The End has Come

Hey everyone. So tomorrow is the last day of class and so this blog must come to an end. I hope everyone enjoyed it as much as I enjoyed writing it. This blog has not only enabled me to learn about a ton of things I had never heard of but it also educated me on how others view nuclear energy.

Although this blog is ending, the story of nuclear energy will never end. And, you the public should remember to always arm yourselves with facts about any and everything so when the time comes...you know what's going on. There are many more sites out there that can help you in your quest for nuclear knowledge:


NEI Nuclear Notes
This Week in Nuclear
and as always Google News

I never thought this blog would become so popular with audience coming from so many different places in the world. Makes me sad to end it...but all good things must come to an end. As for me, I was recently accepted into the Nuclear Engineering Graduate Program at CSM and so nuclear energy is definitely in my future and I hope it will also be in everyone else's.

Thanks guys.

"Not every end is the goal. The end of a melody is not its goal, and yet if a melody has not reached its end, it has not reached its goal. A parable." Friedrich Nietzsche

Tiny Science...Big Potential

Just a quick post on something I found really cool. I recently had to give a presentation in my Extraction of Rare Earth Metals class about the rare earth promethium. One of the few applications of promethium is for the use in nuclear batteries. So this got me wondering about just that...nuclear batteries.

Credit: University of Missouri

So I went into researching them and came across a really neat story from CNET. The story is about scientists at the University of Missouri who are developing a nuclear battery...or as they call it "radioisotope battery", that is about the size of a dime but holds over a million times the charge as a normal battery. The developer Jae Kwon even states that with the right materials it may be possible to make the battery the thickness of a human hair.

Just so everyone knows...the basic concept behind a nuclear battery is that energy from released particles due to radioactive decay is transformed into a current and thus power can be produced. Nuclear batteries are already used to power many things from pacemakers to space satellites. Who knows where else these awesome little buggers could be used!