Not terribly innovative on its own, but given the DIY aspect and price, it can be a viable "eternal" auxiliary power supply for some hi-rel devices:
The tritium pipes are available on Aliexpress for 10-20 dollars a piece.
Best regards, Piotr
Buy a lithium battery! They last a lot longer than the half-life of tritium. Lots more power too.
We do use tritium lights so's to not bash our heads on the old bed frame at night.
After about 8 years, they are getting dim. Time to buy some fresh ones.
There is another type of atomic battery, namely the direct collection of betas in a vacuum. It makes small currents at hundreds of kilovolts, which can be hard to use efficiently.
I prefer the plastic filled with doped strontium aluminate - just needs to be in the sun for a few hours to work all night. 3M had an emergency torch that used it to great effect just before power LEDs became common.
My favourite is a zamboni pile taken from war surplus night vision devices. Looks like 3 black sticks of dynamite in a perspex frame. Produces insane voltage at essentially zero current - just about enough to electrostatically attract a long piece of foil again and again.
-- Regards, Martin Brown
I tried that, but there's not enough daylight in that bedroom to charge the strontium aluminate. Strontium aluminate is amazing stuff.
A lithium battery and an LED would last 30 years or so, but would involve more carpentry. And the nuke thing is cool.
One WWII-era sniperscope had a wristwatch mechanism that closed a contact briefly, about once a second. That fed a battery to a step-up transformer which drove a cold-cathode rectifier to charge the image converter tube.
Some cheap Russian night vision things have a battery and a pushbutton and a transformer and a rectifier. You are the inverter oscillator.
On a sunny day (Thu, 15 Aug 2019 19:20:26 +0200) it happened Piotr Wyderski wrote in :
Yes, I have 2 photo diodes looking at a tritium tube:
On a sunny day (Thu, 15 Aug 2019 13:03:29 -0700) it happened John Larkin wrote in :
I have an 80W solar panel looking at the nuclear processes in the sun.
That will get dim in a mere 12 hours.
Do you think there might be phosphor degradation over time?
I wonder what the time spectrum/waveform of the light looks like. I'd expect single-decay events to make detectable spikes into a good detector. Old clock dials, radium alphas hitting phosphors, sure did. They would make nice fat pulses into a PMT.
On a sunny day (Fri, 16 Aug 2019 08:04:17 -0700) it happened snipped-for-privacy@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote in :
Oh absolutely.
But since we are looking at seasonal changes a simple Fourier transform on the years of data would see that as a very very low frequency. It would not interfere with the experiment.
I think I did not test it with the tritium tubes, the glass stops most I'd think. I still have some radium painted watch hands. I may also still have some radium light switch that glows in the dark... And a phosphor screen.
This is a movie I made, just a few seconds long, only 300 kB, that shows the single events:
In Linux to get it you can use wget
On a sunny day (Fri, 16 Aug 2019 07:53:03 -0700) it happened snipped-for-privacy@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote in :
Nothing to worry about, just earth shadow, sun will be still there when morning comes :-) Buffer in a battery.
Easy for you to say. A few days worth of batteries for your house would be a big deal. Especially if a week-long snowstorm arrives. I guess you can always burn the chairs and the books.
Batteries at utility scale would be a gigantic industry. With environmental consequences.
The visible-light flashes should be resolvable, I'm thinking. The rate will be high, so a PMT would be ideal to see them. Some phosphors have nanosecond decays so the pulses will be short. Might be fun. You could maybe count the pulses as a way to measure your decay rate.
You can see individual alphas firing in an old radium-dial clock, once you are dark adapted. Looks cool. Makes big signals into a nearby PMT.
Or in the UK three months grey cloudy skies and the sun barely getting
15 degrees above the horizon even if the day happens to be sunny.UK has active radar "Please go round the dangerous bend" signs where I live - they work fine in midsummer but are dead in the water a couple of hours after sunset in winter and destroy a set of batteries every year. The ones with a wind turbine in addition fare a bit better.
Although the recent UK National grid MFU demonstrates that it might well make sense to have some battery storage in parallel with wind farms so that their relatively expensive inverters can be used to support the grid when the unexpected happens and generators go offline suddenly.
