Comment on Coin-sized nuclear 3V battery with 50-year lifespan enters mass production
deegeese@sopuli.xyz 1 week agoWhich is why your suggestion of simply recycling copper won’t work. You don’t have copper, you have a radioactive alloy.
Comment on Coin-sized nuclear 3V battery with 50-year lifespan enters mass production
deegeese@sopuli.xyz 1 week agoWhich is why your suggestion of simply recycling copper won’t work. You don’t have copper, you have a radioactive alloy.
floo@retrolemmy.com 1 week ago
Not after 50 or so years. Then it’s just non-radioactive copper.
deegeese@sopuli.xyz 1 week ago
That’s not how radioactive half lives work.
Learn about radioactive decay and what half life means.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Half-life
floo@retrolemmy.com 1 week ago
Prove it.
apotheotic@beehaw.org 1 week ago
It can indeed be recycled after it degrades into copper, but it will take far longer that you claim for it to do so.
The half life of nickel-63 is 101.2 years which means that after 101.2 years approximately half of the core will have degraded to copper, then after 101.2 more years approximately half of the remaining will have degraded, leaving approximately a quarter, then after 101.2 more years there’ll be approximately one eighth, and so on. This is how radioactive decay works.
The battery, they claim, functions for 50 years or so, which is probably because after 50 years the radioactive decay has slowed by over 25% (can’t be bothered to work out the actual amount but its at least this much). This 50 years doesn’t mean that all the radioactive material has decayed, just that a portion of it significant enough to render the battery dead/less effective/etc.
deegeese@sopuli.xyz 1 week ago
LOL I’m not your chemistry teacher, kid.
Sas@beehaw.org 1 week ago
A half life of 100 years many that after 100 years half of it is copper while the other half is still nickel 63. It does NOT mean that after half that time all of it will be copper