[Mr. Wyndham]

I think something along the lines of this might be much more productive....

LEAD: Paul Brown, a college dropout who is vice president of Peripheral Systems Inc., a six-year-old technology concern in Portland, Ore., has won patent approval for a nuclear battery.

Paul Brown, a college dropout who is vice president of Peripheral Systems Inc., a six-year-old technology concern in Portland, Ore., has won patent approval for a nuclear battery.

The device converts the energy of decaying radioactive material into electricity. The company said it has built a prototype about the size of a garbage can, which is capable of generating 50 kilowatts of electricity, enough to maintain about 20 households for 25 years.

The battery can be fueled by strontium 90, a waste product of nuclear plants. A cage of silver ribbons surrounds the material and absorbs the charged particles that are emitted by the decaying radioactive isotope. As the particles bombard the cage, the magnetic field around each particle collapses and induces an oscillating current in the cage.

The battery is not yet ready for home use, however. In addition to the potential hazards of handling radioactive material, the device costs as much as $25,000 to produce said Mr. Brown, who received patent 4,835,433.
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpag...55C0A96F948260

Nanomaterial turns radiation directly into electricity

Materials that directly convert radiation into electricity could produce a new era of spacecraft and even Earth-based vehicles powered by high-powered nuclear batteries, say US researchers.

Electricity is usually made using nuclear power by heating steam to rotate turbines that generate electricity.

But beginning in the 1960s, the US and Soviet Union used thermoelectric materials that convert heat into electricity to power spacecraft using nuclear fission or decaying radioactive material. The Pioneer missions were among those using the latter, "nuclear battery" approach.
Dispensing with the steam and turbines makes those systems smaller and less complicated. But thermoelectric materials have very low efficiency. Now US researchers say they have developed highly efficient materials that can convert the radiation, not heat, from nuclear materials and reactions into electricity.

Power boost
Liviu Popa-Simil, former Los Alamos National Laboratory nuclear engineer and founder of private research and development company LAVM and Claudiu Muntele, of Alabama A&M University, US, say transforming the energy of radioactive particles into electricity is more effective.

The materials they are testing would extract up to 20 times more power from radioactive decay than thermoelectric materials, they calculate.

Tests of layered tiles of carbon nanotubes packed with gold and surrounded by lithium hydride are under way. Radioactive particles that slam into the gold push out a shower of high-energy electrons. They pass through carbon nanotubes and pass into the lithium hydride from where they move into electrodes, allowing current to flow.

"You load the material with nuclear energy and unload an electric current," says Popa-Simil.

Space probes
The tiles would be best used to create electricity using a radioactive material, says Popa-Simil, because they could be embedded directly where radiation is greatest. But they could also harvest power directly from a fission reactor's radiation.

Devices based on the material could be small enough to power anything from interplanetary probes to aircraft and land vehicles, he adds.
"I believe this work is innovative and could have a significant impact on the future of nuclear power," says David Poston, of the US Department of Energy's Los Alamos National Laboratory. However perfecting new nuclear technologies requires years of development, he adds.

Popa-Simil agrees, saying it will be at least a decade before final designs of the radiation-to-electricity concept are built.
http://environment.newscientist.com/...ectricity.html

And this:
http://www.rexresearch.com/nucell/nucell.htm
(Long read, so I didn't post.)