Youtuber makes clickbait video
Why is this on the Reg?
You too can build a nuclear battery from junk you have lying around the house
It's illegal and impractical to construct a nuclear power plant in your backyard. But a DIY tritium nuclear battery is far less dramatic - just don't expect any appreciable amount of energy from it. You don't even need any specialized supplies, as YouTuber and electrical engineering enthusiast Double M Innovations demonstrated …
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Monday 20th April 2026 17:45 GMT bombastic bob
Re: Anyone tried smoke detectors
correct. Americium is an artificial element, heavier than plutonium. All such materials are radioactive [usually alpha emitters].
And in theory gamma radiation could ALSO produce electricity, but it would take up to half a meter thick photo-electric effect panels to capture up to 90% of it coming from a source like Cobalt 60 or "plain old nuclear waste". Scintillation for high energy gamma would be interesting if you could get it to work.
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Monday 20th April 2026 19:45 GMT DS999
Re: Anyone tried smoke detectors
Such dirty bombs would cause little or no actual harm from the radiation but would cause mass panic and chaos - because the public has been trained to fear "radiation", and a "dirty bomb" has been a thing they've been taught to fear almost as much as a proper nuke!
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Tuesday 21st April 2026 11:18 GMT doublelayer
Re: Anyone tried smoke detectors
No, it would be a lot higher. The smoke detectors have shielding, which you don't need a whole lot of for alpha particles, so a lot of the emitted alpha particles are absorbed inside the detector and never go into your wider home. A bomb designed to spread that around would be quite different, and they would use more smoke detectors for the area covered. However, you can also be a lot higher radiation than a smoke detector without much trouble other than someone coming around to clean it up, so if someone wanted to cause harm through radiation instead of panic, they'd need a very large number of smoke detectors to build their device.
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Monday 20th April 2026 18:32 GMT Excused Boots
If it is true, then they’ll be fine. Tritium has a half-life of about 12.5 years and is a weak beta emitter. It’s fairly safe to directly touch as the electrons don’t really have enough energy to penetrate skin. Of course, being a gas you can inhale it, but it will rapidly combine with Oxygen to produce super-heavy water which your body will naturally excrete within a week or so.
So, overall not something to actively go for, but not a big deal if exposed.
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Monday 20th April 2026 18:38 GMT Fishbird
Poor man's nano-ammeter...
If Double M knows the input impedance of his voltmeter, then the voltage reading also gives the current, 'cause I equals V/R.
Guessing at 10 megaOhm*, half a volt is about 50 nA, or go straight for the power : 25 nW, if I got my sums right.
* used to be common, but I dont know for modern cheapo multimeters.
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Monday 20th April 2026 19:56 GMT Kevin McMurtrie
Re: Poor man's nano-ammeter...
The DVM input is often a 10M series resistor and a bank of switched shunts for the range selection. If you're measuring in the first range (~ 250mV) there's no shunt and the input impedance can be over 100M Ohm.
You don't have usable power if you can't measure it. Even for intermittent power consumption, something needs a nA or two for performing the wakeup.
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Tuesday 21st April 2026 10:03 GMT Bebu sa Ware
It's illegal and impractical to construct a nuclear power plant in your backyard
The mineral sands in SE Queensland(AU) beaches and sand isands are fairly rich in Thorium. The tailings from rutile etc extraction are possibly concentrated. So you might be able to smurf sufficient sand to extract enough Thorium for a backyard rector and produce more than just a few nW.
The beaches in Kerala(IN) are similarly blessed according to the Great
IntelligenceIgnorance.Some affected sand was used in a school playground a few decades which caused a media furore at the time. Presumably some curious soul used a Geiger counter outside. My Grandfather's WW1 watch sent the school Geiger counter crazy and I think I was told to leave the wristwatch at home.
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Wednesday 22nd April 2026 09:42 GMT phuzz
Unless you're the Duke of Cornwall (aka the Prince of Wales aka William Windsor), who, (for complicated legal reasons that don't seem to be very well explained), is exempt from many pieces of legislation, including the Nuclear Explosions (Prohibition and Inspections) Act 1998.
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Tuesday 21st April 2026 00:05 GMT brainwrong
maybe enough to flash an LED every once in a while
"But it's just a teeny tiny amount - maybe enough to flash an LED every once in a while."
Is Pink Floyd's "The Pulse" due a re-release with longer lasting packaging? Old corroded AA cells aren't good for a CD box.
Wot no blinkenlights icon?
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Tuesday 21st April 2026 10:08 GMT You aint sin me, roit
Cut out the middle man...
Tritium is a beta negative emitter - it literally spits out electrons. All you need is an Electron Net (TM) to catch them and feed them directly into your circuit. No need for the phosphor to convert to photons and the light sensors to convert back to electrons.
You can get twice the energy from capturing the electron antineutrinos that are also emitted when tritium decays, but I haven't yet perfected my Neutrino Net (TM).
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Tuesday 21st April 2026 11:41 GMT Elongated Muskrat
The bit that cements how pointless doing this is, is where he has to wrap the photocells in foil to prevent them from generating a voltage from the ambient light that would otherwise far outweigh that from the phosphor around the tritium, even at night. Sure, there might be niche applications for this in environments of complete darkness, but this is akin to me trying to get some sort of power from my collection of uranium glass, which barely reads above background on a radiation detector.
Really, all this demonstrates is that a photocell converts photons to electricity even at very low levels, which is hardly surprising given how they work (an incoming photon knocks an electron from one energy level to a higher one). 1887 called with news about the photoelectric effect.
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Tuesday 21st April 2026 12:27 GMT Ian Bush
It can also make the Kessel Run in 12 Parsecs
"the capacitor managed to reach 2.8 volts" What is this supposed to mean? Capacitors store charge and surely the amount of stored charge, i.e. in some sense the amount of electricity, is the interesting thing here, not the potential difference between the two ends of the capacitor? Yeah, given the capacitor's speed^W, errr, capacitance you can easily get (approximately) the total charge, but we aren't given that ....
Admittedly you can estimate the charge from 1 day charging at a few nanoamps, and from that get an estimate of the capacitance of a few microfarads which doesn't sound daft. And admittedly I like articles to make me think. But not in this way!
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Tuesday 21st April 2026 16:41 GMT captain veg
Re: It can also make the Kessel Run in 12 Parsecs
Also:
"Sandwich those vials between a pair of solar cells pried from cheap calculators, insulate 'em, and wrap them in tin foil to block out the light, and voilà: A very small, very ineffective nuclear battery that should run for around 12 years, which is the half-life of tritium."
Why would it stop working at the half life? By definition there would still be half of the original Tritium remaining.
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