If it is a dead body and it is being cremated you take it out so it doesn't explode in the crematorium. I say this as a former funeral director who had to remove them.
Even if HN mostly consists of people engaged in building or maintaining technology, technology is in every industry, so the discussion can credibly touch nearly every topic with some interesting depth.
I'm curious whether it was standard practice for you to check for a pacemaker prior to cremation or whether the process relied on a family member informing you?
An X-ray machine has capital and operating expenses, requires significant safety measures, licensing/inspection (at least in the US), and a trained technician.
That all is significantly more expensive than saying "you hand us a form telling us whether there's a pacemaker or not, and if you fuck it up you get in trouble."
I assume it's mostly an issue with the li-ion battery pacemakers? Plutonium wouldn't explode, though the casing may crack which would be less than ideal.
yeah, in england the resident doctors in training would get paid 25 pounds to certify there was no such device in a body, it was unofficially known as “ash cash”
> Despite the often longer life-expectancies, nuclear pacemakers quickly became a part of the past when lithium batteries were developed. Not only did the technology improve, allowing for lighter, smaller, and programmable pacemakers, but doctors began to realize that this excessive longevity of nuclear pacemakers was excessive. Lithium pacemakers often last 10-15 years allowing for doctors to check in on their patients and replace either the batteries or the pacemakers themselves with new and improved technology as it is develops in those 10-15 year spans.
You really should not. 60 beats per minute means that in ten years the leads of a pacemaker will be bent *315 million* times. That's an order of magnitude higher than we typically test fatigue resistance, and even if we were that confident about being able to produce flawless materials, there are millions of different enzymes and acids and temperature fluctuations in the body. Any one of those could impact the fatigue resistance.
Additionally, any kind of implanted device is significantly prone to a wide range of problems that range from inconvenient to devastating. The human body is very hostile to foreign objects, often with few warning signs. Clots and fibrous capsules (and eventually, calcified capsules) form around ANY implant, and that's the best case problem.
Titanium is extremely biocompatible. It forms a thinner capsule than most materials. It integrates with bones beautifully, due to surface treatments that allow bone to grow into microscopic surface cavities, with strong molecular bonds. But also sometimes, for no apparent reason, all the bone around a titanium implant will just start dying and resorbing. It's rare, but if you get a hip replacement you absolutely need to check on it regularly because if you don't you'll lose use of the leg completely (and quickly, and permanently).
In and around the heart is one of the most challenging places to implant things, aside from maybe the brain. Any moving part of the body will constantly stress any mechanical part, and build up scar tissue around and rubbing spots. The only reason the brain is worse is because its fragile and changes size significantly when you sleep.
Recently we started using leadless pacemakers. Even before that pacemakers were continually getting smaller, and smaller pacemakers are less irritating and experience less stress and movement. Even if that weren't true, it would still be worth checking in on pacemakers, because they're doing incredibly hard jobs and if they fail people can die faster than they can get to a hospital.
EDIT: oh, and heart disease is the #1 cause of death in the US, while heart surgery is one of the most difficult specialties to get in to. They are absolutely never short on patients, lol.
It sounds like you have quite a bit of knowledge on the subject. I had to get a pacemaker a couple years ago, and am an embedded engineer. I hope to live another 50 years at least, so this is an interesting subject for me.
Maybe my cardiologist is just trying to make me feel good, but he says my leads will likely last 30-50 years. Intuitively that seems unlikely, but we'll see. It's got to be one of the most engineered cables in existence.
The leadless pacemakers are indeed a technical marvel, but they aren't yet nearly as feature packed as shoulder implanted devices. They'll keep your heart from stopping if your nerves are flaky from time to time, but they don't have the energy storage to do much more than that. Mine monitors every single beat my heart takes, and automatically reports issues to my doctor via BLE. (Is bluetooth more or less scary than radioactive isotopes mounted in your body?)
For about 8 months, my AV nerves were completely broken, and the pacemaker paced my ventricles 100% of the time. It was a nearly perfect drop-in replacement for the failed nerves. A leadless pacemaker wouldn't have had nearly the same performance. My nerves eventually started mostly working again, and now I'm on track to have a battery life pushing 15 years.
It would of course be great for the technology to advance even more over the next decade. Since my nerves mostly healed, a leadless device with a 30+ year battery life would be a nice replacement. With a shorter battery life, I don't really want to be collecting them in my heart (they don't plan to remove leadless pacemakers when they die.) I'm hoping by the time my current device is worn out, it will have logged enough telemetry for me to convince my cardiologist that I don't need a pacemaker at all, though.
> Maybe my cardiologist is just trying to make me feel good, but he says my leads will likely last 30-50 years. Intuitively that seems unlikely, but we'll see. It's got to be one of the most engineered cables in existence.
One of my favorite learnings in school was about the "Endurance limit".
Some materials, like aluminum, will eventually fail under cyclic loading even at tiny, tiny loads. This was a big problem when they built the first passenger jets. Other materials, like steel, have a threshold at which they can be cycled indefinitely without issue.
For something like a pacemaker, I like to imagine they dialed the materials and forces to be within such a threshold so you can keep on ticking!
