as how it works think of a solar cell if you put a solar saw and you have
light coming down you create electricity that way what we've taken is instead of having the
light out here we use tritium we embed it inside with the beta voltaic cell and the beta will take
radiation hits the junction and it can uncap this for you so you can see so you have a beta voltage
junction which is black right there and instead of receiving light we have we put the tritium right
on the surface and the beta radiation comes in and it produces electrical current that way City
Labs is a key player in the nuclear batteries comeback in fact they're the only company with
a general license to sell beta voltaic batteries to anyone but they're not the real reason why this
technology made the news recently we owe that to a team of researchers from the University of
Bristol who invented a totally new way to build beta voltaic batteries and what they did changed
the game they replaced silicon carbide with shiny synthetic diamonds using a process called chemical
vapor deposition they force carbon from gaseous methane to crystallize into nano-sized diamonds
a couple of billionths of a meter wide but that's not the end of it they also chose an
equally unconventional radioactive Source carbon 14. this Choice has several big advantages one is
that diamonds are made of carbon so using carbon 14 lets them integrate the radioactive Source
into the semiconductors structure itself making it easier to harness the power coming from the carbon
14. the second key benefit is that carbon 14 is a byproduct of most nuclear reactors although
not a particularly dangerous type of nuclear waste radioactive carbon blocks make up the bulk of all
radioactive waste by volume so we're using that carbon 14 would help us manage nuclear waste that
would otherwise end up buried for the next couple thousand years draining taxpayer dollars by the
billions what really set the nuclear waste Diamond battery Ablaze was when its inventors professors
Tom Scott and Neil Fox who founded a spin-off company called Arc and light to commercialize
their design were quoted saying that these batteries would eventually run our smartphones
for decades without needing to recharge Ever Could you even imagine no more messy power cables
exploding batteries or worrying about your laptop going dead you can imagine the internet when that
news broke it would be heaven on Earth especially for Millennials nevertheless arcan light hasn't
been able to make good on their promise and their best batteries to date barely produce
a couple of microwatts but we'll get back to that later on in the video arcan light isn't the only
company building nuclear waste Diamond batteries another company called NDB has been making even
more noise since its foundation in 2019 but they're using a different kind of radiation
if you've heard about nuclear Diamond batteries odds are you've heard about NDB their Tech is
similar to arcan lights in the sense that they're also using Diamond assay semiconductor but that's
for the similarities end the company is making what they call Decay voltaic batteries which
is a way to say that they can tailor their host Diamond semiconductor to use different types of
radiation and radioactive sources including both Alpha and beta emitters alpha decay produces more
energy than beta Decay and it's also three times easier to capture in a semiconductor than beta
radiation so NDB is betting that this technology will create more powerful nuclear batteries with
their new technology NDB claim games their designs can work on a wide power output range that could
power not just laptops and phones but EVs and even our homes these claims are bold to say the least
and it's no wonder NDB made headlines everywhere I mean if what they say is true it will change the
world completely just imagine coming home from a trip on your nuclear-powered EV and plug it into
the outlet not to charge it but to power Your Home Instead This makes Tony Stark's chest Arc
Reactor seem like a disposable double A battery talk about replacing fossil fuels we wouldn't
even need Renewables or utilities but as this even possible or is it all just hype well let's
look at it from the engineering perspective so engineering hats on you may have noticed that
by now all of the currently available nuclear batteries provide awesome energy densities and
long battery life that can reach into the decades that's awesome and there's no denying that but all
nuclear batteries have a major flaw which is they have extremely low power density if you discharge
a battery at extremely low power than the power within no matter how small is going to last a
very long time take a typical double A battery which holds about 3.9 Watt hours of energy and
if we were to use it to power a small wrist walk that consumes say one microwatt assuming no other
losses the battery would last Almost 450 years one double A but for EVS we need batteries that
can pump out hundreds of Watts not microwatts we need power density not just energy density
same goes for the grid most other really useful applications so then the question is is there a
way with these technologies that we can increase the power the answer is yes but there's a limit
the power density for a radioactive Source say plutonium-238 which is an alpha emitter
with a half-life of 87.7 years assuming 100 pure sample is 510 watts per kilogram for comparison
the highest specific power density for lithium ion batteries caps around 1000 watts per gram which is
already twice as high but sadly there's no way we can get even that 510 number out of plutonium-238
for several reasons the first is efficiency direct Alpha voltaics with a diamond semiconductor can't
physically use more than 44.2 percent of the total power additionally because of many
unavoidable losses the real efficiency is much lower typically in the range of only about three
percent but just for the sake of argument suppose NDP could magically extract a hundred percent of
the power those 510 watts would still only be true for one kilogram of 100 pure plutonium-238
but that is not what NDB would use NDB plans to Source its radioisotopes from spent nuclear fuel
