Researchers in the UK have built a ‘diamond battery’ that could power devices forever – but how did they do it, and what will it be useful for?
It was 2015 and Neil Fox, a professor of materials for energy at the University of Bristol, UK, had been drafted along with his colleague Professor Tom Scott to assist with the decommissioning of graphite core reactors at the UK’s Magnox fleet. The Nuclear Decommissioning Authority wanted to know how much carbon-14 – a long-lived isotope – was present. At the time, Fox and Scott were developing diamond radiation detectors for CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, that could help them find out.
As their work progressed, the duo noticed something strange: the detectors were recording a radiation signal, even when switched off. “Somehow,” explains Fox, “the radiation sensed from the cores was causing the detectors to switch on.”
This was their lightbulb moment. They started to wonder: what if the carbon-14 within the nuclear waste could...