Is it possible to draw energy from an ion chamber?
On a purely theoretical basis, would it be possible to harness a small sample of radioactive material and an ion chamber to produce a small trickle of electricity?
I'm not sure what the practical use of a device would be, and I'm well aware of the risks and dangers involved; I'm asking to satisfy my own curiosity.
Discussions
7 years ago
Lots of satellites and space-probes use nuclear batteries to generate electricity from nuclear decay.
Answer 7 years ago
Usually by thermo-electric effect.
Answer 7 years ago
Called Snap-8 as a first unit followed by snap-10
7 years ago
Yes you could.
But unless it's very highly* active it's not a good source of electrical energy.
L
*i.e. lethally
7 years ago
There's more than one way to extract energy from a small chunk of radioactive stuff. Here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_battery
That page lists a number of methods. I think for most of these, the problem you're going to find is that you've got a small number of charged particles with very high energy. E.g. thousands of particles/second, with energies in the MeV.
In contrast, a usable flow of electricity, e.g. enough to light up an LED, consists of about 1016 electrons/second, at potential of just a few volts, or eV per electron.
It's like you have to "step down" the potential of those fast particles by a factor of a million or so, to get from MeVs to just a few eVs.