NUCLEAR Diamond Battery: BUSTED!! (Patreon)

While diamond batteries are in principal possible, they remain one of the least well thought out, impractical, and massively oversold half baked ideas ever thrown out there by a reputable university as an ‘amazing new development’.

It requires you take some of the lowest level, easiest to store nuclear waste, and refine it into high level radioactive waste- then give it out to people as ‘batteries’ with one of the lowest power supply densities on the market.

It fails on almost every level. Their claims of making batteries using 14C as a power source seem to be based entirely on speculation. Further even if they can make them, their power supply density is going to be at least 10x lower than the 63 nickel prototypes. These prototypes would require kgs of battery, costing millions of dollars, merely to be able to trickle charge a mobile phone. If you could get this sort of power out of it, you are getting up into the territory of selling ‘dirty bomb’ kits. That alone for me isn’t a total deal breaker, after all we fuel our cars with exactly the same stuff they make fuel-air bombs from…. but lets just say it’s a concern!

The fact that in their video they ‘ask the public’ to come up with new uses for this battery reeks of a PR stunt. Lets be real, what real technological advance did scientists and engineers ‘ask the public’ to come out with potential uses for this MIND BLOWINGLY low power battery.

Betavoltaics are not a lost cause, but they are exceptionally limited. They are certainly not the amazing new discovery, and solution to nuclear waste that the University of Bristol was portraying them to be!