New Magnet-Powered Monitor Installed In Nuke Waste Sites Could Survive 100 Years
A Nuclear Waste Container Bill Ebbesen via wikimedia Today in cleverly designed solutions to old problems: University of Bristol engineers have devised a "hundred-year battery" that could report the state of buried nuclear waste repositories wirelessly to the surface 100 years after it--and the sensors connected to it--is buried, sealed, and cemented into the ground. The problem here, of course, is that buried nuclear waste has to be completely sealed, meaning there can't be any ductwork allowing wires to run from the surface to the inside of the containment facility. If there were water might get in or radioactivity might get out, negating the whole point of burying the waste in the first place. But how to power sensors underground 100 years after they are buried? Conventional chemical batteries would long since have lost their charges. This answer entails a handful of magnets and a copper coil--the basis of a simple generator--and...