At 08:45 AM 10/13/2009, you wrote:
From Abd:
> Cool. I assume that the radioisotope decays with emission of very
> low-penetrating charged-particle radiation. As long as you don't
> swallow it, this should be quite safe! And eating batteries isn't
> particularly good for your health anyway.
How about stowing it away in one's front pant pocket? What would one's
future children might look like?
Children normally look reasonably like their parents. Children of
parents with a radioisotope cell phone tucked in their pants pocket
would look the same. The radiation is beta, very low-penetration.
Beta emitters are harmless unless you swallow them or otherwise get
them in direct contact (or solution) in tissues. Except don't hold
your breath for that cell phone. There is, shall we say, a bit of
engineering to do.
Liquid-Semiconductor-Based Micro Power Source Using Radioisotope
Energy Conversion
T. Wacharasindhu, J.W. Kwon, D.E. Meier, And J.D. Robertson --
University of Missouri, USA
This presents a betavoltaic micro power source using
liquid-semiconductor for the first time. The battery is powered by a
radioactive sulfur (35S) source with a selenium
liquid-semiconductor-based Schottky diode for direct power
conversion. The radioisotope material is encapsulated with liquid
semiconductor in a micromachined device to capture the full
potential of radioactive material in all direction. Experimental
results show that maximum of 16.2 nW can be harvested from the
micromachined liquid semiconductor Schottky diode. A large
open-circuit voltage of 899mV and short-circuit current of 0.107 A
were also observed.
The copy and paste lost the micro. That was uA, not A. Too bad, eh?
One might think a similar device would work with the charged particle
radiation from a CF cell. Again, a bit of an engineering problem. How
can one harvest the radiation from the NAE? Just about any
intervening material would absorb too much radiation, and NAE seems
to depend on deuterium flux. Maybe a gas-loading technique would work, though.
Looking for the paper, I noticed that a company that makes digital
holographic microscopes, nanometer-scale resolution, 3D, presented
there. Now, wouldn't it be cool if we could image a PdD system while
NAE is active? I don't even want to think about what these
microscopes cost. Maybe someone will email me a lottery ticket that
wins, I'm certainly not going to buy one, too much of a ... long
shot, unlike my cold fusion project, which I consider little short of
a sure thing; indeed, my own flakiness is the biggest obstacle, not
money or the technology. That is, I'll be able to put together
reliable and affordable kits that show something interesting.
