Can Nuclear Voltaic Power Get Us to the Stars? Or at least Mars?
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- čas přidán 23. 03. 2024
- How could we power a spaceship or off-world colony for half a century?
Nuclear Voltaic Power could be the answer. China has announced a nuclear battery breakthrough that will allow power production for fifty years, with thousand year batteries possible soon.
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65 years ago, my Physics teacher said to me "An ounce of electrons can launch a battleship to Jupiter." and then chalked the maths on the blackboard. Difficult to forget that . . . 😎
PS. I have forgotten the maths, but remember his name: R. M. Marsden. Bless him.
Depends on how you use the electrons. If using 1 ounce of electrons going across a 1 volt potential, it can accelerate a 53.5 ton battleship by only 31 mph. You need 30300 mph to go directly to Jupiter, or 23400 mph with gravity assists from Venus and Earth.
If you convert that ounce of electrons into pure energy, e=mc² style, you get 2550 Terajoules. That's enough to get the USS Alabama(1942) to Jupiter with gravity assists or the USS Nevada(1916) there directly.
He used more than a volt and was much more general about battleship weights, and knew nothing about gravity assists, I suspect. Thanks for the polishing there. I went in the direction of thermodynamics after that, and now, of course, I have no brain left, and must swim in the tropics. Cheers. @@kolbyking2315
Teachers like that are what inspires the next generation to do great things. My physics teacher, Mr. Sears, told me when I was just a subnerd that a single proton... accelerated sufficiently. Could launch a rocket to the Moon. Blew my mind.
Thank you. I never heard about these kind of batteries before. Effectively they seem to be a kind of nuclear reactor. Anyway I remember a zubrin article debunking Vasimr in which he claimed that we need an improvement in power to mass ratio of two orders of magnitude to achieve the quick transit times to mars: On the ‘39 days to Mars’ claim, Zubrin says "VASIMR would need to couple with a nuclear reactor system with a power of 200,000 kilowatts and a power-to-mass ratio of 1,000 watts per kilogram, while the largest space nuclear reactor ever built, the Soviet Topaz, had a power of 10 kilowatts and a power-to-mass ratio of 10 watts per kilogram." So do these Nuclear Voltaic batteries produce that kind of power to mass ?
He was exactly right... And didn't want to wait for that. He wanted "Mars DIrect" to use available infrastructure like Falcon Heavy. While his plans are excellent to get the job done now those with control of the resources want totally reusable systems. VASIMR does need a lot of power and solar won't work well on the way to Mars... But nuclear is coming, by the US and EU or by China, and so is the VASIMR, once we have a source of sufficient power.
Thanks so much for these valuable lessons! The "extra" content at the end of the lessons is also first rate, and very interesting.
Thank you Jeff! That way someone can get the gist or dive a little deeper.
As the graph at 8:17 show, these do have quite impressive energy densities, but the rate a which that energy is released, their power density, is quite low. Like with RTG's, nuclear voltaic cells rely on the steady decay of unstable isotopes. They can't slow down or ramp up the reaction like a fission reactor can, they just get a steadily decreasing amount of power as the material slowly decays away, releasing half its energy during its first half life, then a quarter during its next half life, etc. If you used the materials you listed in your starship example, Nickle 63 and carbon 14, you would have to wait quite a long time before you got that energy out, cause they have half lives of 76 thousand years and 5.7 thousand years respectively. That huge ship worth of batteries in the example would produce barely enough power to run a light bulb. It would do so for dozens of millennia, but that's not really the power needs of a spaceship, more a long term vault project.
If we want something more *power* dense you need a shorter half-life, like plutonium, which has a half life of around 80 years. Which why we use plutonium for RTG's. But making a significant chunk of your ship out of plutonium would be quite expensive, probably even more expensive than a fission reactor, which has an even better power density and can be throttled. The main advantage of RTG's and these nuclear voltaic cells is they are much simpler than a fission reactor, with no moving parts, which is good for a probe or a medical device that needs to run on a trickle of power for decades without maintenance. But if you're trying to make a fast high power ship that is going back and forth to port every few months, a proper fission reactor would give you better performance.
That's true... But he potential is much higher than these early models. That's why I went with 1,000x so it's between the 100 minimum estimated and 10,000 maximum. I also went with a 1% power harvesting when over 35% is possible these days.
@@terranspaceacademy No, you misunderstand my point. The energy density is between 100 to 10,000 times better than lithium ion, sure, but the power density is way worse. No matter what you do, you're not going to get a significant amount of power out of the natural decay of Carbon 14, the half-life is just too long. It has a huge amount of energy, sure, but it releases that energy over the course of 5 thousand years. The only way to make the energy release faster, is to pick a material with a shorter half life, but those are far more expensive and not suitable to being incorporated into a ship's hull.
