Batteries Powered by Nuclear Waste

Nuclear power is considered a clean energy source because it has zero carbon dioxide emissions; yet, at the same time, it produces massive amounts of hazardous, radioactive waste that pile up as more and more reactors are built around the world.

Experts have proposed different solutions for this issue in order to take better care of the environment and people’s health. With insufficient safe storage space for nuclear waste disposal, the focal point of these ideas is the reutilization of the materials.

Radioactive diamond batteries were first developed in 2016 and were immediately acclaimed because they promised a new, cost-effective way of recycling nuclear waste. In this context, it’s unavoidable to deliberate whether they’re the ultimate solution to these toxic, lethal residues.

What Are Radioactive Diamond Batteries?
Radioactive diamond batteries were first developed by a team of physicists and chemists from the Cabot Institute for the Environment of the University of Bristol. The invention was presented as a betavoltaic device, which means that it’s powered by the beta decay of nuclear waste.

Beta decay is a type of radioactive decay that occurs when an atom’s nucleus has an excess of particles and releases some of them to obtain a more stable ratio of protons to neutrons. This produces a kind of ionizing radiation called beta radiation, which involves a lot of high-speed and high-energy electrons or positrons known as beta particles.  READ MORE...

USA Makes Discovery Then Gives It To China

The former UniEnergy Technologies office in Mukilteo, Wash. Taxpayers spent $15 million on 

research to build a breakthrough battery. Then the U.S. government gave it to China

When a group of engineers and researchers gathered in a warehouse in Mukilteo, Wash., 10 years ago, they knew they were onto something big. They scrounged up tables and chairs, cleared out space in the parking lot for experiments and got to work.

They were building a battery — a vanadium redox flow battery — based on a design created by two dozen U.S. scientists at a government lab. The batteries were about the size of a refrigerator, held enough energy to power a house, and could be used for decades. 

The engineers pictured people plunking them down next to their air conditioners, attaching solar panels to them, and everyone living happily ever after off the grid.

"It was beyond promise," said Chris Howard, one of the engineers who worked there for a U.S. company called UniEnergy. "We were seeing it functioning as designed, as expected."

But that's not what happened. Instead of the batteries becoming the next great American success story, the warehouse is now shuttered and empty. All the employees who worked there were laid off. 

And more than 5,200 miles away, a Chinese company is hard at work making the batteries in Dalian, China.     READ MORE...

Electric Cars - Prices Increase

As US gas prices hit record highs in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, it seems like electric vehicles may not be a safe haven for those looking to save money. 

That’s because Russia plays an important part in the production of the nickel that ends up in batteries used by many electric vehicles — a metal that’s rocketed up in price even faster than oil.

On February 25th, nickel was trading on the London Metal Exchange for around $24,000 a ton, according to The Wall Street Journal. By March 8th, it was trading at $80,000 (down from a peak of over $100,000), and the London Metal Exchange had suspended trading. 

There are a few reasons for the massive uptick in price — because it’s 2022, there are financial shenanigans involved, but it’s also impossible for the market to ignore the fact that an important nickel producer is at war and facing a flurry of international sanctions.

When it comes to mining nickel, Russia isn’t a massive player. According to the WSJ, the country supplies up to 6 percent of the world’s nickel. (For context, that puts it a distant third behind Indonesia and the Philippines, according to a datasheet from the US Geological Survey (pdf).) 

But Russia’s role in producing the battery-grade nickel used in EVs is a different story — in a Twitter thread breaking down the issue, the CEO of Benchmark Mineral Intelligence says 20 percent of that supply comes from a single Russian company.  READ MORE...

Disrupting Battery History

The Addionics Tream 

“Battery technology hasn’t changed in over 30 years,” Moshiel Biton, CEO of electric car battery startup Addionics, tells ISRAEL21c.

And here is where Biton saw a huge opportunity “as trillions of dollars will continue to be invested in creating better batteries.”

Addionics aims to capitalize on this opportunity by introducing a relatively small change into how batteries are designed. 

Unlike other companies that focus on improving battery chemistry, Addionics is focused on the physics of a specific part of the battery, the electric current collector.

The current collector serves as the substrate of a battery’s electrodes. These small metal sheets, not dissimilar to aluminum foil, are layered around the “active material” – lithium ion, for example.

Think of an electric battery like a sandwich, Biton suggests. “The bread is the electricity collector, and the cheese is the active material.”

Most electric car battery “sandwiches” have the “cheese” only on the top. Addionics layers the “cheese” throughout, along with layers of porous and spongy “bread.”

“Using nanotechnology, we can find space that’s not well utilized and make it more efficient,” Biton says.  READ MORE...