“Self-Charging Nano-Diamond Batteries” That Can Run An Electric Car For 90 Years?
Is this Cold Fusion deja vu all over again? Maybe. Or maybe not.
On my news aggregator yesterday was a story on newatlas.com titled, “Nano-diamond self-charging batteries could disrupt energy as we know it.” What the hell? That pegged out my weird-s**t-o-meter, so I had to read it.
First, here’s the backstory. It turns out that in 2016, back when [political rant deleted for space], a group of scientists at the University of Bristol took some radioactive waste graphite, squeezed it into teensy-weensy diamonds…and those diamonds generated a small amount of energy all by themselves, though not enough to power a cell phone. You see, in many reactors, graphite is used as a moderator to control the heat flow, and when the reactor is refueled or decommissioned, all the graphite removed is rich in carbon-14 and is highly radioactive, and at that time the United Kingdom had 95,000 tons of it sitting around pumping out zoomies (which is how we sometimes referred to radiation in the Navy), its half-life of 5730 years providing motivation for hundreds of generations of protesters.
According to a 2017 article by the Snopes fact-checking service, the concept of transforming radioactive waste graphite into electricity-emitting diamonds has been around since at least 1973…