The part where you say the power output would be 75 megawatts is a conversion error. Everything before that was in terms of energy, you got that the battery would *store* 7.5 gigawatt hours of *energy* . That is a measure of the batteries capacity. The total amount of energy the nuclear fuel contains. You then say we could extract 1% of that energy, getting 75 megawatts of *power* . That shouldn't be power. We are still talking about energy here. 1% of 7.5 GWh is 75 MWh, not 75 MW. That means of the 7.5 GWh of energy the battery can store, 75 MWh of that energy is usable. If you want to know the *power* output of the battery, you need to know how quickly that energy is released. Power is energy divided by time.
Since carbon 14 has a half life of 5.6 thousand years, that means half of the 75 MWh of usable energy is released over the course of 49.056 million hours. So the power output of the battery is 0.76444 watts. Even if we made the battery 100% efficient, we'd still only be looking at around 76 watts of power, not enough to run any engine of note. Making the battery out of Nickle 63 would make this even worse, as that has an even longer half life.
Remember, always check your units! Going from GWh to GW without ever dividing by hours should have been an immediate red flag.
@@terranspaceacademy Also, in addition to checking your units, its also good to just have a sanity check of "is this thing physically possible?" Like, does it make sense for 7.5 tons of batteries to be able to output 7.5 gigawatts of heat and electricity for 50 years? No. That's thousands of times more energy and power dense than any nuclear reactor, that should have also immediately been a red flag. 7.5 tons producing 7.5 gigawatts for 50 years would require an energy density of 438 TWh per ton. That's not an energy density a thousand times better than lithium ion, that's an energy density comparable to antimatter. Nuclear materials are not that energy dense. Even if you picked a much shorter half life material than carbon 14, one that *does* output a a gigawatt of power per ton rather than a watt, it would only last a few weeks, not decades. Also such materials are fantastically expensive and impossible to store for long periods, cause they decay away to almost nothing in a month.
But even if you did pick such a power dense material, that would still leave us with the second reality check, of does it make sense that 7.5 tons of material could survive 7.5 gigawatts of power being passed through it? No! That's as power dense as a nuclear reactor undergoing a meltdown. There is a reason nuclear reactors are thousands of times less power dense than this, its because no machine we can build can survive that much power being dumped into so little mass, it would not just melt, it would vaporize. There are limits to how quickly we can cool things, and this exceeds them by several orders of magnitude. The amount of equipment you would need to process those gigawatts of heat and turn it into electricity would have to be several orders of magnitude larger to keep from melting. And the amount of radiators you would need to cool that equipment in the vacuum of space is even larger still. A 150 ton spaceship is not large enough to handle such power outputs. The radiator array alone would need to be several times more massive than that.
The fact that the example calculation you gave produced physically implausible results should have been another clue to double check your math. If the results you're getting are impossibly large, that's a good sign you made an error somewhere. The error in this case is at 10:20, where you mix up watt hours and watts, getting a power figure that is 10 million times higher than it should be, because you didn't divide the Watt hours by the time it takes the battery to discharge. Which again, for the case of carbon 14, is over 5 thousand years. That was a third red flag. This battery is powered by beta decay, that depends on the half life of the material. You can't create a 50 year beta voltaic battery with materials that have half lives of millennia.
@@terranspaceacademy Its been a few days, are you going to do anything about the power estimate mistake? The conversion error at 10:20 resulted in your power figure being millions of times too large. That's not a small typo you can just ignore, that was central to the premise of the video, so its concerning that you haven't seemed to have made any kind of correction.
I'm sorry if I've come off as rude, I'm not trying to be. There is nothing shameful about mixing up watt hours and watts, its an easy mistake to make, we're only human. It would be shameful though if you didn't correct it even after people pointed it out to you, leaving the video up even though it is misinforming people. I understand not wanting to take the video down, but please, could you at least write a pinned comment explaining the error? Or perhaps make a video on energy vs power where you mention the mistake and use it as an example to help other people in your audience learn about it, turn it around into a teaching opportunity. After all, like you've said to a different commenter, the entire purpose of this channel is to learn together.
@@massimocole9689Valuable feedback and sound arguments, from my layman's perspective. I saw so much potential in these batteries. You put this into another perspective. We need more efficient conductors that would avoid energy to heat loss. Maybe such materials could also convert radiation to electricity without so much heat?
