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by dongobongo
1898 days ago
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The typical radioisotope generator is a Plutonium-238 source like the MMRTG on the Mars rovers. The Plutonium decays by alpha emission with a half life of 80+ years. The problem is there is a very limited supply of Plutonium-238 - we use the entire supply for Mars Rover - and it's very controlled material. The CAB starts with a non-radioactive material like Cobalt-59 spheres placed in a ceramic matrix. It is then put into a nuclear reactor where it turns into Cobalt-60, which releases energy by beta and gamma emission with a half life of 5 years. This charging can be done every couple years to generate more Cobalt-60 inside the device. Such a power source is something like 40x as power dense as the Pu-238 source and since it's made of high temperature ceramics, it can go to very high temperatures which is very useful for space generators where you have to reject heat using blackbody radiators. |
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I asked because of an experiment conducted by a german research institute at an accelerator in France. They modified nuclear states by using "shaped" x-ray pulses. I wondered if it were possible to store energy by making a nucleus undergo a transition to a meta-stable state (spontaneous emission is forbidden by a selection rule) but which could eventually be triggered by another pulse to extract energy again.
I hope my description of the process I imagine is not too far off, it has been a while since my nuclear physics course ;)
Here is the article and some discussion:
https://www.mpg.de/16449701/coherent-nuclear-excitations
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26190965