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Finally—a “solution” for a city whose residents are too stupid to change the batteries in their smoke detectors!

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But what happens after ten years? Maybe then they’ll mandate nuclear batteries—I hear they have electrolytes!

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Could Elon build a slightly larger version of the “nuclear” battery to power a Tesla sedan?

At first glance this strikes me as an endless (not literally) source of science fair project ideas.

And on a separate node, aren’t all batteries nuclear in the sense that all their atoms are nuclearly endowed :wink:

PS auto correct insists the right spelling for “nuclearly” is “unclearly”… go figure!

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Click for access to the full text.

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No those were average Texans. We get to walk around armed in the republic of Texas.

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I think back then Texas oddly banned open carry. I am only talking about uniformed private guards and police “details”.

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“Nuclear batteries” such as betavoltaics and thermoelectric radioisotope thermal generators (RTGs) have very long life but low power output—useless for a vehicle. The RTG on the Perseverance Mars rover has a power output of around 110 watts, while the dinky engine on my 30 year old Toyota Starlet has a power output of 65 kW.

There’s never a Ford Nucleon when you need one.

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From the original article

The market research and opinion polling firm found that 41 per cent of those surveyed in France are supportive of a proposal from engineer Jean-Marc Jancovici to ban people from taking more than four aeroplane trips during their entire lifetime.

The survey, which took a representative sample of 1,010 French people aged 18 and above, found that support for the draconian measure was even higher among those under the age of 35, with 48 per cent supporting the idea and rising to 59 per cent for 18 to 24-year-olds.

The CSA institute also found that 64 per cent of French people were in favour of reducing their own use of air travel over the medium term to help the climate, with support jumping to 72 per cent for those under 35.

The book of knowledge provides a bit more helpful information on the initiator of the proposal mentioned above, along with a link to a piece of advice published in 2016 on his website (link)

Je ne prétends pas que mon cas soit transposable à n’importe qui, et l’objet de ce qui suit n’est surtout pas de m’ériger en modèle de vertu (d’autant moins que j’ai adopté ce mode de fonctionnement avant tout parce que c’est agréable, et non parce que c’est écologique !), mais il m’a semblé intéressant de décrire comment s’organisent alors les déplacements, car je suis dans une catégorie généralement grosse consommatrice de déplacements en voiture : j’habite en banlieue et la maison est pleine d’enfants.

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She should be in cargo.
Hope they put her over the wing.

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Andrew Côté posts on 𝕏:

How to make a battery that lasts 5000 years in three steps

1: Take used graphite shielding from a nuclear power plant.
2: Scrape off the layer of carbon-14 that’s formed via neutron bombardment
3: Compress this along with carbon-12 into a diamond.

Diamonds can convert radiation directly into electrical current, something first proposed by the University of Bristol in 2016.

The half-life of carbon-14 is 5730 years. It decays by emitting a low-energy electron which bounces around the surrounding carbon-12 diamond crystal lattice generating electron-hole pairs, which creates a small electrical current. From the carbon-14 you get usable energy and nitrogen-14, a stable isotope.

One gram of carbon-14 would produce about 15 joules of energy per-day at an operating voltage of 2V — for reference, an IoT mesh network device that sends 12 bytes every hour consumes around 0.10 joules per day. A single one-gram diamond battery could power 150 mesh network nodes for 5000 years before the power output drops off substantially.

There are 250,000 tons of irradiated graphite shielding containing carbon-14 from the world’s nuclear power facilities today.

You can also tune the output power by choosing different radioactive isotopes — a Russian team developed a prototype battery using nickel-63 as the radioactive isotope and achieved a power density of 10μW/cm³ output and specific energy of 3.3Wh/kg - about 100x lower power output than lithium-ion batteries, but over the 100-year usable lifetime it contains 10x more total energy.

Nuclear diamond batteries have emerged from the world of academic research into a startup based in Switzerland, @ndbtechnology, building chips that provide ~100μW of power that last decades.

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Here is the home page of NDB Technology.

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Efforts to erase Garret Hardin:

… and instead promote

Her theory is more compatible with Marxism.

In his book, Hayes argued that what he called “the cult of exclusion” was possible because it was undergirded by a powerful story of inevitability, including the belief that open access would mean disrespectful or ignorant people mistreating the land. (In the United States, this idea was most vociferously articulated in an essay called “The Tragedy of the Commons,” written in 1968 by the ecologist and eugenicist Garrett Hardin, who argued that it was the fate of any communally managed property to be mismanaged and destroyed. Hardin’s work has since been widely debunked, including by the Nobel Prize-winning political scientist Elinor Ostrom, who showed that communities around the world are capable of managing shared resources sustainably.) Right to Roam organizers countered that another story was possible, one in which people were educated to appreciate and protect places they saw as partially their own.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/26/magazine/right-to-roam-england.html

If you’re interested in how this ‘persuasion’ works, look at this thread on Mastodon.

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My spider sense was tingling. Web page says NYC.
Limited patent portfolio:

And then I found this:
https://www.sec.gov/litigation/litreleases/lr-25829
https://www.sec.gov/files/litigation/complaints/2023/comp25829.pdf
https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/67796038/securities-and-exchange-commission-v-ndb-inc/

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Their Web page has plenty of flakiness markers. First of all, there’s the giant type “NEVER-RECHARGE BATTERY” juxtaposed with line art of a car, which suggests it could power a vehicle, which their currently claimed technology is around eight orders of magnitude too small.

Then there’s the “Vision” page:

At NDB, we pursue sustainable innovation based on our sustainability strategy, including our community, environment, and social value throughout our business activities.

We aspire to deliver advanced, innovative, green solutions for our environment and society, with the aim of leading sustainable innovation across cultures.

NDB is ready to take action to protect the environment and manage the various impacts of climate change

Building a sustainable business based on cutting-edge technologies is a significant challenge. Nevertheless, we remain determined to provide professional and outstanding services.

On the “Careers” page:

OUR UNITY IS OUR STRENGTH,
OUR DIVERSITY IS OUR POWER

We think that working at NDB will be one of the highlights of your life, something to be proud to share.

NDB offers career opportunities as it favors skill development in the energy sector. We encourage and reward effort and commitment as it benefits the entire team and the future of the company.

Talent is the key, and this is what we are recruiting. Embrace the unique and immersive culture inside our company and carry our values.

Thanks to the diversity and hard work, we can achieve exceptional productivity, quality, creativity, and innovation for the company and its partners.

On the “Invest Now” page, under the Investor Relations contact information, they misspell “United States”.

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Launches rockets on demand for the U.S. Space Force.

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Can’t spell “cue”.

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Look either people in this modern age are just hypochondriac pansies or there is something in our food supply genetically weakening us. Could be both but since I know the WEF wants us dead I’m not ruling out the latter.

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No, food can’t ‘genetically’ weaken you. Instead, look at this:

With travel and globalization, the germs have gained a superpower they’ve never had - and we’ve got so many more pathogens to deal with that it puts us way out of what the environment we’ve evolved in were like. The advances in sanitation and medicine have by now been offset by the evolution of pathogens.

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So hypochondriac pansies it is!

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