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Comment on Coin-sized nuclear 3V battery with 50-year lifespan enters mass production

If it’s a small battery intended to be used a long time, pretty much a guarantee these are going to end up in the general landfill waste stream.

I wonder how much contamination one of these will cause if it goes through a waste incinerator. If they have 50 Curies of activity, that’s more than a million times what’s in a smoke detector.

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Semi_Hemi_Demigod@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
They’re probably going to be used in medical devices like pacemakers. So they’ll be in the land but not necessarily a land_fill_

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ChokingHazard@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
There’s a lot of radioactive thorium to be found in coal ash leftover from power plants. I am not worried about this.

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floo@retrolemmy.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
They decay into copper, which can be easily recycled.

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- deegeese@sopuli.xyz ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
  Yeah, but it’s radioactive nickel-63 for many decades until it all decays.
  
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  - WoodScientist@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
    There’s radioactive and then there’s radioactive. It beta decays with particles that would only penetrate 5 cm of air or .01 cm of tissue.
    
    You could get a thousand of these batteries, grind them up into a powder, explode them in a crowded place as an improvised dirty bomb…and you would still cause less harm than if you did the same with countless chemicals you can buy at the hardware store.
    
    There are many forms of radiation. Something like this going into a landfill is perfectly safe.
    
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  - floo@retrolemmy.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
    Yeah, that’s how the battery works.
    
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    deegeese@sopuli.xyz ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
    Which is why your suggestion of simply recycling copper won’t work. You don’t have copper, you have a radioactive alloy.
    
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  - markinov@lemmygrad.ml ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
    And that nickel-63 can be recycled to make new batteries.
    
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Cethin@lemmy.zip ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
Eh, it’s likely not an issue. There’s radioactive material in water runoff and all kinds of places. A small amount is not noticeable. Even in the worst case, these aren’t an issue. If they can be near your body 24/7 without causing problems, them getting spread out into even smaller pieces can only be less significant than that.

People are too scared by radiation. It usually isn’t an issue and you’re constantly interacting with it. It’s only in very rare circumstances where you need to worry.

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