A Nuclear Battery That Fits In Your Pocket
Imagine a battery that runs for years on end, promising endless energy from a clean, safe, environmentally-friendly form nuclear technology. Learn about the compelling quest for a true portable, pocket-sized nuclear battery…
It’s the middle of August and I’m standing in the basement of an aging brick house a few miles outside of Redmond, grateful to be in a cool area on a hot, muggy day.
We’re in the suburbs, but I feel strangely cut off from the modern world — hidden from the busy street by an abundance of sun-bleached weeds growing through cracks in the driveway.
The basement is packed with tools, cabinetry, odd looking equipment, and all sorts of old, dust-covered electronics. Everything down here appears to be at least a few decades old, but at least I’m not smelling that thick damp musk that accompanies the interior of a lot of the older homes in the Pacific Northwest.
Along the walls is a series of metals racks, filled haphazardly with a various assortment of tools, equipment, knick-knacks, and other oddities. I recognize an oscilloscope, positioned next to a set of nearly 30 glass jars containing dried herbs. Some might mistake it for a junk room, but I know exactly where I’m at: a tinkerer’s workshop, filled with a lifetime of dreams.
This basement is the “secret lab” of experimenter Merlin Del Orion — a white-bearded gentleman in his late 60’s that bears more than a little resemblance to his namesake from the age of Camelot. In a past life, he was Frank Stazny, a hard-working Boeing engineer, but after retirement went back to using a monicker he’d picked up in the 60’s and decided to invest his golden years in satisfying a child-like curiosity in science that had never waned.
Merlin pauses to adjust his spectacles and frowns slightly, with one eyebrow curling up just slightly. “Betavoltaic cell?” he asks, questioningly. I’ve just finished telling him about my encounter with businessman and inventor Michael McDonnough, and a remarkable new technology that I’ve heard about. “It’s a nuclear battery,” I tell him, “using a method of stimulating the decay of a nuclear isotope with a high-voltage to produce abundant, safe and clean electric energy. I don’t know if it’s for real or not, though, because I haven’t actually seen one yet.”
Merlin walks over to a shelf in one of the racks covering the entire back-wall of the basement. I can recognize an electric typewriter and several other pieces of electronics test-equipment on the shelf, but what he pulls out of a shadowy area is unrecognizable. “Oh, they work,” he says, “Here’s one that I’ve been tinkering with for the last few months”.
The device that Merlin is holding is obviously a piece of electronics equipment, but I can’t really place many of the parts on it. Mounted on a 1-foot square epoxy circuit board, I recognize the familiar dull-green plastic case of a high-voltage flyback transformer, and after realizing what that component is I then recognize the multi-vibrator circuit that feeds it — a set of two transistors set to pulse at a specific frequency through the flyback to power the device.
Flyback transformers are used in television sets and HV-experimental equipment to step up a low-voltage input current to a high-voltage output, and can be further connected either directly to a rectifier diode or instead to a Cockroft-Walton voltage multiplier. In this case, Merlin’s done something different, and wired it up to a round metallic ball rising from the circuit board on a post, almost like a miniature airport traffic-control tower.
“Wait a second”, I tell him, “this nuclear battery technology is totally new stuff — even the person who was telling me about it doesn’t have a working prototype yet. You’re actually telling me what you’re holding actually works?”
“Yeah,” he responds, “It works. You turn it on and it applies a high-voltage to the nuclear material inside, and that causes the isotope to beta-decay & release electrons faster than they’d normally be emitted. It’s pretty-trippy — it’s like a battery, but it’s nuclear.”
Merlin twists at a seam in the middle of the metal ball and lifts off the top portion for me to look inside. The ball contains a collection of maybe 20 or 30 small pellets. From their dull-gray metallic color, these could be made of lead or pewter, but I know better as I realize that they are the Americum-241 pellets used to provide ionizing radiation in smoke detectors.
“I had to pry these out of the little epoxy cases that they’re normally housed in within the smoke detector”, Merlin tells me, “and they’re safe as long as you wash your hands after touching them.”
Merlin explains to me that this device must be primed initially by being connected to the flyback transformer. After external power has been applied and a static-charge initiated through the special control-circuits running into the isotope chamber, the isotope becomes self-sustaining for a period of time and generates its own electricity as the decay-rate of the Americum-241 accelerates and releases a steady stream of high-voltage electrons.
Merlin’s device isn’t perfect though — it won’t self power indefinitely after it has been initially activated. “I put it on the oscilloscope a while back,” he says, “and it basically rings. It doesn’t generate enough electricity to completely self-power, and that’s mostly because of inefficiencies in the feedback-circuit. This means that after I turn the power off, the static charge decays very slowly compared to an inert test sample, which gives me a ring-curve on the oscilloscope. I’m planning on modifying the circuitry to allow it to completely feedback the electricity that the isotope generates through the stimulation circuit in the near future — that should let it run indefinitely, and after that I can attempt to draw high-voltage electricity from it to power other projects. For the moment, though, it just rings …”
Merlin’s nuclear-battery does more than just ring, though — and both he and I know it. The electricity given off by Merlin’s Americum-241 battery is accompanied by an enormous surge of high-energy protons & neutrons. I know that Merlin also realizes this, because the inside of the reflective metal-ball that the isotopes sit inside is lined with at least 1/8th inch thick lead-shielding. After taking into consideration the possibility that I might want to actually have children in the future, I decide not to ask him for a demonstration of the device — at least not today.
Are Nuclear Batteries Even A Thing?
If you’re shaking your head at this point in disbelief, it’s time for a quick reality check: beta-decay (Betavoltaic) cells have been around for years, and it’s a well understood technology.
