Diamonds made with C14, long life battery

https://phys.org/news/2016-11-diamond-age-power-nuclear-batteries.html

C14 has half life of over 5000 years! This form of carbon can be made into diamonds and incorporated into a usable nuclear battery! Low power out but it never stops.

@sonhouse said
https://phys.org/news/2016-11-diamond-age-power-nuclear-batteries.html

C14 has half life of over 5000 years! This form of carbon can be made into diamonds and incorporated into a usable nuclear battery! Low power out but it never stops.

Terribly written article.
What the hell is a "radiation field" and saying diamond is the
hardest substance known to man? It's not even the hardest naturally
occurring substance (some meteorites contain a harder substance).

And why should being "hard" give protection from
radiation? It's the density which is important.

Makes me suspicious of the whole article.

@wolfgang59 said
Terribly written article.
What the hell is a "radiation field" and saying diamond is the
hardest substance known to man? It's not even the hardest naturally
occurring substance (some meteorites contain a harder substance).

And why should being "hard" give protection from
radiation? It's the density which is important.

Makes me suspicious of the whole article.

A radiation field is a region where there's radiation. I think the point about hardness is that people might worry that radioactive material could leak out of the battery. Because the carbon-14 forms covalent bonds in the same way that carbon-12 does it's locked into the lattice and won't leak out. Carbon-14 decays into nitrogen-14 which is the stable isotope and so the decay product isn't a radio-hazard. Also carbon as a semiconductor is radiation hard in the sense that it withstands radiation well. I think this is an extension of its use as a radiation detector. It just seems like an expensive battery.

@DeepThought
Well, if you are immortal and need a heart thumper, it would be just the thing with it's 5700 year half life😉

@deepthought said
A radiation field is a region where there's radiation.

Well, I assumed that.
But then everywhere is a "radiation field" to a degree.
I've just never heard the term.
I thought "fields" were used to describe forces?
gravitational field, magnetic field, etc.

@wolfgang59 said
Well, I assumed that.
But then everywhere is a "radiation field" to a degree.
I've just never heard the term.
I thought "fields" were used to describe forces?
gravitational field, magnetic field, etc.

The term "radiation field" is sometimes used in physics but I have only rarely come accross it and I don't think it generally has proper scientific meaning although it is sometimes given a proper scientific meaning.
Wiki sometimes on the rare occation uses the term. An example of that can be found in this link but its only mentioned once in this link;
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiation_exposure

That said, I know from experience from internet forums that, nearly always when someone mentions "radiation field" (with DeepThought being one of the rare exceptions here) its because he is a layperson that don't know the first thing about physics but merely has this weird delusion that he DOES know all about physics and knows better about physics than the physicists! There are also a number of people that I won't name that often post in THIS science forum with that weird delusion.
You also get a lot of stupid third-rate science fiction films which mention either "radiation field" or, much more often, "force field", in a context and a way that is just complete and utter gibberish to ANY good physicist even though the term "force field" certainly DOES have a proper scientific meaning, at least when used CORRECTLY. The problem with "force field" in science fiction is that it consists of a layer suspended from a machine generating it and with a gap between that layer and the machine generating it, which is just complete nonsense in real physics.

@wolfgang59 said
Well, I assumed that.
But then everywhere is a "radiation field" to a degree.
I've just never heard the term.
I thought "fields" were used to describe forces?
gravitational field, magnetic field, etc.

I think it's pretty rare it comes up except in discussions about safety in nuclear power plants and microwave ovens. If we look at it from a mathematics point of view, they define a field as an algebraic structure that follows a collection of axioms. In physics a field is just a function. More specifically a function of configuration space, the other paradigm is particle, which exists at just one point. Typically we require the field to be physically real, meaning we can directly measure it. Because the photons in a radiation field are physical we tend to think of them as little cannon balls. The photons in a electro-magnetic field are virtual and are not required to obey formulae like:

E^2 = p^2c^2 + m^2c^4.

so the behaviour is more wave-like. We still refer to the matter particles as quantum fields.

One way of measuring the speed of light is to disable the motor that makes the plate in the bottom of a microwave oven go round, and put some cheese on a microwavable plate. Use an oscilloscope to find the frequency and a ruler to measure the distance between melted points. In the context of this the following sentence is fine: "The cheese melts at anti-nodes in the microwave oven's radiation field.".

In the actual article I get the impression a journalist who knows nothing about science latched onto a phrase the researchers used.

@humy
I wonder how strong a magnetic field has to be to duplicate the sci fi movies, like able to stop a nuclear bomb, you can imagine what would happen if a nuke was set off near a magmatar, it would basically ignore it like a puff of wind on a rhino....
Right now we can generate some number of tesla's, 10, 100 or so but magnatars are millions of times stronger, so I wonder what the max field strength will be in another 100 years of development.