can strontium be used to make a super battery?

canadmonster

can strontium be used to make a super battery? Or a strontium generator?

rbj

take a look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiois...tric_generator and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strontium . evidently the answer is yes, and it's been done.

someone who knows something about the atomic decay can maybe tell us about the mechanism. i dunno how to make it so that + charged particles go one way and the - charged particles go another.

waht

RTG have been around for long time now. The heat from the radioactive decay is harnessed by a thermocouple and converted into electricity.

Various radioactive elements can be employed with different half-lives for different applications.

Sr90 is pretty radioactive so might be used.

Also, it looks like scientists at Los Alamos are coming with a way to directly convert radiation into elecrity using carbon nano-tubes. Sounds very promising.

http://technology.newscientist.com/a...ectricity.html

zeitghost

The bones of those of us lucky(?) enough to have been born in the 1950s have a generous helping of Sr90 from all those lovely atmospheric tests...

deakie

This is way overdue....the understanding and technology is in place to get on with this.
However, in the current climate, this will be a no-no...

We worked out one generator, theoretically, at work that would give us 640watts roughly for every terabequerel of amercium activity.
Am-241 has a halflife of 432 years, so buying such a generator is for life....

Big oil rules.....

canadmonster

so with all the radioactive waste from nuclear reactors can be used to power another power plant

deakie

Thats why they have re-processing....to reuse the waste....

research is continuing into how they can further utilise waste for generation....problem is, most waste are products that do not give off the right stuff.....
they are hoping to find ways that will allow them to effectively speed up the transmutation or reduce the half-life of these products to make them have further life, rather than get stuck in some ground facility somewhere....

i'm wishing them all the success as without a doubt, its a nuclear future...

turbo

Holy cow! Do I have enough to become a copper-top?

zeitghost

Depends where you were with regards to the fallout...