Here’s how it works: there are different types of nuclear decay, and Betavoltaic cells work on the principle of beta-decay. Essentially, when they break down a high-energy electron is released, which can be captured and used to create a small, high-voltage current.
I first learned about nuclear beta-decay batteries from none other than the infamous Bob Lazar, formerly of Area 51 fame. Lazar owns United Nuclear, which manufactures Geiger counters for use by the government and several commercial organizations, and one of Bob’s hobbies is collecting naturally-occurring radioactive rocks in the desert.
I asked Bob if he’d ever considered building a nuclear battery with any of them. “Sure,” Lazar replied, “using a piece of radioactive rock to build a simple nuclear battery is easy. You simply get a glass vial and run a wire into the glass until it touches the rock — this is your positive potential. You then suspend another wire inside of the glass vial, but not touching the rock — current will flow between these two wires, although it won’t be a large amount, and you can’t use it for much.”
Lazar told me that he’d actually built two or three batteries like this, and claims it’s simple & inexpensive, provided you have some radioactive rocks on hand. “You know,” he said, “I could send you one of the little nuclear batteries that I’ve built — I think that you might get at least a couple of milliamps of high-voltage current from it. But now that I think about it, the major problem with mailing it to you is the fact that you can’t turn these things off…..it’ll be producing a high-voltage trickle of charge all the way through the postal system, which will set off all sorts of alarms.”
Ultimately, that’s the problem with old-school Betavoltaic technology: it takes a good sized chunk of nuclear material to produce a usable current, and there’s no off-switch. Electrons are always being produced, even when you don’t need them.
That’s also what makes the device Merlin showed me so incredibly intriguing: by using stimulated beta-decay, it produces more current on-demand, and the output drops to almost nothing when it’s turned off. In other words, you get power when you need it, none when you don’t — a true battery. How do you stimulate it? With a high-voltage static charge, at least that’s the claim.
The Betavoltaic Battery’s Fission Process
Who exactly is claiming that you can speed up nuclear decay using a high-voltage field? The basis for stimulated beta-decay technology comes from the theoretical research of Dr. Ruggero Santilli, who claims that with a specific static-charge applied to a nuclear isotope it can be made to break down at a sustained rate in comparison with a control sample.
What this means is that a beta-emitting isotope (one that emits primarily electrons as it decays) can be forced electronically to emit the same number of electrons in an hour as it ordinarily might emit in a year or more. Therefore, instead of a scant-few electrons being emitted from the isotope under normal conditions, the same isotope in a charge-stimulated environment will emit enough to generate a usable electrical current.
Dr. Santilli believes that isotopes can be utilized with such a normal low decay rate that they are considered for all intents and purposes to be “inert materials”. So instead of using simply using Strontium-90, which is a well-known beta-emitter, it may actually be possible to use K40 (an isotope of Potassium), with a half-life of approximately 1.7 billion years. It has an 89% ratio of calcium formation, featuring a double beta-decay with energy levels of 1.311 Mev (Million Electron Volts).
Essentially this means that K40 takes so long to decay under normal circumstances that its basically an inert substance — but when it does decay it releases an enormous amount of energy.
Since the electrons are emitted at high energy & high-speed, they disrupt other electrons when they collide with atoms, which allows you to create a “secondary current” at a lower voltage but much higher amperage simply by having them strike a correctly designed metal collector.
According to Michael McDonnough, the founder of Betavoltaic, Inc. and an avid follower of Santilli’s work, “Potassium-40 is the perfect fuel for beta-decay because if the Betavoltaic cell is accidentally ruptured during operation K40 goes back to being extremely low in activity,” McDonnough tells me, “K40 allows us to throttle the isotope decay. It’s a nearly perfect process, because it only releases energy under stimulation, and in the event of a critical failure it immediately ceases energy production.”
In science, K40 is stable enough that it has little scientific use other than in studying biological systems using a highly bio-available and generally stable isotope. The trick is sourcing enough K40 for commercial applications, but McDonnough is actively working on sources for that.
Conclusion
Certain nuclear isotopes emit electrons when they break down — these are called “beta-emitting” isotopes. The electrons that are released during this natural decay process can be collected to provide electrical energy.
Using these isotopes to create a “Betavoltaic” nuclear battery isn’t hard to do — according to Bob Lazar, it’s about as simple as putting a rock inside a glass jar. However, putting a radioactive rock in a jar doesn’t generate usable current and there’s no off-switch, making it commercially useless.
The key to commercialization comes from stimulated beta-decay, based on the work of Dr. Ruggero Santilli, who claims that the rate of the decay process can be stimulated to provide electrical energy on-demand.
Electron-emitting beta-isotopes are capable of storing incredible amounts of energy in a tiny package — which means that a commercially feasible stimulated beta-decay battery would be suitable for mobile applications that require continuous power for years, perhaps even decades, without replacement.
Time will tell as to the commercial viability of this product. With a non-stimulated half-life of 1.7 billion years, it would appear that that the K40 solution under development by Betavoltaic is the ‘perfect’ process for liberating energy in a controlled manner from the breakdown of this material.
If Betavoltaic makes it work, they’ll be holding the key to an entirely new energy technology that has the potential to revolutionize our world through an inexpensive and efficient method of creating and storing electrical energy.
References
- Betavoltaic Battery (non-stimulated): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betavoltaic_device
- Stimulated Beta-Decay: https://www.nist.gov/news-events/news/2016/06/physicists-measured-something-new-radioactive-decay-neutrons
- Dr. Ruggero Santilli, http://www.i-b-r.org/santilli.htm
- Betavoltaic Industries, http://www.betavoltaic.com
- United Nuclear, http://www.unitednuclear.com
Read more at medium.com
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