Re passenger jets - I imagine you are thinking of the Comet 1? That was a more complex failure than is generally known. In brief, they did know about fatigue life at the time, and had ways of retiring aircraft before it was an issue (safe-life design, apparently introduced in the 19C for steam engines despite their being iron and steel). Ok, now you will be thinking "square windows, stress concentrators". Almost all pressurised aircraft use windows with angled corners in the cockpit. There isn't an intrinsic bar to square windows, and in fact the original design would probably have been ok. That used glued installation, avoiding stress concentrators. However a production engineer changed the design to use riveted installation, which caused the well-known problem with hull failure. Still, that would have been discovered if DH had not managed to resist government pressure to do fatigue testing on the pressure hull (because they were racing Boeing to be first to market, and fatigue testing takes time). They actually had the apparatus for repeatedly pressurising the hull in a bath, but only used it for testing static pressure.
If you have complete AV block, a leadless pacemaker is less good than one with multiple leads, since it allows pacing multiple chambers and maintaining synchrony between A and V.
That's neat, although the left channel of my wireless earbuds drop out like 2% of the time!
What I want is a shoulder implanted pacemaker that's significantly smaller, with a quarter of the primary battery capacity, and an inductively charged supercap that can store enough charge to run at least week between charges.
Lol. I've certainly already made the joke that embedded systems are dear to my heart. I'd consider working a few years at a place like Medtronic just to see what I can contribute, but on the other hand I hear there's roughly a 2:1 ratio between requirements and lines of code.
Going through airport security is fun just because the TSA agents overreact as if the metal detector is going to kill me.
/u/sgtnoodle has accepted a great job with MedTronic, little does he know, that as a QA process embedded engineer, his duties require him to monitor various labs - including the PENTEST/AGGRESSIVE attack lab... but the anechoic chamber contract was low bid - and has leaks...
As he walks by the lab, checking his tablet for his various checklists... there is a leak.
A deadly leak... As he rounds Corridor-4A toward his desk, the leak hits him.
As a Class-I Mk2 Embedded engineer, he was susceptible to the RF attacks...
We only found him after the alarm sounded that he badged through Door X1A, but never made it to Door TR3B where his lab was...
Cardiac failure due to failed electro-stim documented as cause of termination of employment.
You are getting downvoted for the conspiracy theory aspect of your post and for throwing shade on a guy with the pacemaker. If you care about being liked, say likeable things.
It's not. It's a full diagnostic interface. Someone with the right software and my serial number could reconfigure it from across the room.
BLE replaces the previous diagnostic interface, which was some form of near-field. You had to have a puck resting within a few inches, going to a several decade old toughbook. My device supports both. It's just in the last couple years that UCLA got the BLE equipment, and sometimes a doctor will whip out the old gear if they feel more confident with it.
When I had the pacemaker first implanted, there was a reliability problem they had to do a second operation to fix it. The pacemaker failed to "capture" my ventricle a few times when it should have. It turned out to be a loose lead connection, but the device's impedance diagnostics didn't make the issue immediately obvious. My overall case was weird enough that UCLA did a case study about it, so for the revision procedure they had a vendor rep in the room to help out just in case. She was holding a tablet and pushing buttons that would make my heart temporarily stop.
Now my AV nerves mostly work again, so the pacemaker can't stop my heart if it wanted to. It can only increase my heart rate, and report unusual patterns to my doctor. Also, if someone did somehow mess with it, holding a strong magnet near it will force it into safe mode.
That's fascinating, and very unfortunate how lax the security likely is for an organ keeping you alive.
You would think if you can detect a strong magnet, you could use that to turn the wireless on and off... Like how holding a power button on a phone turns it off, but holding longer can do a factory reset or what have you.
An interesting thought would be to have a nano-lead down the arterials to the wrist, where an external telemetry relay-watch could read the signals, and have the BLE device top dermal. (apple watch)
eliminating RF/BLE bullshit from talking to the pacemaker.
I don't think my particular pacemaker has the necessary circuitry to generate more than 5V, in pulses less than a few milliseconds. The voltage doesn't really matter much to the muscle.
If you got in you could probably put the leads into single-ended mode (so that there's more current path to cause mayhem) and pace my atrium and ventricles at 210bpm, and effectively give me a seizure. I can't imagine it would kill me before an EMS arrived with a magnet?
Perhaps a more nuanced attack would be to somehow use all the configuration parameters to intentionally bias the pulses so that there's net charge going into the muscle. Over a long time that would cause tissue damage.
If someone wanted to kill me overtly, a gun would be less work. A pacemaker malfunction that bad would be thoroughly investigated, and would be fixed in new devices within a year or two.
If they were able to cause the pacemaker to fire when they wanted they could time it during the repolarization, which could possibly cause a fatal arrhythmia even in a heart that doesn't need a pacemaker. It's called R-on-T phenomenon and it's usually caused by malfunctioning pacemakers.
I doubt you could do that through configuration changes alone, simply because of how defensive the firmware would be about that exact scenario. You'd probably have to resort to code exploits on top of simply gaining access. Even then, there's probably a rudimentary interlock at the silicon level.
The crazy thing was that this was when there was a lot of talk about Dick Cheney and how he was vuln to this attack -- and there was a lot of spec around if barnaby was silenced because it was the older, Cheney-esque politicians that could be taken out by this vector...
Perhaps, he got the 'reverse bounty' on this bug...
It's a weird argument, though, that we should be checking in on the state of the patient & these devices, but we don't do it unless we have the additional problem of needing to replace a battery.
