Power Up!

A team of scientists at Bristol University have come up with an idea to address problems of nuclear waste, clean-electricity generation and battery life in one swoop. It involves combining a manmade diamond with a radioactive field, which then generates an electrical current.

The plan is to extract carbon-14 from graphite blocks used in nuclear power plants, reducing their radioactivity and lessening the challenges of storing them safely. The carbon-14 is incorporated into a diamond to produce a battery that will take more than 5000 years to lose even half its power.