This is an intellectual singuarity waiting to happen., Full story at http://www.physorg.com/news4081.html

http://www.physorg.com/news4081.html

This is the start of enabled devices that can have a stream of consiousness.
CPUs with no downtime.
The rise of skynet.

Or, perhaps a really smart, and long lived wristwatch.

Uh, availability of power has never caused downtime of any of my systems or networks in the past decade, which includes various long-term regional, multi-county and state-wide blackouts.

That, and most of these CPUs will be running Windows.

So, hopefully you're only joking.

Well actually Steve, no.
I am saying, (and I was about half drunk when I started this mess) that this technology could put power sources at the chip level.
What this could mean depends on the advancement of AI. We must remember that a purely rule based AI asked, in the 80s (quite a while ago) the question, am I alive?
Well, maybe, but if I pull the plug where does your little electronic soul go, eh?

Now as to network et al.
You mentioned last decade, this includes 95, 98 and my favorite, ME; gee whiz, all those suckers have to be re-booted every 34 days or so or else bad things happen.

No, I am really considering the long view.

Sometime in the future we will have to meet our new electric children, at that point we had better hope we have not commited digital child abuse.

Can someone explain what is said in the webpage below?

http://rmrc.org/rft/index.htm

Can someone who actually knows (not speculating) tell us what nuclear batteries are typically used for? Other than satellites, what applications are willing to risk having radioactive materials on board just to avoid changing the battery more often?

The page you link to is nonscientific, quasi-spiritual bunk -- you can safely ignore it if you're looking for a sciencific understanding.

maybe looking to far ahead but couldnt these batteries be used as a fuel source for cars and such that use focile fuels??
If so then that could exponentially increase abillity to travel aswell as lower global warming if it did work why i ask is where i live we are at risk of geting one of those lng plants here and that is one dangerous two damageing to our echo system aswell as the economy seeing as we live by what is shiped in by the river and it will close the river every time the ship comesthrew.

Actually, if this battery uses tritium, as has been suggested, then the threat of radioactivity is quite low. Tritium has been used for years in Luminox watches, you know the kind that have glowing dials that Navy Seals use. It has a half-life of around 12 years and has a very low risk unless very large amounts of it are used.

Um, tritium isn't really that dangerous except if used in a 3rd stage nuclear weapon...

Let us explore briefly, current nuclear batterys.
Hot isotope and thermocouple.
Not bad, but if it falls down and goes bang on launch it creates a headache.
Hot isotope and stirling engine.
Better, but still a (on my honor, I thought that turkey could fly) danger.
Hf178.
Somewhat dangerous but gives a large amount of energy, damn hard to recharge. This could replace our orion rocket as the new gotta have it, who gives a damn about the environment, platform.
This new crap.
Very low output over ten years, reasonably safe.
The very low output (where did they come out with 10 times more powerful?) means it would have to be distributed across the chip.
(not that there is anything wrong with that.)

From the article (emphasis added):

Well, yes, given that current nuclear batterys are very, very inefficient compared to the batteries in my flashlight.

But, I will give you that they beat the heck out of the isotope/thermocouple things.

I just think the headline might possibly misslead.
(they are comparing sparks to diehards here.)

Oh, I completely agree. All they would have needed to do is add "than predecessors" to the end and that would have been a lot clearer. But of course, that doesn't grab the reader and scream "CLICK ME!" in the same way.

And I just noticed that the part I quoted says "efficient", not "powerfu"l. And last time I checked, efficiency does not equal power, so I guess the headline is just flat-out false.

At first glance you would not think that there could be a downside to this tech. The battery is not a piece of pu or other radioactive isotope that could be misused. Tritium is a strong beta emitter so the inside of the battery case will prevent it from being an exposure hazard (i.e. Beta is easily shielded against by a thin piece of aluminum, the battery case in this example) If released tritium gas rapidly disperses so even if you break the battery there is a very small hazard.

There are two downsides;

1> The cost of producing tritium in large quantities is the other radioactive isotopes generated during manufacture that must be 'utilized' in some way.

2> Tritium is a very good neutron moderator and someone could use one of these tritium batteries to convert common fast neutrons (say from radium decay) into slow thermal neutrons that could be used to create other dangerous radioactive materials.

In practice I'm sure it's not so easy. Just so every knows why these cool batteries may not happen anytime soon.

PS. The fact that tritium can be used as H-weapons fuel is a nit because you first need the weapons which is not trivial.

They can be used for these new sensor nets where you may have thousands, or millions of indipendent devices that are not physically connected. Those devices networks can be very difficult to keep powered. Also, I suspect that low power devices may not require much more radiation than a common rock sitting in the sun gives off. Not very dangerous even in large quantity. When a radioactive partical decays, it's mass is converted to energy. According to E=mc2 A small ammount of mass has a large ammount of energy. An efficient mass to energy battery would not need to be very large to produce a decent ammount of power. Consult a physicist for the actual numbers... (how many rads to kw?)