Modern devices provide a wealth of telemetry completely autonomously. My pacemaker talks at least daily to a UFO shaped brick on my night stand via BLE. The brick has an integrated cell modem, and was given to me pre-configured. It has a bright green light (that turns off in the dark) to show that it's functional. It has a single button I have never pressed, for if I think something notable enough happened that my doctor's office needs to be sent a report sooner than every 90 days or so.
> 315 million times. That's an order of magnitude higher than we typically test fatigue resistance
Nah, it's not that bad. Decent mechanical keyboard switch is specified for 100 million clicks [1, or google for "switch million actuations"]. Surely good engineering can eek out another order of magnitude. Not to mention - pacemaker leads ("wires"), the only part that bends, have way less stress on them (= larger bend radius) compared to a keyboard switch. Oh, and technology of multi-strand wire for redundancy is a very well established and understood one.
You're not counting failure rate over time. How many people actually click a key 100M clicks? What does the bathtub curve look like? What's the failure rates at 1,10,100,200M clicks?
I'm going to assume those failure numbers are far higher than you'd want for something keeping you alive.
I've had Cherry switches fail right as the keyboard's warranty was up. The switch feels soft after wearing out, it gets dust in it and starts double typing, etc. Pacemakers need to be 100% reliable, not 99.9%.
Indeed, the keyboard switch people have to produce a device that's manufacturable at scale for pennies per unit, and can be fitted in unforgiving environments by the untrained.
How is that comparable to a pacemaker in any way? They aren't made for a similar scale, price, or 'environment', and would only be installed/serviced/dealt with at all by anyone aside from highly trained specialists.
Intentions aside, I read it as a very narrow comparison of the relative durability - I'm guessing they weren't trying to devalue pacemaker engineering.
I have an ICD, and have had to have two lead revisions, once when the lead failed to implant, and the second when it cracked. My resting pulse is 100bpm, and the device overpaces me if I exceed 140bpm (unless having sex, when it kicks in at 220bpm. Is this so I'll die happy?). So in ten years my leads cop at least 500 million bends. Since my device does cardioversion and defibrillation there's no way a wireless implant in the atrium and ventricle will work.
The doctors keep quoting figures of how reliable this tech is, but I've had 3 procedures due to device failure in the last 5 years.
All of this sounds fine in theory as an explanation but was material fatigue actually why the technology was abandoned? Like you say, those complications are rare and the section that was quoted by the other commenter seems to imply that the opportunity to upgrade the patient's hardware was the real motivator (since obviously the opportunity to swap batteries wasn't a factor for the nuclear variant). It seems more like a question of if regular upgrades produce results significant enough to justify opening the patient up again after implanaing what's currently state of the art. Or is surgery obligatory in either case?
> EDIT: oh, and heart disease is the #1 cause of death in the US, while heart surgery is one of the most difficult specialties to get in to. They are absolutely never short on patients, lol.
This is still relevant to his concern, but from the other end. They might be making the labor artificially scarce to increase pay.
> This is still relevant to his concern, but from the other end. They might be making the labor artificially scarce to increase pay.
This is very much true. I find that a lot of people in tech seem to put healthcare on a pedestal and believe that the professionalisation and gatekeeping of the industry create a better outcome than other engineering fields. This is very much untrue, the healthcare field is in need of massive disruption and lobbying to increase labor supply. You are being downvoted because a lot of tech people here hate to imagine that healthcare at the highest level is still subject to market forces like everything else. Medical training is being severely gatekept and hindered via the current apprenticeship/residency system. After all, we call the worst medical student, doctor. If you want to improve healthcare, tie medical school admission to the MCAT score, and only the MCAT score. You are not going to get better doctors just because candidates spend their summers building houses in some impoverished third world country.
I live near Boston which is known for its medical centers, so this might skew things somewhat, but it seems like every graduate I know is going into medicine of some form (surgery, anesthesia, nursing, surgical tech, hospice, etc. etc.)
I heard consistently that residency slots are extremely competitive and a lot of qualified candidates get passed over. The more I learn about the process the more insane it seems.
From the student perspective you go from paying to work one day and spending most your time working cases with zero relevance to your actual specialty, to raking in several hundred thousand a year.
It also seems like hospital systems seem to spend more than half their capacity either dealing with patients that don’t need to be there but there’s literally no place to send them, or patients that are too far gone and untreatable but there’s literally no place to send them.
Healthcare is like a Gordian knot of terrible policies cemented into place by trillions of dollars of government spending.
We turn away beyond capable people, it’s just that we have decided to drastically reduce the number of doctors per capita by artificially limiting the number of medical schools.
700k people per year in the US die from heart disease. There are ~18k surgeons (of all kinds) in the US. So even if 10% of them were cardiac surgeons, each surgeon has one person dying per day to worry about. They're busy.
Heart surgeries often happen on actively beating hearts. Tiny mistakes mean death. Infections mean death. Its a muscle which never gets rest, the majority of people in the US have clogged arteries and high blood pressure by the time they die.
Theres no artificial shortage. Heart surgery is really hard. Its the third hardest kind of surgery, right behind brains and rockets.
Brain neurons going into sleep mode eject some of the cell contents and shrink, which apparently also helps flush waste because the cerebrospinal fluid can flow better.
There’s not a single cardiac surgeon in the world who thinks he’s gonna get rich with once-every-10-years follow up appointments. We produce enough new patients to keep them all sufficiently busy.
