Are Nuclear Diamond Batteries The Future Of Tesla?

Today I want to talk about some of the supposed, ‘next generation’ battery technologies that are floating around the ether. Because we’re all pretty aware by now that the biggest limiting factor on electric vehicles - and the entire sustainable energy transition movement - is the complication and expense related to lithium ion batteries.

And that’s got us stuck in a very unfortunate rut where the people of the world are now more than ready to accept electric vehicles, but there is just not nearly enough manufacturing capacity to meet the new demand. 

Elon Musk has recently said that his new GigaFactory in Austin Texas is basically just a giant money furnace right now because production of the Model Y vehicle can’t ramp up fast enough. And Elon identified the introduction of Tesla’s new 4680 cell and structural battery pack design as a major contributor to that slow start. 

So that kind of got us thinking - is there a better way to make batteries? If the materials and the manufacturing of traditional lithium ion cells is causing so many problems, then there must be some new thing in the works that will come up and replace them with a better option. Right? Let’s take a look.

Nuclear Diamond Batteries

OK, this one is so outrageous that we’ve got to address it right off the top - can we use Nuclear Diamond Batteries to power the sustainable energy transition?

This has been popping up a lot lately on the old YouTube feed, and typically we’d just ignore something that sounds as fantastical as a nuclear diamond powered battery - but upon further investigation, this is actually a real thing, it does exist. But can we power electric cars with radioactive diamonds?

Well, the idea here is actually pretty smart, it’s basically repurposing nuclear waste into usable energy storage - which is fantastic, because while nuclear power is a very excellent source of zero carbon energy, it does produce a radioactive byproduct that is virtually impossible to safely dispose of. 

Did you know that we literally have no plan for the long term disposal or elimination of nuclear waste? This is kind of mind blowing - there is currently over 90 thousand metric tons of radioactive waste in the United States alone that are just chilling in temporary storage - and by chilling, we mean the containers holding this material are rapidly degrading and corroding after several decades of just sitting around, allowing nuclear waste to leak out. Basically what happened was, the people back in the day had no clue how to deal with this stuff, so their solution was to just stash it in a hole and hope that someone in the future would figure it out. Well, we’re in the future and all that same waste is still sitting in the hole where they left it 70 years ago. Someone should do something about that.

Obviously we can’t just turn all of that into batteries, but the suggestion is that we can repurpose some of it as a storage of energy. This is a concept proposed by the University of Bristol England’s Cabot Institute, and they’re specifically using spent graphite blocks which served as neutron moderators inside nuclear reactors. Graphite is just a crystalline form of carbon, and this nuclear graphite waste contains a very important radioactive isotope called carbon 14 which can produce energetic electrons as a byproduct - and that’s what we want to harness and use for energy. 

By superheating carbon in a low pressure environment, we can transform it into gas, and then by cooling and repressurising that gas we can create diamond - in this case, a radioactive diamond. Then you place your radioactive diamond inside a battery cell with a semiconductor material, like silicon, which collects the stray electrons and allows an electric current to flow out of the cell - this converts radiation into electricity. This sounds dangerous, and that’s because it is - so the radioactive diamond cell has to be encased by a layer of non radioactive diamond to prevent radiation from spilling out. The biggest advantage here is that the carbon will continue to produce electrons for the entire time that it stays radioactive, which in this case will be a half life lasting for thousands of years. So the battery will never die.

The technical term for this idea is a betavoltaic cell, which is not a new idea, but what is new is the refined application using the diamond within a diamond method to make it safe. This technology is currently being pushed by a California startup company called NBD, or Nano Diamond Battery. They’re pitching this technology as a solution to powering everything from data centers, to smart phones, to electric cars. Sounds fantastic, right?

The only problem is that the only cell design proposed by NDB so far is a tiny little thing, about the size of a computer chip - and its energy capacity is measured at 100 microwatts. Typically on this channel we talk about energy as measurements of kilowatts and megawatts, even gigawatts. An average tesla long range battery pack for example is going to be 75 kilowatt hours of energy capacity. And to compare that with the microwatt scale - there are 1 billion microwatts in a kilowatt. So the amount of scaling necessary to get nuclear diamond battery tech from where we are now, to where we would need to be to power an electric car is is overwhelmingly steep.

To summarize - great idea, definitely does work, but is nowhere near ready to become the “Game Changer” that many would lead you to believe.

Sodium Ion Battery

Let’s switch over to something called the sodium ion battery - this is something that is currently being explored by the Chinese battery manufacturer CATL - they’re a Tesla battery supply partner and currently the largest battery producer in the world.

The idea behind sodium ion is that they are swapping out the lithium, which is a rare metal, for sodium, which is an abundant mineral - there is about 100 times more sodium available than there is lithium. 

The process going on inside a battery cell is basically just the movement of lithium ions from one pole of the cell to the other - when you charge a battery, you are pushing lithium ions from the cathode or positive side, to the anode or negative side - then to discharge the battery, same deal just in reverse, lithium ions move from the negative to the positive.