Thank you. This is a great overview and logistics and spec breakdown
You are most welcome my friend :-)
I enjoyed this one, thanks for sharing.
You are most welcome!
Excellent video, thank you.
Greetings,
Anthony
Glad you liked it and thanks for watching!
Lots of interesting information about theories. One I’ve pondered but have yet to hear anyone taking about is the use of nuclear energy in a molten reactor to make xenon for use as a propellant. From 32 years in the power industry talking daily to nuclear power plants one of their Achilles heels is the inadvertent production of xenon that has to be cleaned out of the feed water to allow higher power levels. If it can be made accidentally I’m sure someone could figure out how to make more on demand. I’m a big fan of the thorium LFTR since the fuel is liquid and can be constantly reprocessing and cleaning and has the side benefit of lower long term waste production.
Every thing else aside, I like the idea of creating artificial gravity in a liquid fuel engine by spinning it echoing the design of the firefly engine in my favorite under appreciated scifi.
Wow... I can think of a simple separator using centrifugal force. Xenon is pricey and a good source would be valuable. LFTR is I think a very viable design, China (again) has one running. I promise you there is an army of analysts reading through the golden age of American scientific innovation... 1950 through 70s.
Very impressive concept.
Thank you.
Informative
Thank you!
This is Robert Foreward and Greg Benford thinking. Good job
Thank you!
I watched this live at TVIW!! I think they go by Interstellar Research Group now tho
Ad Astra does?
في المستقبل البعيد وبفضل التكنولوجيا المتقدمة سوف يتساوى الخيال مع الواقع ويمتلك الإنسان قوى الآلهة ليحول الكون والأكوان المتعددة إلى جنة خالدة ❤
حلمي أن يكون هذا صديقي. من أجلنا جميعًا. :-)
And yet something else that makes me go "Hmmmm" LOL Luv it
We do too!! :-)
This is really interesting idea. A problem will be heat rejection. If you’re carrying gigawatt hours of energy, and you only get one percent of that then you have to figure out a way to radiate the other 99%. You would need to have massive massive massive radiators. another problem is going to be availability of the radioactive substrates. How difficult is it going to be to gather together tons of purified carbon 14 or nickel 63? It’s doable I’m sure but it might not be economic for multiple ships.
The end film from Britain shows that they have almost 200,000 metric tonnes of C-14 rich carbon damping rods from nuclear reactors. Nickel 63 I'm not sure about and will need to research sources.
@@terranspaceacademy i’m sure there’s plenty of source material, however, it might be difficult to separate carbon-14 from everything else, especially when dealing with a radioactive source.
The other major weakness of the betavoltaics is that the power density is terri wha . Something like .01 W to .1 w per kilogram. So a 7500 kg sample might only give you 75 to 750 W unusable power. They can do it for a very, very long time, however, it’s not enough power to really do anything meaningful on a spacecraft.
A beta voltaic cell is more or less a solar cell using radiation instead of light ...in the early 2000s, I read an article about a nuclear cell phone. The phone had rechargeable batteries, and the betavoltaic cell charged the phone when not in use ...
Well, cell phones used less power back then. The betavoltaic generator + battery is a good solution for seldom used devices, only if you live on a planet without light from the Sun. Otherwise, small solar cells are cheaper, lighter, easier to manufacture and more practical.
Theoretically, there have been commercial betavoltaics - the NanoTritium cell from CityLabs. I've never seen one. But they keep getting talked about, every year, for the last 2 decades.
@@PaulSpades Phones then used NiCads or nickel metal hydride batteries....and , in theory, could be trickle charged by a betavoltaic cell when not in use. No bulky solar panel. I don't know if any prototypes were built...I got the impression none were.
I did see a tiny model steam engine running a small DC motor as a generator used to charge an old Nokia phone. Steam cell research?
Some pacemakers back in the day had a radioactive power supply...my grandmother had one in the early '70s...I don't know if it was a tiny radioisotope generator, or a betavoltaic cell.
These were used in patients where surgery every six to change batteries wasn't practical ( although why not use rechargeable batteries and inductive charging? ) .....
I like it. Most of our devices have at least six hours of "down time" due to sleep.
We definitely need nuclear electric propulsion. Preferably, with a drive capable of sustained/continuous 1G acceleration for long trips.
That way, we can leave the spinning donuts in orbits and on cyclers.
It would be fantastic :-)
Interesting information. Humans definitely caught the high difficulty starter solar system. Enormous resources but planets range from simply dangerous. To you will be crushed, shedded, & converted into frozen meat dust nearly instantly. With most planets closer to the latter.
