- Are Radioactive Diamond Batteries a Cure for Nuclear Waste? And See Our Buy 1 Get 2 Limited Time Offer

Hi ,

For the past few years, Tom Scott (a materials scientist) and Neil Fox (a chemist), both from the University of Bristol who formed a company called Arkenlight, have worked to commercialize a nuclear diamond battery that can last for thousands of years without ever being charged or replaced. Unlike the batteries used in most modern electronics, their battery collects particles spit out by radioactive diamonds, made from reformed nuclear waste.

Carbon-14 is naturally formed when cosmic rays strike nitrogen atoms in the atmosphere, but it is also produced as a byproduct in the graphite blocks that contain the control rods for a nuclear reactor - which eventually end up as nuclear waste.

If successful, Arkenlight could provide a virtually inexhaustible supply of raw material to create nuclear batteries. They haven't made a betavoltaic cell using reformed nuclear waste yet however, and say that its nuclear diamond battery still has a few more years of refinement in the lab before it’s ready to hit the streets...

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