Completely agree about the rural US I’ve seen (Illinois, Missouri, Wisconsin), but in the UK rural towns tend to have the best standard of living: low crime rates, access to cultural activities, green space, good schools, independent shops and restaurants. The same applies in quite a lot of France, Germany and Switzerland. I’m a recovering Londoner (like alcoholism there is no complete cure) but after thirty years in a small town I find, on visits to London, that it is increasingly dirty and crime ridden by comparison - and the facilities no longer really compensate.
Where we live (a smallish town not far from Bath) there’s a lot of solar PV including us. As our baseload generator is nuclear, a largish battery installation could probably make us close to carbon neutral (no gas powered generators needed for fluctuating loads.)
Lithium is considerably more abundant in the Earth’s crust than nickel. The issue is where the concentrates are located. Proven reserves of lithium are much lower than those for nickel, but nickel has many uses other than batteries, and the fact that only recently has large lithium demand been forecast means that the effort put into surveying hasn’t been great. The rumours of huge deposits in Afghanistan seem to be subject to a lot of secrecy, but they were enough to depress the lithium price almost immediately.
Nickel extraction causes a lot more problems than lithium extraction, too. It’s basically a nasty, very polluting business.
Two steps forward (Musk) and one step back (online commenters).
As a collector of lithium bullion coins, this distressed me greatly 
You might as well toss them in a lake, and watch the reaction.
Another way to obtain ruthenium is to separate the technetium and wait…
No need to. You have to start with the wait because the material is too hot. Once it cools down enough, no more technetium to bother with.
… a wait of somewhere between five seconds and 50 million years.
Browsing Wikipedia for isotopes in that area, I noticed that Pd107 would be a good candidate for a super-long-life betavoltaic cell. No gamma, and it quietly emits low energy beta, yielding Ag107 (stable) with 6.5e6 y half life. It could probably also serve as a contact/collector electrode.
Yup, Pd-107 is a nice thing. The problem I see is getting it from the uber-hot fuel while there’s still enough of it.
High radiation levels are degrading materials. So even robotics will have problems with manipulating the hottest fuel rods. But I believe the problems are solvable, albeit difficult; and if the reprocessing is done online, in a molten salt reactor, many of the problems are made much easier.
Which is easier to separate chemically - technetium or ruthenium?
I think, given the minor technical barriers, it might make more sense to invest in light metal battery technology. Remember folks, if you see the blue glow and the stuff isn’t deep in water, check your will is signed and valid and go and lie down.
Tell that to the British and Japanese governments, both of which have managed to lose rather a lot of money trying to reprocess nuclear waste. The US keeps producing scientific papers on clever ways it might be accomplished, but seems rather unwilling actually to spend cash on any of the proposed methods.
Unfortunately with radioisotopic batteries long life implies you need a lot of it. Taking the usual isotope for beta batteries, tritium, with its roughly 12 year half life, you need eighteen million times less by mass for a given current (which is why beta lights are cheap.)
This is probably why we are still dependent on plutonium powered thermoelectric generators for long range space missions. You’d need so much palladium to power a decent sized space probe that Elon Musk’s evil twin would be plotting in his underground lair on how to steal it.
Technetium separation would probably revolve around the pertechnetate ion. Its chemistry is well known, it is analogous to permanganate and perrhenate. Other transition metals are separated with coordination chemistry. The raffinates mentioned by shaddack are coordination complexes. Trick is to find the right ligand to separate what you want.
But the hard part is working with high-level radwaste at all. It isn’t merely get-cancer-20-years-later radioactive, it is drop-dead-after-five-minutes radioactive. And it quickly embrittles plastic items, and fries electronics.
That’s true. However, there’s a bit of difference between a betavoltaic battery, a long-life no-maintenance trickle current source, and a radioisotope thermoelectric generator, a way WAY higher-power one.
Betavoltaic device - Wikipedia
Radioisotope thermoelectric generator - Wikipedia
…and there are way more subtypes of the atomic batteries, see the “see also” and “category:” links.