It's a great obstacle course... A boot camp to be worthy :-)
a 7.5 ton array of the chinese batteries (0.1 mA 3A) would produce 2.25kW if they weighed 1g each, the maths in this video are a long way off reality. The ISS produces up to 120 kW of electricity from about 6 tons of hardware, which is a great deal more. With supercapacitors you might be able to store energy for spurts of ionic propulsion, you could do the same with huge arrays of solar cells which will only get lighter in the future. Its not unreasonable to expect that 250 kW could be produced at earth orbit with an array weighing 1 ton at some point, perhaps even less with evolving material science. This would make trips to Jupiter and even Saturn viable with solar electric propulsion or even magenetoplasma propulsion combined with supercapacitor storage. But betavoltaics does not seem to be the way in its current form, and an alphavoltaic system would be better since it requires less shielding on manned missions (forget gammavoltaics).
We are talking about potential... Not what the very first functional design can do today.
If you use that energetic protective field to manipulate the plasma energetic field already filling the space around you , "decompressing " it in front of the vessel and "recompressing" it behind it. You could both protect the vessel and propel at the same time. Space isn't empty and the faster you go the more dense it will become etc. etc. etc......
Oh that's cool... swimming through the interstellar medium...
You have a wonderful habit of making my brain hurt. Thank you for another outstanding video.
How practical would it be to have an Earth-Moon/Lunar cycler tug/ship? Would be about a period of seven-ten days but seems like it would simplify moving things back and forth.
Imagine a ship that powers itself for hundreds of years... mind-boggling.
There is an error at 10:20. You mix up energy and power. You estimate that the battery can store 7.5 GWh of energy, and then you say 1% of that is 75 MW of power. 1% of 7.5 GWh is 75 MWh of energy, not 75 MW of power. To convert watt hours of energy into watts of power we need to know how many hours it takes the batteries to discharge. Since this battery is suppose to last 50 years, that means those 75 MWh of usable energy is doled out over the course of 438000 hours, so the power output of the battery is 75MWh/438000h = 171.2 watts. That's not much. Its also even worse than that, cause if you made the battery out of the materials you mentioned (Carbon 14 and Nickle 63), it wouldn't take 50 years to discharge, it would take over 5 thousand.
Dang... Now I'm sad... unless you're just looking at things from a normal battery perspective. Remember, this device is creating energy by radioactive decay and those factors were considered in the calculations.
@@terranspaceacademy Unfortunately not, the things I'm talking about are also true for nuclear batteries. Energy is energy, power is power. When that graph says these batteries have thousands of times higher energy density than regular batteries they are talking about the energy stored in the nuclear fuel. However since the battery is powered by the slow decay of that fuel, that energy is released really slowly, so the power output is really low. The nuclear fuels you used have half lives of thousands of years, so it would be millennia before they released even half their energy.
@@terranspaceacademy Are you going to do anything to correct the video? The watthours to watts mistake is pretty important. Without that typo the actually power figures for such a battery isn't nearly enough to run a spaceship, which was the core idea of the video. The video in its current state is misinforming people.
Esto me interesa 👌
Encantado de escuchar que mi amigo!
For long-term space travel must we travel with the biome of our planet?
About 40 years ago I came across an article in New scientist describing an experiment in a German research institute.
They elucidated that by raising rats in a totally germ-free environment, that the rats died emaciated as if they had starved to death.
This is one of the first references I came across indicating that there was a gut biome that was essential for our and other mammals survival.
In other words it is a cool evolved Cooperative system and it may not be the first.
The mitochondria inside every one of ourselves converting glucose into ATP is actually a plant based unit, this would seem to indicate that we are not animal but a combination of animal plants virus, bacteria, fungi, and an additional plethora of other species living in cooperation supporting each other.
So back to my original question, can we leave the splatter with just some basic food water etc, or must we bring along the planets cooperative biome, of which just one cypher?
I suspect the great deal additional research will be required.
Scientia Habet Non Domus,
(Knowledge Has No Home)
antiguajohn
PS, is it possible complexity of bringing along our planetary interrelated biome, perhaps elucidate the Fermi paradox,?
It will indeed be an issue... AI will be necessary or long separated space colonies will transmit plagues with each new contact.
This is exactly why we don't shoot nuclear "waste" into the sun like some suggest.
I thought a subduction zone was a good plan until I found out about this.
I was just reading about Bose-Einstein condensating photons between two plasma lenses. Maybe this can work with any bosons, such as Cooper paired He3 superfluid? right? Then you focus a high frequency, high powered laser on it and *boom* you have your power source for space travel to beyond Jupiter?
