[jdurg]

1 Curie is the amount of radiation given off by 1 gram of pure Radium-226, I believe.  1 Curie is equal 3.7x10¹⁰ disintegrations per second (Becquerels).  So you can get a rough estimate of the mass that a curie of a substance would require based upon it's halflife.  If something has a half-life of 10 years that means that if you had a 2 gram sample of it, after 10 years, or 315532800 seconds (taking into account the two leap-years that would occur), you would have one gram left.  So let's say this mystical isotope has an atomic mass of 140 grams per mole.  One gram of that would be equal to 1/140th moles which would equal about 4301428571428571428571 atoms that disintegrated.  Divide this by the number of seconds that elapsed and you get 1.3x10¹³ disintegrations per second.  So your sample would have an activity of about 368 Curies per gram.  Now this isn't an absolute method for calculating the amount of curies based upon mass, but it gives you a good idea.  (Now I'll go back and check all my math and logic and make sure that everything is correct).

[Mr. Pink]

tritium is probably the best for a nuclear battery. it has a half-life of about 20 years, so it has a long enuf life to be practical, but it shoots off enought beta to generate a good charge. Get some sort of gel, wax, or at least something chemically bonded to the tritium, so you dont have to deal with gas. If you must have gas, house it in glass, because although plastic isnt very gas permiable in air, tritium is so small, it will simply slip between the plastic molecules. And sure, you can post it on the HV forum. Oh and speaking of HV, do u know where i could buy a Van De Graff generator not from united nuclear?

[jdurg]

Tritium has a half life of 12 years, and although it's a beta emitter, it's a fairly weak one.  (The beta particles don't have a heckuva lot of energy).  If you were to use a tritium compound, you'd lose a good portion of the energy as the beta particles would hit other atoms in the compound/matrix and wind up going bye-bye.  Thus, you'd create a mixture of positive and negative charges within the chamber itself and completely destroy any type of circuit.

[Mr. Pink]

ahhhh, makes sense. 18.6 MeV beta energy seemed a bit low to me. Although, it does say here that low energy beta radiation is needed to prevent harmful radiation:

"Atomic batteries use radioisotopes that produce low energy beta particles or sometimes of varying energies alpha particles. Low energy beta particles are need ed to prevent the production of high energy penetrating Bremsstrahlung radiation that would require heavy shielding. Radioisotopes such as Tritium, Nickel-63 and Promethium-147 have been tested. Plutonium-238 may have also been tested."

-Wikipedia

although i guess you could solve the bremsstrahlung problem with thcker shielding, and therefore you wouldnt have the mix of charges within the battery

[Mr. Pink]

They already make "nuclear batteries".  There are a great number of people walking around this Earth right now who have some plutonium imbedded in their chest.  For these people, their pacemakers are powered by small plutonium batteries which should last their entire lifetime.  

Yes, but they are of the RTG variety, as plutonium generates an unusual amount of heat when it decays. They really havnt made a practical/working model of the beta-powered battery. They have made ones with a phospherenscent material and an alpha emitter, and plenty of RTGs, but the beta ones are still in R&D

[Corvettaholic]

United Nuclear has some Thallium-204 that puts only Beta radiation something to 763MeV. Is this enough punch? Think the presence of alpha or gamma would matter? If not, maybe get something that emits all three with Beta being the most powerful. Problem with this stuff is that its going to be freaking expensive. 60 bucks for one uCi.

Also noticed some Polonium-210 that is alpha only. $60 for .1uCi (almost nothing) where the alpha particles are 5304KeV. How does that compare to americium? Jdurg: do you have a good resouce where I can look up known amounts of radiation energy from radioactive isotopes?

Any leads of buying a curie of tritium?

[Mr. Pink]

u can get tritium from glow-in-the dark gun sights, watch dails, and other, expensive things. you can get gaseus tritium from "trasers". As for polonium, its barely worth the money. it has a half-lif of about 180 days, and 0.1 Uci is barely anything. as for thallium, that should work, as long as you have money, you dont need much of that stuff to make a battery

[jdurg]

1 Curie of ANYTHING would be incredibly expensive and dangerous.  Most likely, you would need an NRC license to even posses a curie of a radioisotope.  The majority of radioisotopes are sold on the microcurie scale as a full curie is actually a great deal of radiation.  I have two grams of depleted Uranium, and that is only about 0.6 uCi.  I will be getting another ~5 gram chunk shortly, so I'll have a total of around 2.1 microcuries of Uranium and that's approximately 7 grams of the stuff.  So to put that in perspective, you would need about 3,333 KILOGRAMS of depleted uranium to equal the amount of radiation in ONE GRAM of Radium-226.  WOW is Radium radioactive.  

[Corvettaholic]

You should get some for your collection!

I would love to play with radium, but "play" is a bad word for it because I don't want to die. I think I'm just going to order some stuff off unitednuclear until I get rich enough to buy my own lab and get radium... then have someone mess with it for me. Or the smoke detector approach could work too. How would I go about getting one of those licenses anyway? Is there an online application I can find? The only apps for fun stuff I found is through the ATF for getting a license to produce high explosives.

[Corvettaholic]

The battery project has been put on hold  

Lack of money. The army trip to Cali murdered my bank account... again. Maybe next month...

[Corvettaholic]

Mitch, any idea how Berkeley went about getting a NRC license for nuclear material? I ask you because I know you work with the stuff. I just sent off an email to the NRC regional office asking about licensing, or if even need one, if I want over 5 curies of Americium-241... I'd much rather use radium though.

[nuenergy_scientist]

All of the patented nuclear batteries that I have explored generate only small amounts of power. I have developed a method that generates useful amounts of electrical power using only natural obtained radioisotopes. I will be giving a lecture next month disclosing my methods... http://www.nuenergy.org/iw/2005/perreault2005.htm which is being presented at Inventor's Weekend... http://www.nuenergy.org/iw/2005/conference2005.htm

                   -B.A. Perreault

[Corvettaholic]

I don't suppose you'll have the lecture available on the web? I would LOVE to hear it!

[Mr. Pink]

I'd much rather use radium though.

If you are lucky enough to find any number of radium-enriched trinkets in an antique shop, just dissolve them in some solvent (i dont know which one) with some barium sulphate. if you filter the solution, the barium sulphate and anything that isnt radium will stay behind, and a pure radium solution will come out.

[Corvettaholic]

I'm sure I can find plenty of radioactive junk in northern Arizona, there's a lot of mysterious things up there. But do I REALLY want to try and make radium salts? I mean, of course I do, but how safe is it to do? And where in the world would I get barium sulfate? After picking through nuenergy_scientists website, I saw his method for getting pure radium as opposed to the curie method, but those two methods are definantly beyond my scope of doing things.