rods these contain only 1.15 percent of plutonium and out of which only two percent is plutonium-238
this brings our theoretical maximum power density down to just 0.117 watts per kilogram roughly 120
microwatts per kilogram that's just a big bummer I mean even at 200 microwatts per kilogram you need
11 tons of spent fuel to power a simple hair dryer let alone an EV the second major limiting factor
is raw material availability this table shows the total World supply of the Isotopes produced
in nuclear power plants that we would potentially use to make nuclear Diamond batteries say we took
all the strong tm-90 in the world which is one of the most abundant radioisotopes in nuclear
waste and use it to make our batteries the most power we could produce would only be 3.5 megawatts
that means if we wanted to make batteries that could pump out say 350 watts each we would only
be able to make 10 000 units with the entire world supply of strontium 90. this alone ends
a discussion nuclear waste Diamond batteries are definitely not going to take over the EV energy
storage Market not now or ever regardless of how good NDB or any other company's claims make them
out to be they simply isn't enough raw materials to cover the demand in terms of power and either
way the massive batteries would be way too great for most applications also I don't know how Keen
you would be on having a bunch of nuclear waste sitting around your house by the way adding a
capacitor on top like NDB proposes to do won't really help either because once it's depleted
the nuclear battery will need to recharge it and it again Powers at the level of micro watts
and will take years to recharge the capacitor but is this it I mean is this the end of the
nuclear battery I don't think so while companies like NDB may not have been straight when setting
expectations others like City Labs have it turns out there are plenty of applications for low Power
Nuclear batteries we have a contract now with the National Institutes of Health to make a tiny beta
will take the size of a couple grains of rice and it's going to be put on this sleeveless pacemaker
that's inserted up the femoral artery and Into the Heart there are latest pacemakers right now
that have regular conventional lithium batteries but about 60 to 80 percent of it is a lithium
battery it's it's pretty big so a beta will take and do is shrink down quite a bit and uh make the
the overall size a very very small probably you know fraction of a cubic centimeter for
battery and pacemaker and and that it can last 20 years right now most of these pacemaker batteries
they're projected to last 10 years sometimes they say 15 years but it depends on how much it's used
by the patient with the beta will take you a straight steady supply of power so what about
shape and size for these batteries could they be putting something like a neuralink implant for
example I'd like to just show these little props this right here is our original beta will take
cells it's about 0.6 millimeters or 600 microns thick this here is our current beta will take
semiconductor it's same function same ability same efficiency but it's only about 15 microns
thick and we can make them quite thinner if you look at a the size of a human hair the thickness
it's about 100 microns so this is way thinner so we can cut this make them any size stack them up
to increase the power and potentially just put it on a small little chip and just flip chip
bit onto a computer chip and make the chip self-powered so we're looking at a world of
possibilities that range from nuclear pacemaker to size of couple of grains of rice that can be
inserted directly into your heart to Tiny swarm satellites to self-powered computer chips and
sensors that can fit on your fingertip and operate for decades unattended but you might be thinking
you want me to put a radioactive battery inside my heart wouldn't the radiation kill me that's
a very valid question and of course with any radioactive there's always a risk a course with
tritium the risks are somewhat mitigated because of the tritium betas or the electrons that are
coming out can be stopped with a thin sheet of paper like I mentioned earlier it travels
about a micron into the material and that's it so we can contain all the variation by just the
the packaging or even a thin sheet of paper or a foil of course our beta will take devices are are
hermetically sealed and the you know we go above and beyond to make sure that it's safe and we
are very regulated as far as the manufacturing of these devices so nuclear batteries are perfectly
safe and they have plenty going for them without powering our phones and cars perhaps NDB and arcan
light are on the brink of a breakthrough that could change the world as we know it but what I
like most about my conversation with City Labs is that their technology is available today this is
proven technology that already hit commercial scale and it's perfectly safe and it's making
our lives better today this is so refreshing when you consider all the new breakthrough Technologies
we've covered on this channel that are still 10 or 20 years away from hitting the market
so don't think phones and laptops and cars maybe in the future that could be possible but imagine
the millions of opportunities and possibilities if you can have lifetime batteries and little
microchips you could embed and cement for example on Bridges to check for strain and stresses is and
report back forever if there's ever an issue or sensors around the world to in videos building
with their Earth 2 digital twin system that feeds unbelievable amounts of data at every
corner of the globe all with batteries that never need to be monitored ever there's still tons of
potential and in a world of big data and digital Twins and modeling and simulation for predicting
the weather and everything else these batteries and these sensors that power them could go a long
long way but what do you think what was your take from all of this were you surprised at the state
of nuclear batteries did you know City Labs is actually making these batteries today I'd love
to know and I think this video that we have on nuclear you'll also like is check out next
I'm Ricky YouTube DaVinci thank you so much for watching we'll catch you guys next week