You can't ask the wind to blow harder or the sun to shine to order.
-- Regards, Martin Brown
A weeklong snowstorm will transfer megawatt-seconds to a few windmills. That will tide him over the lack of sunlight. Diversify.
That also works in XP (and the other WIN OS-es i think).
They still have not released enough information to say what was wrong. I s aw in another group that the frequency drop (the trigger for most of the lo ad shedding) happened some minutes before the gas plant went offline and th at a couple minutes before the wind farm went offline. So it is not at all clear what was cause and what was effect.
I'll wait for the report on what failed before I start talking about soluti ons.
-- Rick C. - Get 1,000 miles of free Supercharging - Tesla referral code - https://ts.la/richard11209
Vanadium flow batteries
might have environmental consequences - we might need new mines to supply the vanadium - but presumably that isn't what John Larkin had in mind (if it's possible to dignify the organ in question with the name "mind").
-- Bill Sloman, Sydney
On a sunny day (Fri, 16 Aug 2019 13:25:56 -0700) it happened John Larkin wrote in :
Oh yes. OTOH we have not had days of darkness here (yet?). And temperatures are not low either, this summer was / is the warmest ever measured I think? And if it really gets cold I have one of those mummy like polar sleeping bags.
Compared to those tritium -photo-cell batteries you get a trillion times more power with a solar panel, if you cannot - or are not allowed to use lipos or other batteries use supercaps perhaps, all depends on what you want to do. For heating you could use a water reservoir you heat up with the sun.
Indeed when things get critical people will start burning anything and if no food eat horses etc too. This happened in WW2. In some shipwreck situations they did eat each other.
Most greenies are hypocrites.
If they get cold feet they will want nuclear power, :-)
And that (nuclear power) is really the way to go. Thousands of people die in coal mines each year,
1 (one) person died from radiation in F*ckupshima IIRC. Then it is about the value of property that is more important than the value of human life, Greenies are hypocrites.Wildlife is thriving where Chernobyl was. Guess what, they removed that video from youtube. What a puppet show world. Anthropogenic climate change is big business, just like religion in medieval times and maybe still is in some countries, a way to maintain power (political power that is) and to control the masses, sell, never mind the faked science. Kids love it, demonstrate against climate change, no school! Tax the weather.
But only after about a million years of random walk scattering to get to the surface of the photosphere and escape. The nuclear reactions only run deep inside the core at high pressures and temperatures.
It leads to an interesting paradox very massive stars burn out extremely quickly because they can burn fuel in a much greater volume internally.
-- Regards, Martin Brown
That is utter bollocks. The raw frequency data for a few sites have been published online with timestamps that match that event see for example:
The frequency (and voltage) dip and load shedding was all over inside a five minute period and then bounced back. 16:52:44 - 16:57:00
The preliminary report is somewhat uninformative with no new info apart from the possibility that a lightning strike triggered both plants to disconnect that is being investigated.
It has been going on for a while with borderline stability and multiple near misses where load shedding was almost triggered.
The Offgem report is likely to say words to the effect of "the National Grid system load shedding measures worked as intended" and local distributors dropped 5% of the load. They chose mainly the few remaining heavy loads on the cheapest load shedding tariffs - these happened to include some hospitals!! and core railway infrastructure. WTF their critical signalling system doesn't have backup power is anybody's guess.
National grid restored power again to most places within the hour and many within fifteen minutes but the power supply interruption had very long lasting consequences for kit that had assumed a continuous supply.
It beggars belief that they make rolling stock that cannot recover from a power cut without the intervention of a skilled technician to restart.
It is clear already that the relatively high proportion of renewables at the time of the first failure during peak evening load meant that there was much less inertia in the system than with conventional plant. It also hints that they don't have any spinning reserve at peak load times.
Exactly why the wind farm went offline a minute or so after the gas plant remains unclear but my instinct is that it was rather too rigid in its application of the df/dt and delta_f rules. We will eventually find out after a long investigation and an anodyne whitewash report.
I expect them to bend over in complex contortions to avoid saying that the UK grid is teetering on the edge of instability (which it is).
-- Regards, Martin Brown
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