This is a seed of an article I intend (for couple years already, no time, maybe I get inspired soon?) to write about effects of radiation on materials. Hydraulic fluids, lubricants, polymers, metals, ceramics, name it.
Help welcomed, of course.
I haven’t been inspired enough to do much writing for WP. Nothing more than an occasional reversal of obvious vandalism.
But you could add a section re the effects on solids:
– neutrons hauling up to a stop inside the steel of a reactor vessel, popping a beta, and leaving hydrogen in the metal
– recoil in a crystal by the decay of a component atom, leaving tracks of displaced atoms and broken bonds
– similar displacement of atoms in a crystal by momentum imparted by external beta or gamma rays or neutrons
– insertion of helium by nearby alpha sources
– disruption of covalent bonds in polymers, leading to free radicals, which are attacked by ambient oxygen, always present in a polymer exposed to air.
… etc.
I sometimes use it as a sort of notepad when I am doing research for myself. Available from anywhere and even if somebody reverts the edits they are still in the history. Quite handy, it turns out.
That’s exactly the plan!
And more things like neutron induced swelling, embrittlement or loss of hardness depending on what the neutrons do with the dislocations and dispersed phases, and combined effects like radiation effects on corrosion, radiolysis of materials and their products attacking other materials (oxygen → ozone → rubber cracking…)… the field is rich and full of goodies!
Also, the way fission damage to ceramic objects provides a dating method when they are annealed, as long-captive bond strain energy is released.
I can’t recall where, but recently saw a picture comparing nuclear energy to chemical energy. A classroom setting, and the chalkboard had notes and simple graphics (maybe a Leclanché cell <> mushroom cloud) showing that while ordinary chemical bonds contain ~1eV of energy (or a few eV), an actinide nucleus gives up ~14MeV when it fissions. This not only explains the impressive size of nuke weapons, but also gives us a hint that, when a fission occurs in ordinary matter of any kind, the single event can break a million chemical bonds. When considering radiation damage it may be helpful to refer to this difference.
Yup. Works the same way as thermoluminiscent dosimetry, accumulation of radiation damage over time and then releasing photons when heated up when the damaged lattice is snapping back and releasing potential energy deposited into the damage. I wore the TLD crystal when I went to Chernobyl, back in 2006… (…and got dose below its sensitivity threshold. It’s apparently quite safe over there.)
That was, kind of, the point I was making. RTGs have the major disadvantage that the alpha particles build up as helium, making design difficult for prolonged use. Beta batteries look like an ideal solution - except for tritium, which has 3He as its byproduct - but the current available is just too small.
It really looks to me as if the universe is designed to keep intelligent life tied to a planet. Given the way we treat our own one, if I were to believe in a god I might think this was intelligent design. As it is, I have mixed feelings about it given the way human beings have traditionally treated the inhabitants of places they have colonised.
So, 10kWh costs $3500, and a power pack contains 15 of the 10kWh battery modules, and provides 100kWh continuous. And we need about 2 billion power packs to get the world off CO2.
Then: 2 × 109 powerpacks × 15 battery packs / power pack × $3500 / battery pack = 1.05 × 1014$
Annual Gross World Product is about 0.75 × 1014 $
e.g. it would take about 18 months of the total world productivity being directed into manufacturing Tesla power packs.
What about venting the helium? Maybe getting the isotope enclosure linked with a helium pressurization tank via a capillary, to equalize the pressures? Or use a helium-permeable enclosure? The thing tends to diffuse through some materials; and we can as well turn the annoyance into an advantage.
3He is not a problem as tritium is already a gas, unless it is bound chemically to some matrix, e.g. a tritiated polymer.
For really high power densities, nothing of contemporary tech can beat a fission reactor. The Greenpeace types break out in hives when they hear it but no amount of protesting will make it untrue. Russians understood that well and wisely developed e.g. the Topaz-class reactors for their radar satellites.
It looks to me that the universe is just being a dick. In such contest, we have to be the bigger one to prevail. So, to the labs!
And if this nonsense is a god’s work, let’s poke it in whatever it has for the eyes in the process. For the lulz.