A private surgery business that specialised in pacemakers would surely care, because those 10yr repeat customers would be part of the valuation (valued like SaaS with long duration and high churn?). That would matter to a surgeon with an ownership stake on retirement.
I agree that a surgeon at a general hospital probably wouldn’t care (little financial incentive).
Private practice is quickly going extinct in the US. It's generally not an option for US residency and fellowship graduates these days unless they are in one of the specialties that has cash payors (plastics, dermatology, orthopedics, a small number of "concierge" primary care docs and psychiatrists that cater to rich patients, and a small number of ophthalmology practices that carved out a good Lasik business).
The vast majority of pacemakers are placed by cardiologists with an additional two years of training in electrophysiology (not by cardiothoracic surgeons, who prefer to do complicated open heart surgeries and generally find things like pacemakers boring).
Contrary to the conspiratorial thinking all over this thread, medical society guidelines have scaled back the indications for putting in pacemakers time and time again, so the market has shrunk. Electrophysiologists have to make up for the lost pacemaker volume by doing newer procedures (ablations) that reimburse less per hour of work. Even then, the volume at a lot of shops isn't enough to merit full time work. A lot of graduating electrophysiologists have to take mixed electrophysiology/general cardiology jobs where less than 50% of the work is electrophysiology.
All that is to say, no, pacemakers are not a money making scheme. While there is decent money to be made, it's a shrinking market and those who got obscenely rich putting in pacemakers in the 80s and 90s have mostly already retired.
Yeah I how everyone who has a body.... a thing that is naturally subjected to ageing and death... has it in for surgeons when they are professionals at trying to reduce the impact of this inevitability. Its like we think our body is a car and we deserve a warantee then sue the surgeon when the surgery doesn't have any effect.
A friend had one of these units that extended his life for over a decade. He had it upgraded at least once, and the programing updated several times, and noted improvements each time (although he never got the one feature he really wanted [0]). So active maintenance is definitely not spurious or mercenary but is genuinely useful.
[0] When the pacemaker detected a problematic arrhythmia it would give a couple of defibrillation shocks just like the paddles but right on the heart muscle. He said this felt like getting kicked in the chest by a horse and came completely out of the blue with zero warning. So it could be quite disruptive. He wanted a feature where it would tingle or beep or something just a few seconds ahead of time so he could mentally prepare; apparently the second one that was expected was a lot less traumatic. Anyway, the docs thought it was a good idea, and passed it up, but it never happened before he passed.
> He wanted a feature where it would tingle or beep or something just a few seconds ahead of time so he could mentally prepare; apparently the second one that was expected was a lot less traumatic.
reminds me of the pre-safe sound prior to collision
I’m not clear on what he was supposed to do in response to this. Is it a situation where if he were to sit down and relax he could resolve the arrhythmia? Or is this a notification mechanisms that he can then alert his doctors?
(My question is why was this designed to be an extreme “notification “)?
He just wanted some kind of warning to get himself mentally prepared or braced for the kick - maybe take a quick breath, pull out of the way a tool he's using, whatever, or just reduce the surprise factor. As he said, the second one that he knew was coming was not such a big deal. It was definitely not to try to resolve it, that was up to the pacemaker/defib.
My Dad was diagnosed with a fatal lung illness and was given three years to live. He made it to ten years the last six months were rough. But I can't imagine if he had died after the predicted three years.
I see people Dad's age or older driving and walking around and I find it amazing how older people are alive. Elderly people are amazing as people and for their knowledge.
Love every day you and your family are here and healthy!
If battery life doesn't improve much, I don't die prematurely, and I continue to materially benefit from having an implant, I personally could be realistically looking at 3 replacement devices and at least one lead replacement over the years. In the unlikely event that I suffer from ventricle enlargement long term, I'd need two more leads installed as well.
Yup, there's definitely some patients that would benefit from a nuclear battery.
> I personally could be realistically looking at 3 replacement devices and at least one lead replacement over the years. In the unlikely event that I suffer from ventricle enlargement long term, I'd need two more leads installed as well.
This is the point I'm making, though: realistically, you have a high chance of needing 2 additional procedures for non-battery reasons, which are likely good times to replace the device, too.
> cynically read this as "we needed to get more money out of these patients"
Unfortunately in the OECD I think its possie for an American to read it this way due to the unusual health system. Don't get me wrong... things are changing elsewhere too... it used to be a great shame to go sue a surgeon for anything but reckless intentional negligence... after all we all have bodies that age and decay and the surgeon is provided freely as a public service and their profession is to try as best and compassionately as they can with their training they recieved freely to delay or prevent the suffering inevitable from life... now people sue here for like an orthopetic surgury that simply didn't produce any result ... we are becoming more like america it is sad.
Medical professionals worry a lot about "compliance". It would not be unusual for a doctor to unironically believe that "leverage" like this—forcing the patient to come in for a check-up instead of letting them make their own decisions—actually benefits the patient. So it's not necessarily about money, but that's not imo saying it's much better.
Until now I assumed that all pacemakers were nuclear powered, since I read about this as a kid in some children's science book. It's come as a surprise to find out they're unusual.
> Due to the extremely high risk and toxicity involved with using plutonium, numerous layers and shields were woven into these pacemakers resulting in larger and heavier devices. Despite strong concern of radiation exposure, the actual risk of exposure from these plutonium-powered pacemakers was almost non-existent.
