this post was submitted on 03 Nov 2023

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So, turns out that nuclear-powered pacemakers were a thing (www.ans.org)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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In today's episode of "weird shit I stumbled onto on the internet", I bring you: nuclear-powered pacemakers.

Some of the earlier pacemakers made in the US, around the 70's, were powered by a very small amount of plutonium. If you've ever heard of the term radioisotope thermoelectric generator or RTG in relation to eg. satellites, that's what the pacemakers used. The upside of using an RTG was that the device could run for decades without needing to get its power source replaced. The downside is that you now have plutonium sown in to your chest cavity – which actually isn't as bad as it sounds considering the amounts used, but it's still a highly radioactive element and presents some fun challenges, some of which are discussed in the article.

Here's an article on the technical details on how they, and thermoelectric kajiggers in general, work https://blog.plover.com/tech/seebeck-effect.html

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[–] [email protected] 30 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I wonder why no new companies have picked up this technology. Some patients surviving 30 years, with no surgical intervention required is a pretty bold claim for any pacemaker. Regulations be damned.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Regulations be damned.

I guess when it comes to plutonium the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission doesn't want to take any chances – it's still frickin' plutonium after all. But yeah, having a pacemaker that'll essentially work the rest of the patient's life sounds pretty damn impressive, although I really don't know what the state of the art is.

But if we do want to sew radionuclides into people (because why not), maybe the same could be done with one that's a bit less spicy? I'd imagine that with modern technology you could get away with using something that wouldn't give you the same amount of power, but that also wouldn't be… well, plutonium.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Other fuels would either require much more shielding or have a much shorter life. Plutonium-238 lasts for decades and barely produces any gamma radiation.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Yeah that makes sense, and I guess it figures that they didn't originally pick plutonium just for shits and giggles

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

This video about ex-Soviet RTGs of questionable radioactive source choice is quite a good watch

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NT8-b5YEyjo

NASA apparently used RTGs for deep space missions only, while in the same timeframe the Soviets scattered them all across the countryside, then promptly forgot about them.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

Ha yeah I've read about the stray Soviet RTGs. Great power source for some godsforsaken lighthouse etc. in Siberia, but much to the surprise of exactly nobody, of course they just left them lying around when the Union collapsed. I have a vague memory of there having been some, err… incidents related to those, something along the lines of some poor Siberian schmuck finding one and going "ahh, this metallic doodad is nice and warm, I think I'll camp next to it"

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Lol, let's just be glad this didn't become wide spread enough to tempt a certain boy scout to turn serial killer.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

Would have made for a pretty crazy story though 😅

I got to wondering what happened to David Hahn, and it turns out he died of an OD in 2016. He was apparently doing a lot of coke and was 'paranoid about people who he claimed "had the ability to 'shock' his genitals with their minds"', and around 2007 he decided it'd be a great idea to steal a bunch of smoke detectors for, well, something.

So his real story didn't end nearly as happily as I'd hoped

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

Jesus Christ. That's nuts.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

and was 'paranoid about people who he claimed "had the ability to 'shock' his genitals with their minds"'

Some people really need to gjve their kids more sex education instead of leaving them in the dark to work it all out for themselves.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

But he likely had paranoia or something like that, education won't much help you there 😁 even the smartest person can suddenly start believing pretty weird things

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

it's not the boomy plutonium

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

I'm not sure Hahn would have cared about that, considering he was paranoid about people being able to shock his dick with their minds, and he stole a bunch of smoke detectors to get at the americium because reasons 😅

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

They are, in the form of “diamond batteries”,

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Oh now these are cool. That's how you recycle lol. Thank you sir for providing my next wiki hole.

[–] [email protected] 24 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I wish I remembered the details, but I read a couple years ago about new batteries using the same sort of principal.

It was being studied as a way to handle a specific part of radioactive byproduct from nuclear power.

You sandwich the tiny radioactive bit in materials to generate a charge, and the whole thing is encased in conductive man-made diamond.

A battery the size of a half dollar coin could generate roughly a watt of power for, ostensibly, up to hundreds of years.

The big seller beyond its lifespan is that the diamond is dense enough to shield the tiny amount of radiation inside.

Incredible potential that probably wont be realized in consumer goods for decades. Just think about never having to change the battery in a remote ever again. Or even a lot of wireless smart home sensors and devices.

A shocking amount of things take very little power. Air tags that never die. E-book readers. You could make super dim puck LEDs that are always on and can go anywhere for illuminating pathways.

You could never scale it much in size/output because the diamond encasing would become disproportionately heavy and expensive, but for anything 1.5 Watts and less, and possibly up to 3 Watts or so, could be totally feasible.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Huh, that's interesting. I found a wiki article that describes a diamond battery that generates current from beta particles emitted by carbon-14, but that one's only good for microwatts. I also found some pages that referred to diamond batteries that use nuclear waste, like this one, which might be what you were thinking of? No idea what the wattage of those would be, but I'd guess more than ^14^C

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

to put that into some interesting context that's about what your cell phone uses if you go through the battery over 24hrs. With a battery or big capacitor to act as an accumulator you could in theory have a smart phone that never needs charging, or rarely when you use it a lot in one night.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

This article poses the idea of a universal smartphone battery.

Remember when we could just remove and swap the battery? Now we could go back to that, removing the part where we charge it and the battery just... does it.

Not quite there yet, but holy hell this looks far more promising than most things we get. The idea of getting away from cell batteries entirely is... momentous.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 year ago (1 children)

So there were people with a synthetically produced element powering there hearts (for decades), and none of them made flying mech suits in all that time?

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago

They didn't have boxes of scraps laying around... otherwise it absolutely would have happened.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 year ago

Pink Floyd's Atom Heart Mother was so named because Waters had just read a newspaper article about a woman who had received a plutonium pacemaker.

https://www.loudersound.com/features/pink-floyd-the-story-behind-atom-heart-mother

[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I want that‽ 😆

When I'm old and decrepit with an out of sync heart, I would like to go with a nuclear pacemaker.

I could then say that I am henceforth Plutonium powered 😎.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

A-ha, fellow interrobang enjoyer!

But yeah, how frickin' cool would it be to have an implant powered by an RTG‽ Honestly the most cyberpunk thing I've heard in a while

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

After hearing about all of the reckless radium and uranium use during the 1920s, nothing like this surprises me.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago (1 children)

The Radium girls were from the 1920s or even before that. While they didn't know about the dangers that the Radium paint posed to them, their employers certainly did. Not only did those companies hide the truth from the women, they actively sabotaged any efforts to identify the problem and hold them responsible. These weasels went so far as to secretly pay the doctors around to falsely diagnose the women with syphilis instead of radiation poisoning - in an attempt to destroy their reputation and discredit them. The reckless use of radioactive substances back then wasn't entirely unintentional or based on innocent motives.

The action those women took was a revolution in workers' rights. But the moral of the story is, if a company can make money by subjecting you to hidden, but mortal dangers, they will - no matter how fatal that danger is. Then they will use a portion of that money to destroy your image and pin the blame on you. This tendency is even stronger today than it was back then. It was radiation back then - today there are a dozen other problems - lead, microplastics, PFAS and God knows what else.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

And CO2