So in this application, the lithium ions would simply be swapped out for sodium and therefore the cells would become cheaper and easier to manufacture. Sounds great, right? Well, again it’s a more complicated problem than the headline might lead you to believe.

Unfortunately, you can’t just turn a salt shaker into a battery - because you still need all of the other elements that make up a traditional lithium ion cell - such as nickel, cobalt and manganese. And those are the elements that are actually problematic.

So, people make a big deal out of lithium, you’ve probably heard some keyboard warrior spout off about Elon Musk launching a coup against the Bolivian government to steal their lithium mines. In fairness, Elon didn’t do himself any favors by responding to these accusations with a tweet that said, “We will coup whoever we want! Deal with it.” Obviously that was a joke trying to match the absurdity of the claim, but some people take things too seriously.

Anyway, as Elon has said many times, lithium is actually not that scarce, Elon even owns a large chunk of desert in Nevada that contains enough lithium sand to build every battery he would ever need - the problem with lithium is processing it into a useful material in the form of ​​lithium carbonate or lithium hydroxide. Nearly half of all the raw lithium mined worldwide ends up in China, where it is refined into battery material. As much as 80% of all lithium ion batteries are produced in China. 

So the problem with lithium is not the supply, it’s the fact that China holds a near monopoly on lithium refining. That can be fixed, and it is being fixed, but that won’t happen fast.  It takes years to get a lithium processing plant or gigafactory off the ground, and it could take decades and an estimated 175 billion dollars of investment for the US to catch up to China in this regard.

So swapping out lithium for salt might be a speedier and cheaper solution in the meantime. But that still leaves us with a reliance on other problematic metals, like nickel, for example. We know that the Russian conflict has created an extremely volatile global market for nickel, with record high prices and gigantic swings in price that are wreaking havoc. And in the majority of battery chemistry formulas, nickel requires a small amount of cobalt to act as a stabilizer, because nickel on its own is very reactive. Cobalt has a very similar problem to lithium - it’s not actually that scarce, there is plenty of it in North America, just look around on the map for towns in Canada and the US named Cobalt - there are several, that’s not a coincidence. The problem is that cobalt is incredibly physically toxic for human beings, and exposure to cobalt causes all kinds of health problems from cancer to blindness. And that’s why the majority of cobalt mining is being performed by slave labour in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where about half of the world’s cobalt supply is located - which is just an unfathomably terrible situation. So unlike lithium, there really is no fix to using cobalt as a battery material, it really should just be stopped entirely and done as soon as possible.

So what about LFP or lithium iron phosphate? Battery manufacturers have actually been able to eliminate both nickel and cobalt from their cell design entirely by using iron as a cathode material in conjunction with lithium. These cells have a lower energy density than nickel based cathodes, but they are still good enough for an electric car with modest performance that is still perfectly acceptable - can we just swap out that lithium for sodium and create a truly sustainable, non problematic, sodium iron phosphate battery recipe? Well… maybe. It’s difficult.

So while we can swap lithium for sodium, it’s not a one to one substitution, there is a tradeoff going to sodium, and that is a loss in energy density. So if we take a high performance cell design, like a Tesla 2170 cell with nickel, cobalt and aluminum in the cathode - these have a very high energy density and allow for vehicles like the Model 3 long range that will go 334 miles on a single charge. If we exchanged lithium for sodium, it would bring that energy density down to the level currently occupied by LFP batteries - and that same Model 3 with an LFP pack will drop in range to 267 miles.

So if we were to swap out the lithium in an LFP chemistry for sodium ions, we would get the same effect, a drop in energy density - an in this case we would be taking a low perming cell down to an even lower performing cell - which would likely result in dropping the Model 3 range to something as low as like 180 miles - and that obviously wouldn’t fly with the average consumer.

That basically leaves sodium ion as another case of a great idea, that just doesn’t quite pan out in a real world application that is as challenging as an electric car.

Tho we should say that, even 5 years ago, people would have said lithium iron phosphate  was impossible for electric vehicles because it didn’t have enough energy density - and that was true back then, but it’s not true anymore, because companies like Tesla and BYD over in China have made the necessary advancements  in both electric vehicle architecture and battery design to turn the impossible into the possible. The reason Tesla’s have more range than most other electric cars isn’t because they have bigger batteries - in most cases they actually get more range out of a lower wattage pack - it’s because they have a significantly more efficient electronic system. And there’s no reason to say that they won’t continue to refine and improve that level of efficiency.

So while sodium and iron based batteries might not hold their weight as a legitimate alternative right now, there actually is pretty solid reasons to believe that this might be the battery solution of tomorrow - maybe that’s 5 years from now, maybe it’s 10. But that’s just one very strong example of how we can turn this industry around and have a future with sustainable energy that doesn’t require exploiting both the Earth and vulnerable human beings to do it. And that’s a really nice thought to end on.