What a strange phrase. I would say it was because of the concern of the risk of radiation, not "despite" it, leading to the precautions built into the device, that the risk was reduced to "almost non-existent".
Or is this a claim that the shielding was unnecessary?
The claim here is "The risk was tiny due to the superb shielding - but patients were still wary and preferred their implants not have any nuclear material at all"
Just got me thinking:
What would it take for us to get to a point where there are small, safe nuclear powered "batteries", that can supply enough electricity for a building.
Short summary: Soviet engineers installed RTG powered radio relays to support the construction of a damn in Georgia. Political instability lead to the abandonment of the RTGs. Someone scavenged the generators and removed the radioactive cores from them.
Two of the radioactive sources were discovered by men gathering firewood in the forest. They decided to bring them to their camp(!) and cozy up to them to keep warm during the night(!!). Despite showing symptoms of radiation poisoning they kept the cores on their person while loading their truck(!!!). They all suffered terrible radiation injuries.
There are more sources "lost" from the same batch which remains unaccounted for to this day.
Yeah the URSS made routine use of RTGs throughout their territory (pretty logically as it's so vast and low-density electrification can't reach everywhere), and those routinely got misplaced. Things got worse after the fall of the URSS too e.g. a helo dropped two RTGs from 50m while airlifting them in 2004.
Yes, there's a Russian movie with a guy that is guarding a weather station in the North and playing games all day. He somehow gets into a conflict with his supervisor, dissasembles a RTG beacon and uses the Strontium 90 to poison his supervisor's dried fish supply. They both get irradiated and the military cleans up the mess.
Compact electrical generators powered by heat from radioisotopes have been under development in the United States since the early 1950s for space, marine, and terrestrial uses. Essentially all the generators developed for marine and terrestrial uses have been powered by 90 Sr. This report summarizes the development work done by Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), Hanford Atomic Products Operation, and Martin Company, Nuclear Division, which led to the production of 90 Sr heat sources for use in the generators.
It was a natural choice since strontium 90 is an inevitable byproduct of operating any fission reactor, and was readily available as a coproduct from weapons plutonium production reactors. Making better RTG isotopes like plutonium 238 required additional infrastructure.
It would take some kind of complete revolution. It’s not happening.
These batteries have very poor power density and are very inefficient. The advantages of nuclear-powered batteries are:
- They generate power over a long time, decades,
- They generate some heat.
They don’t generate much power. If you have a building, you would definitely think of a nuclear RTG as a “very shitty battery”, and that’s even if you don’t care at all about radioactivity.
Thinking of these as a “battery” is also a bit misleading, IMO. These are really just small power plants, which generate heat and turn the heat into electricity. The heat is powered by radioactive decay of Pu-238, and then turned into electricity with the extremely inefficient Seebeck effect. If you had a source of heat you wanted to turn into electricity, it’s much more efficient to use that heat to turn a turbine which is connected to a generator. And if you want an efficient, cost-effictive turbine, you make it big. At that point, you have a power plant.
While Pu-238 is an alpha emitter, so it is difficult to capture the decay energy in any other way than by converting heat into electrical energy, for the radioactive isotopes that are beta emitters there is an alternative where the nuclear batteries function in a way very similar to a chemical battery.
The beta decaying substance is connected electrically to one electrode of a capacitor, while the electrons emitted due to the beta decay are able to pass through the insulating layer of the capacitor, reaching the other electrode.
Thus the capacitor is charged directly by the beta-decay and it can provide electrical energy to the external circuit.
Thanks for the insights. I was thinking if we can make nuclear power generation small, it can avoid the stigma associated with big nuclear power plants. At that point it might become a viable source of energy to replace fossil fuels.
RTGs can’t do that. Compact nuclear reactors, however, can.
The problem is that a nuclear reactor is a dynamic system, with some moving parts. It requires thermal management. It requires dynamic control. It is really hard to design a fully self-contained nuclear power system which wouldn’t require any human intervention to operate.
And even if we could, there is also a problem of waste management. Nuclear waste is not too dangerous, if you don’t touch it. It is, however, quite dangerous, if you grind it into fine particles and spray a large city with it by a crop duster. Our world is crazy. There are people like that out there, who might be interested in it. It is relatively hard to obtain hot nuclear waste from centralized large power plants. It will be really easy in the case of small building-scale reactors.
We'd need to have a lot of money, a disregard for return of investment and a lot patience: Current RTGs can do that, but they're rather expensive for heating houses and problematic from the nuclear materials POV (waste / profileration), not to mention the regulatory and licensing for using it a neighbourhood - better budget the time and money for lobbying for some legislation changes.
If by building we mean say 10 apartments, and each needs 10 kW, the RTG would need hundreds of kg of Pu-238 plutonim dioxide [1].
It's hard to cite the exact cost for that since it's not a freely traded commodity but that's a lot of plutonium. Eg NASA said that with a $75-90 million investment they can make 1.5-2 kg per year of it. [2]
Not related to nuclear, but the startup Bloom Energy was aiming this by fuel cells. A small box could power a house for a year, as they claimed. Trouble was the box internals run at very high temperatures (800°C) and there was potential for things going awry.
This is established and commonly installed technology in Japan. It's called EneFarm. Lots of newish houses connected to natural gas have these largish boxes out front. The odd name leaves most people confused.
