As I have said many times on this blog, nuclear waste is a terrible problem. There are millions of tons of nuclear waste around the globe. It will either have to be buried in the geological repositories under construction or recycled into new nuclear fuel. There are schemes to build special nuclear reactors that can directly burn nuclear waste. There are other projects to find ways to utilize it such as creating batteries that draw power directly from nuclear waste. There has been a recent breakthrough in England regarding nuclear waste batteries.
Most electricity generated from nuclear power uses turbines to move magnets through coils of copper wire to generate a current. The turbines are spun by steam generated from the heat produced in the core of the nuclear reactor. Nuclear power reactors are the most complex and expensive ways to boil water that has been invented by the human race.
The Cabot Institute at the University of Bristol in England is the U.K.'s first cross-disciplinary research institute. A group of researchers there has announced the creation of a man-made diamond that can produce electricity when it is placed near radioactive material.
Tom Scott is a member of the Cabot Institute from the University's Interface Analysis center who is working on the project. He said, "There are no moving parts involved, no emissions generated and no maintenance required, just direct electricity generation. By encapsulating radioactive material inside diamonds, we turn a long-term problem of nuclear waste into a nuclear-powered battery and a long-term supply of clean energy."
The original experiment that showed proof of principle for utilizing a radioactive material to directly generate electricity employed the radioactive isotope nickel-63. The team is currently working on using carbon-14, a radioactive isotope that is created in nuclear reactors as carbon graphite moderators are bombarded with neutrons. Since this is a common byproduct of nuclear power generation, it would make sense to focus on the use of this particular isotope. There are currently almost a hundred thousand tons of used graphite blocks in the U.K. Extracting the carbon-14 would yield fuel for the new nuclear batteries and would reduce the radioactivity of the used graphite blocks making disposal easier.
Carbon-14 emits short range radiation which makes it dangerous as far as inhalation or ingestion is concerned but also makes it an excellent choice for use in nuclear batteries. Embedding it in artificial diamond would trap its radioactive emissions. The new batteries being developed at the Cabot Institute have relatively low power when compared to current general use batteries but the use of carbon-14 will make them very long-lived.
A carbon-14 battery would take over five thousand years to reach half-power. This would make the new batteries ideal for remote locations and space missions where there is need for longevity with no necessity or capability for maintenance. One possible application for such batteries would be warning lights and signs at nuclear waste repositories that could function independently for thousands of years.
