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Diversification and the common ground
Craig Piercycpiercy@ans.org
Who would have thought, just a few years ago, that we would see so many long-standing barriers to new nuclear development falling like dominoes? Public opinion, policy, regulatory reform, finance and investment, design maturity, nuclear fuel enrichment, and fuel fabrication capacity have all advanced with remarkable speed in the United States.
Conventional wisdom holds that the most effective way to scale up the nuclear supply chain is to do so strategically, matching investments to the needs of reactor developers.
Shiping Wei, Yuyao Wei, Jin Wang, Shaojian Yan, Wei Wang, Zhixin Ma, Chunjing Li
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 199 | Number 3 | March 2025 | Pages 465-475
Research Article | doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2024.2368993
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A nuclear battery is a promising candidate for small power supply sources in the military and commercial fields, but its output power and energy conversion efficiency need to be improved. This paper mainly describes a design, preparation, and electrical performance analysis of a GaAs-based tritium battery. The design of the tritium battery uses a multistage process with Monte Carlo and Matlab simulations. A titanium tritide source was prepared by a high-temperature tritium absorption device, and a GaAs semiconductor transducer was developed using a metal-organic chemical vapor deposition method. The D/Ti ratio and T/Ti ratio of the deuterium/tritium titanium films were 1.9 and 1.7, respectively. Two kinds of GaAs-based PIN junction semiconductor transducers were proposed and irradiated with the prepared tritium source. Their electrical properties were measured in situ and analyzed qualitatively. Under the irradiation of a 0.61-Ci tritium source, the short-circuit current of the device was 0.3 to 0.38 μA, the open-circuit voltage was 35 to 63 mV, the peak power was 2.8 to 6.4 nW, and the energy conversion efficiency of the GaAs semiconductor transducer was about 1.86%. It was found that an air gap between the GaAs semiconductor transducer and the radioactive source caused serious loss of beta particle energy, resulting in low output power and low energy conversion efficiency of the nuclear battery. The open-circuit voltage of the devices with a SiO2 passivation layer on the surface decreased both in a dark environment and in light illumination, but SiO2 passivation did not reduce surface recombination as expected. The research work in this paper will provide some valuable reference for the preparation and performance optimization of nuclear batteries.