The EneFarms used to be heavily subsidized by the japanese government in a long term program to encourage fuel cell development and manufacturing. Over time prices have decreased such that the subsidy is either already expired or could be soon expired.
The tech is near, and allows getting a bit more energy out if natural gas. The gas companies hope it will allow them to eventually reuse their pipes to send hydrogen. Personally I think the combo of cheap solar panels and 400% efficiency heat pumps will outcompete gas.
Just because you pay a positive non-zero amount for less than a quarter of the energy in, it does not mean that a device has greater than 100% efficiency, which is not possible.
If heat pumps are 400% efficient then log burners in cabins in the woods are even better.
A heat pump warms a home more efficiently than using the same amount of electricity for resistive heating. It can do this because it's not generating the heat from scratch; it's moving heat from outside to inside.
A local company has developed a heat pump with a thermal energy storage system. Not sure how they do this, but I imagine there is some sort of insulated cinder blocks on a secondary loop that shuttles heat/cold to where it needs to go.
Unfortunately by that metric other electrical heaters tend to 0% efficiency because they are not making use of the virtually unlimited energy outside the buildings.
The 400% metric let's you compare with other heaters, the 100% is kind of useless.
All energy from log burners comes from the fuel, and some ashes remain unburnt. They're under 100% efficient at converting fuel to heat. You put in x fuel and <x heat.
A heat pump takes heat from outside the system. You put in x fuel and you get >x heat. Getting more energy than you put in makes the efficiency over 100%.
Sure, a slightly irritating turn of phrase, not accurate. I didn't think it would be so controversial to hold terms of art/words with actual scientific meaning to a higher standard though.
If we're willing to be so blasé with 'efficiency' then why not, say, 'functional programming'? If it works it's functional right?
Tritium-powered betavoltaic batteries are off-the-shelf products, and have existed for decades. You can buy them today. But they can only supply a current on the microamp scale, only useful for some niche sensor applications... On the upside, these batteries are fairly safe.
You could have something like that supplies heat to a building by nuclear decay, but generating useful amounts of electricity from relatively small temperature differences is hard. You could theoretically have a steam-generating nuclear reactor in a building, similar to what you'd find in a nuclear-powered submarine, but it wouldn't be small or safe or simple, and it would require large amounts of cold water.
Small research reactors exist, but they tend to generate in the neighborhood of tens of watts.
Far better would be a Pebble Bed Reactor, which more or less fits into a couple of shipping containers and provides a building's worth of power and heat for about ten years with a similar level of maintenance as a diesel genny.
I saw a video about a recent advancement in nuclear diamond batteries. Basically look like normal AA batteries but used depleted uranium and lab diamonds to make them save and long lasting
Sadly like most similar nuclear powered energy sources this is very low density, and provides very little power, despite lasting a long time. Think microwatts.
Only really viable in deployments that need very little power, where no other energy harvesting method is available, and periodically changing out batteries is not an option.
The headline situation obviously needs an entry or two in the "If I Was An Evil Overlord" List.
Best that you not discover that little detail when you're trying to "seal the deal" with an ultra-powerful Eldritch Abomination, which you summoned from Far Beyond Mortal Realms, and are pulling the still-beating heart from your live human sacrifice for that kinda-critical part of the Horrific Ritual.
And it's clearly a detail which any Faithful Lieutenant should check when "procuring" sacrifice victims. And yet another reason for any survival-oriented members of the Evil Overlord's Legions of Terror to request postings in distant and sleepy bits of the EO's Empire - far from the glory and promotion opportunities...
On the one extreme, you have the Elephant Foot at Chernobyl, which even today will kill you if you, like, go up and lick it. But it's not going to sneak up behind you, so just don't go over there.
On the other extreme you have the release of radioactive water from Fukushima, which instantly dilutes to nothing in the vastness of the ocean. Meh.
In the middle, you have radiation sources like this, which are small enough to be unnoticed and highly mobile, but clumpy enough to still kill you dead if you get too close. Unless you have a radiation detector, you could step on one on your way home today and never know it.
There’s another scary Goldilocks aspect too, which is what I thought your comment was going to be about when I started reading it.
Stuff with a really short half life is horribly radioactive, but not for long. Stuff with a half life of millions of years sticks around forever, but it’s not throwing off that much radiation. But stuff in the middle (a half life of perhaps decades to a thousand years) can be very dangerous and remain that way for a long time.
I wish phones had radiation detectors(Aside from camera based ones that aren't accurate and use battery). If 100M people had radiation detection, I'm sure we'd get a few hits every once in a while.
Plus it can probably be done in roughly a headphone jack sized spot.
There were also several incidents from the russian army just up and leaving orphan sources in the wild when the URSS failed e.g. Lilo and Lia (both in Georgia).
Lia was two RTGs, which the URSS used quite a lot, and which regularly got lost or into accidents e.g. two degraded RTGs were found in the north of russia in 2003, one on the Cape of Navarin and one near Kola Bay, and two got dropped by a helo transporting them in 2004.
Though from the Plainly Difficult channel, I feel like the most frequent radiological accidents aren't even orphan sources but either misused / defective radiological devices (à la Therac 25), or commercial irradiation facilities whose opsec degrades until fatal exposure occurs after a jam.