I'm not sure I'm understanding... Photons cannot Bose-Einstein condensate. They are used to strip away energetic gas molecules to "cool" the gas down to a fraction above absolute zero and form the BEC. This is of course a very dense form of matter... In some ways the densest possible outside of neutron starts etc... Are you thinking of the potential to bottle a large enough volume of BEC gas... Say hydrogen, to use as rocket fuel? If so that's an awesome thought. What is the energy density of this gas if heated by a laser as you describe? Let's do some math on this.
@@terranspaceacademy photons are bosons therefore they Bose-Einstein condensate, albeit I think in 2D. He3 is a fuel for an aneutronic fusion reaction, but it's a fermion unless it's Cooper paired, in which case it flows. This flow can be turned into spacecraft motion when fused using a high energy photon. The bosons are already quantized, all you need is to give it a push.
@@terranspaceacademy the Bose-Einstein condensate would be inside a tiny little plasma bubble acting like a lense that keeps the quantized matter in place for the laser.
@@terranspaceacademy what I'm not sure of yet is whether the D2 would also need to be quantized, but I guess yes, just put it in every other bubble.
@@terranspaceacademy release the electrons after enough laser push?
I think Schottky it's supposed to be pronounced like "shot-key", not "shock-lee"...
I've done that before... I'll blame it on interdimensional differences. (After the great Schottky purse of 1620, when they all changed their names to Schocklee) Over here, it's Schocklee :-)
أيضا محرك الثوريوم افضل لي الرحلات الفضائية البعيدة...
قد يكون الثوريوم خيارًا أفضل، لكن المعالجة الكيميائية تمثل مشكلة. الكثير من الكتلة هناك.
Beaming power from satellites orbiting Mars can easily power the entire planet’s colonies
Dust?
If you've got big enough arrays you could say the same of Pluto but it's not viable. Too much infrastructure and again as Tony mentioned. Planet wide dust storms might interfere with you microwave beams.
Mars has dust in its atmosphere permanently, (It must be very fine!) There's less gravity, and almost no humidity.@@terranspaceacademy
Man, as soon as I get a 3DP, I am going to spend *days* trying my Idea untill I give up and accept being wrong...
Or revolutionize space flight...
One or the other...
That's the way to do it. Nothing proves reality better than applied physics.
@@terranspaceacademy
Thing is, I'm not a *maker.*
So even after I finally get one, it will be months before I will be able to actually test my theory.
I will just give up in days, utill I try again
Would a nickel and carbon 14 structure weigh less than stainless steel? Just as strong? Why don't they build the booster out of carbon fiber now? Just shield it and add insulation.
That's a good question and the answer is a four-letter word. COST. Steel is cheap and millions of workers are trained to use it. Carbon fiber takes special equipment and knowledge.
@terranspaceacademy would the weight difference nullify the cost difference over time? Or just add solid rocket boosters for heavy payload launches.
What are you making a AA battery out of to get 10 Kj 😂
Over it's lifetime my friend.
Also try element 115. Apparently it works for alien ships.
Doesn't last long enough for me to get it out of the lab! :-)
Blue print
Red print!
2:55 Energy measures the transfer of energy? That makes literally zero sense. Your videos are often filled with inaccuracies. I'm unsubscribing. You should get someone to proof your videos before you post them or you're wasting your time and our time. Throwing up a bunch of numbers that look fancy doesn't make them right.
Sorry to see you go Zach. The entire purpose of this channel is to learn together. I'm willing to put my work in front of 32,000 science nerds both to educate and entertain them and so that I can learn more. When you are willing to do the same then you can critical. Until then point out an error and we'll all be better off. Argumentum ad circularum, circular reasoning, is, on its face, a flawed approach. Thank you for pointing it out but I did not come up with these names. A flow of increasing entropy doesn't get the idea across as well. But best of luck.
@@terranspaceacademy That's the problem. You're doing a bad job and that's harmful. You need to get people to proof your work before you put it out there. Don't make videos acting like you know what you're saying if you're just engaging in Cunningham's law.
what u want with the stars , u can’t even understand the sun . U should have to go to work for what u do all day !
The sun is pretty easy to understand. A gravity fed fusion powered ball of hydrogen. People who ignore reality are what I don't understand. If there were proof of some other deeper reality I would love it. As long as its "secret" I doubt it.
nice thing is if we use the deuterium for the battery and electricity needed and then use that for impulse propulsion.
That would be very cool.