Nuclear powered cellphones?

[RussSchultz]

http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/WEBONLY/publicfeature/sep04/0904nuc.html

Sounds a little pie-in-the-sky-ish for me, but interesting none-the-less.

 

[CMAN]

And people were worried about health issues before....

There are going to be people who HATE these.... 8)

 

[pcchen]

If you selected the radioactive material carefully, that they emit only alpha particles and decay into stable elementals, it should be pretty safe since alpha particles can be blocked by a piece of paper or human skin. Of course, these materials are still dangerous if inhaled, but so do many other chemicals.

IIRC some expensive watches use radium for glowing paint.

 

[Guden Oden]

IIRC some expensive watches use radium for glowing paint.

Uh, wasn't that back in the friggin FIFTIES? I thought they banned that long ago once the dangers of cancer were discovered.

 

[PC-Engine]

Tritium...

http://www.sciencearea.com/25MAY00.htm

To the subject of tritium specifically, the decay of tritium releases
one very low energy beta (electron) with insufficient energy to escape
a solution or solid matrix nor to penetrate more than a millimeter or so in a
gas cloud. No beta radiation escapes the illumination capsule. Even
when ingested, tritium is considered by the government to be a trivial
hazard and objectively speaking, presents no hazard. The biological
half-life of tritium (how long it stays in the body) is only a few days
because its tritium oxide, the most common form, is chemically almost
identical to water.

First off, radium is intensely radioactive, indeed the definition of the
Curie was originally that amount of activity in a gram of radium. Radium
was used in luminous paint in the WWII era. It was typically a mix of
radium chloride and activated zinc sulfide. The zinc sulfide absorbs
energy from an alpha particle emitted from the radium and is excited.
A few nanoseconds later it sheds this energy as a photon of visible
light. Radium was a particularly poor choice as an energy source because
it emits copious amounts of highly penetrating gamma rays and because
the high energy alphas destroy the zinc sulfide over time. As an
example, I have a luminous button designed to be worn on the lapel
with a grease-penciled code number on it. It was issued to my dad
in France in WWII and enabled sentries identify people without
the use of a flashlight. This button no longer glows, the radium having
long since destroyed the phosphor but it DOES emit a LOT of radiation.
About 0.1 R/Hr at a foot. I use it as a calibration source in my lab.
It is normally stored in a lead pig. Dad said that they got a couple
hundred of these things packed in a wooden box!

Radium is also particularly bad because it acts chemically enough like
calcium that it seeks the bone when ingested and once incorporated
into bone, it is almost impossible to get rid of. The famous case
of the women who painted instrument dials with radium paint in the
plant in NY involved bone-related problems from the huge amount of
radium absorbed as they used their tongues to point their brushes.

These days tritium, the third isotope of hydrogen, is used as the energy
source. It has a decent half-life, emits only a low energy
beta that does a good job of stimulating phosphors while not presenting
any health risks. And it's cheap since it is a man-made isotope
manufactured in huge quantities by the US govt for weapons purposes.

 

[Deepak]

Sony must get these batteries for PSP asap.

 

[Guden Oden]

Oh no, Sony needs some of those plutonium-powered thermal batteries that powererd the voyager spaceprobes. Maybe that way they could extend playtime up to as much as ten hours!

 

[Simon F]

Oh no, Sony needs some of those plutonium-powered thermal batteries that powererd the voyager spaceprobes. Maybe that way they could extend playtime up to as much as ten hours!

Pity the player's life time would end up being shortened by a much bigger margin

Hee Hee. Already some batteries have messages saying "dispose of properly" and an icon saying not to put them in the rubbish bin. I wonder what a Pu battery would have....
"Dispose of correctly. May really explode if a critically large collection is crushed/detonated".