This also happened in Taiwan. A metalworks reused Cobalt-60-contaminated rebar and then hundreds of apartment buildings were constructed with it in the 80s. The government tried to find and buy them, but it seems that some people didn’t want to sell because of the amount offered. There are still some of them around.
It seems like an amazing coincidence that they were able to work out so much about how this happened. It makes you wonder how often this happens and noone finds out.
Nah, I think it would be more surprising if you couldn't track this stuff down. In the industrial and construction world, everything works off of POs and work orders. When a company buys or sells anything, there's almost always a paper trail, and usually some internal records showing what material went where. If you have the money to spend on the investigation (and an easy-to-detect signature in the material itself, like radioactivity) you can probably trace contamination all the way back to the hole in the ground it came out of.
My father built our house in Chihuahua city around 1985. We lived in that house for 25 years. I never thought about it until we had a case of brain cancer in the family 3 years ago.
It was a thing in the US too. My favorite coffee shop in the suburbs of Chicago got a shipment of tables that had contaminated metal from this incident.
Yes! apparently the only reason why this thing was discovered and talked about was because a trailer taking contaminated rebar to the US passed near a military airbase that had reactive material detector and detected the contaminated material. Then the US blew the whistle and pushed Mexico to do a proper investigation.
Otherwise, Mexico (my country) being Mexico, I am sure nobody would have known anything about it. Specially during that time when we had a "soft dictatorship" that buried all bad things under the ground (not that nowadays is that much different...)
Anyway, thanks for the read, I have always found very interesting to know the extent of the contamination.
This whole thing was a complete failure of bureaucracy from that start and the only entities that deserve any blame are those responsible for leaving nuclear waste in an abandoned facility after being told about it.
I think putting it this way absolves the Brazilian government too much. What happened is 100% their fault.
The hospital moved to a new site but as there was disagreement with their previous landlord they were prevented to move equipments by the police despite trying to secure the source which was later stolen and having repeatedly warned of its danger.
That is an extremely cavalier take, especially considering:
> His six-year-old daughter, Leide das Neves Ferreira, later ate an egg while sitting on this floor. She was also fascinated by the blue glow of the powder, applying it to her body and showing it off to her mother. Dust from the powder fell on the egg she was consuming; she eventually absorbed 1.0 GBq and received a total dose of 6.0 Gy, more than a fatal dose even with treatment.
Yeah, tragic. They are no less human than you are. They had no clue what they were doing, like all of us in general. What fraction of the population is aware of the effect of radiation and the toxicity of medical sources? How would they go about assessing the risk in this situation?
Uncontrolled contamination can also harm innocent bystanders, in this case children.
I know that low-empathy privileged commenters are to be expected on HN, but I nonetheless find it impressive that such a short comment can illuminate so many biases in one go.
Flip take : using social media to feign empathy for abstract contexts - ones that you actually have zero emotional connection to - is merely how left leaning people signal their bona fides.
I hear what you're saying but it's helpful to look at this with an additional layer of abstraction.
This is not just virtue-signaling in combat with edginess-signaling for their respective audience. It's more importantly a testament to prevailing sub-ideologies within portions of the population.
Edgy comments in tech forums like these are a signal of larger-scale class warfare (a loaded term, but bear with me). White collar techworkers think nothing of building skinner boxes and ad services all day as they are rewarded handsomely for it. In combination with all sorts of other factors, you end up with worsening social conditions across the board.
Some guy being nonchalant about dead Brazilian families and taking pleasure in signaling it is just a manifestation of overall societal nonchalance about rights and negative externalities among high-skilled workers and capital owners. These are real phenomenons that have consequences regardless of whether I myself might virtue signal about rejecting them.
Right, they are so poor that they are using their what little knowledge they have to scavenge an abandoned building for scrap they can sell to feed themselves and their children.
If you had never been taught about radiation, you wouldn't know what to do about it either. It is not like radioactive materials are a common everyday occurrence for everyone.
What is wrong with you that you cannot see that they are also humans just like us, and were born into horrible circumstances that they never got the education to learn about this, through no fault of their own whatsoever?
There are so many things we could have if we actually could somehow have faith that the required (for safety, pollution mitigation, etc.) full lifecycle was actually honored.
Instead, everything is dominated by lazy jerks. The other day, I noticed my neighbor's house painter digging a hole. I said hello and asked what was up, and he said "Yes, I need to dispose of the water and paint from my sprayer, so I dig holes and pour it in. Don't worry, I will fill the hole back in when I'm done." This was in the bay area.
People just will not do the right thing by default if it is even remotely more work and for most people, thought is the hardest work there is.
I was curious, because I know SF has a high enough population:water ratio that stricter treatment is required, but on the other hand modern non-oil paints are relatively chemically safe (at worst, probably the off-gasing parts).
"People just will not do the right thing by default if it is even remotely more work and for most people, thought is the hardest work there is. "
My theory is simply low education.
Since aeons we burried our garbage and it was never a problem. It only started quite recently, that our technology is so advanced, that it simply will not decompose. But rather contaminate.
But only a very low percentage of people actualy understands this.
So sure, that painter surely was "educated" at some point, that doing this is bad. But they simply do not believe it. "Not a big deal, you know". Same with plastic bags, same with climate change.
Maybe we should start proper science education a lot earlier?
Is something less tragic if the victims weren’t fully participating in capitalism at the time of injury? If they’re performing a societal function that you obviously think is beneath you?
The first thing I thought of when I saw the pacemaker photo was to adapt the miniature RTG to power a digital watch. People have Nixie tube watches, I want my RTG powered watch.
I'd use a capacitor to accumulate a charge which would power one of the really old-school LED digital watches of the early 70s.
Totally impractical, dangerous and illegal? Sign me up!
No. It lasts years because pacemakers have a really tiny power draw.
There's not a miniature nuclear reactor in there, it's just a RTG, which is simple but also very inefficient. So it doesn't get the crazy amount of power from a tiny amount of material a fission reactor does.
> There's not a miniature nuclear reactor in there, it's just a RTG,
I believe these are not RTGs (radioisotope thermoelectric generators.) Rather they use radiovoltaic conversion, probably alphavoltaic conversion judging by the use of Pu-238. Such devices convert alpha or beta radiation directly to electricity using semiconductors, not unlike photovoltaic cells.
But your point still holds, these atomic batteries produce a tiny amount of power.
It would take about 50,000 hours (5.7 years) to charge a 10 Wh iPhone. A solar cell on the back of the iphone would take roughly a full sunny day to charge an iPhone, with ~2 watts peak output.
> Even weak indoor light would eventually charge it.
No, it wouldn't. Sunlight is ~1 kW per m^2. A medium-sized room has maybe a couple 60 watt bulbs, spread over 10+ m^2, each of which radiates ~10 watts of actual light.
Light indoors is pretty easily 1000x less than outdoors. Eyes work exceptionally well in low light conditions, so we don't even realize the enormous difference in brightness.
Current 60W bulbs are about 10W, probably giving off 3W of light.
If it's on for 8hrs a day and you capture all of it, on 1/5000th of a room, you get... 4mWh, or in reality, 0.7mWh because panels aren't perfect?
You could make a call in a few months of charge time. with a 3x3inch panel. But yeah, I suppose I was wrong and "eventually" is a bit of an understatement.
For actual power, no it would be wildly impractical. However there is a concept of a nuclear top-off battery which keeps your main chemical battery from draining during long periods when not it use. So you could throw a charged phone in a drawer and come back months or years later and it's still good to go. Good for applications like an emergency kit.
Please stop spreading unsubstantiated FUD. If you have the data to prove otherwise, please share the links.
I have had an iPhone 7 for many years; yes, same device. I don't remember the exact time when I got it, but it might've been around 2017. So this device is over 5, if not 6, years old. In all this time, I've had to replace only the screen due to physical damage, but the phone is otherwise perfectly functional. I've been told a few times that the battery needs replacement, but that's primarily because the phone reports battery's "Maximum Capacity" is 73%; but I'm reluctant to replace the battery because I haven't had any problems with the current battery.
Another data point: I bought an iPad Air 2 in November 2016 for my kids, and it's been used by my kids, changing hands as the older one grew out of it, and has had zero issues. Yes, it's screen has got scratches, and it's got blemishes on the body. But it's been running along just fine for over 7 years now. It's getting OS updates, even though it's been discontinued for over 5 years. I cannot say that for any of the Android devices I had bought, not even the ones made by Google.
Before getting the iPhone, I was firmly in the "android is best" camp, and I was almost against buying Apple devices, primarily for the cost of the hardware. I have bought phones, and a tablet, powered by Android, but none of them lasted long enough for me to extract value out of my investment. Either they died early because of some hardware failure, or because the device stopped getting updates.
After trying iPhone, and Apple's other hardware, like MacBooks, I have become a fan of the _quality_ of their products. Their products may not give the customer the same freedoms (of choice) and flexibilities that we've come to expect from Linux and Android worlds, but their products serve the needs of their customers for long durations, and in a way that no other company possesses the ability to do.
If you are of the type who pines for products of a bygone era where the products used to last decades, serving the customers faithfully without much fuss, I think you should seriously consider buying Apple devices.
> Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.
From the site guidelines. The most plausible interpretation by far is that the comment referred to the time between charges; otherwise, what would nuclear power do to extend the lifespan of a device?
I didn't complain about anything. I'm using an iPhone from 2018, but I have to charge it every day. Would be nice to not charge it at all from the time I buy it (like a nuclear power source)
So this is the same technology as used in various space probes and the Curiosity and Perseverance Mars rovers (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-mission_radioisotope_the...), just miniaturized. Fascinating, but not sure if I would want to have one inside my body...
AIUI there's not really anything to miniaturise beyond the rest of the pacemaker (i.e. ignoring how it's powered) - there's no 'control' or addition of material as in a big nuclear power station, it's 'just' a decaying radioactive material -> heat -> electricity (the inverse of Peltier effect heating, and presumably just as inefficient (~30%?)).
You need a heat difference, not just heat, to generate electricity.
Now my sibling comment links to a paper where they say they can find heat differences in the body that are sufficient for their needs, so this is still a possibility! But it does mean you need to be somewhere with a heat gradient: the paper mentions just under the skin.
There are different kinds of nuclear power, and these types of small power-trickle devices have been around for decades. (Mostly in spacecraft, I think?)
Yup. All the US mars rovers use radioisotope generators that generate electricity by using the decay heat.
But some satellites actually had real fission reactors on board. The US had the experimental SNAP-10A satellite and the soviets used a small fission reactor in their RORSAT satellites to power a radar so they can detect NATO naval fleets.
