If it is a dead body and it is being cremated you take it out so it doesn't explode in the crematorium. I say this as a former funeral director who had to remove them.
I'm curious whether it was standard practice for you to check for a pacemaker prior to cremation or whether the process relied on a family member informing you?
I assume it's mostly an issue with the li-ion battery pacemakers? Plutonium wouldn't explode, though the casing may crack which would be less than ideal.
yeah, in england the resident doctors in training would get paid 25 pounds to certify there was no such device in a body, it was unofficially known as “ash cash”
> Despite the often longer life-expectancies, nuclear pacemakers quickly became a part of the past when lithium batteries were developed. Not only did the technology improve, allowing for lighter, smaller, and programmable pacemakers, but doctors began to realize that this excessive longevity of nuclear pacemakers was excessive. Lithium pacemakers often last 10-15 years allowing for doctors to check in on their patients and replace either the batteries or the pacemakers themselves with new and improved technology as it is develops in those 10-15 year spans.
You really should not. 60 beats per minute means that in ten years the leads of a pacemaker will be bent *315 million* times. That's an order of magnitude higher than we typically test fatigue resistance, and even if we were that confident about being able to produce flawless materials, there are millions of different enzymes and acids and temperature fluctuations in the body. Any one of those could impact the fatigue resistance.
Additionally, any kind of implanted device is significantly prone to a wide range of problems that range from inconvenient to devastating. The human body is very hostile to foreign objects, often with few warning signs. Clots and fibrous capsules (and eventually, calcified capsules) form around ANY implant, and that's the best case problem.
Titanium is extremely biocompatible. It forms a thinner capsule than most materials. It integrates with bones beautifully, due to surface treatments that allow bone to grow into microscopic surface cavities, with strong molecular bonds. But also sometimes, for no apparent reason, all the bone around a titanium implant will just start dying and resorbing. It's rare, but if you get a hip replacement you absolutely need to check on it regularly because if you don't you'll lose use of the leg completely (and quickly, and permanently).
In and around the heart is one of the most challenging places to implant things, aside from maybe the brain. Any moving part of the body will constantly stress any mechanical part, and build up scar tissue around and rubbing spots. The only reason the brain is worse is because its fragile and changes size significantly when you sleep.
Recently we started using leadless pacemakers. Even before that pacemakers were continually getting smaller, and smaller pacemakers are less irritating and experience less stress and movement. Even if that weren't true, it would still be worth checking in on pacemakers, because they're doing incredibly hard jobs and if they fail people can die faster than they can get to a hospital.
EDIT: oh, and heart disease is the #1 cause of death in the US, while heart surgery is one of the most difficult specialties to get in to. They are absolutely never short on patients, lol.
There’s not a single cardiac surgeon in the world who thinks he’s gonna get rich with once-every-10-years follow up appointments. We produce enough new patients to keep them all sufficiently busy.
A friend had one of these units that extended his life for over a decade. He had it upgraded at least once, and the programing updated several times, and noted improvements each time (although he never got the one feature he really wanted [0]). So active maintenance is definitely not spurious or mercenary but is genuinely useful.
[0] When the pacemaker detected a problematic arrhythmia it would give a couple of defibrillation shocks just like the paddles but right on the heart muscle. He said this felt like getting kicked in the chest by a horse and came completely out of the blue with zero warning. So it could be quite disruptive. He wanted a feature where it would tingle or beep or something just a few seconds ahead of time so he could mentally prepare; apparently the second one that was expected was a lot less traumatic. Anyway, the docs thought it was a good idea, and passed it up, but it never happened before he passed.
> cynically read this as "we needed to get more money out of these patients"
Unfortunately in the OECD I think its possie for an American to read it this way due to the unusual health system. Don't get me wrong... things are changing elsewhere too... it used to be a great shame to go sue a surgeon for anything but reckless intentional negligence... after all we all have bodies that age and decay and the surgeon is provided freely as a public service and their profession is to try as best and compassionately as they can with their training they recieved freely to delay or prevent the suffering inevitable from life... now people sue here for like an orthopetic surgury that simply didn't produce any result ... we are becoming more like america it is sad.
Medical professionals worry a lot about "compliance". It would not be unusual for a doctor to unironically believe that "leverage" like this—forcing the patient to come in for a check-up instead of letting them make their own decisions—actually benefits the patient. So it's not necessarily about money, but that's not imo saying it's much better.
Until now I assumed that all pacemakers were nuclear powered, since I read about this as a kid in some children's science book. It's come as a surprise to find out they're unusual.
> Due to the extremely high risk and toxicity involved with using plutonium, numerous layers and shields were woven into these pacemakers resulting in larger and heavier devices. Despite strong concern of radiation exposure, the actual risk of exposure from these plutonium-powered pacemakers was almost non-existent.
What a strange phrase. I would say it was because of the concern of the risk of radiation, not "despite" it, leading to the precautions built into the device, that the risk was reduced to "almost non-existent".
Or is this a claim that the shielding was unnecessary?
The claim here is "The risk was tiny due to the superb shielding - but patients were still wary and preferred their implants not have any nuclear material at all"
Just got me thinking:
What would it take for us to get to a point where there are small, safe nuclear powered "batteries", that can supply enough electricity for a building.
Short summary: Soviet engineers installed RTG powered radio relays to support the construction of a damn in Georgia. Political instability lead to the abandonment of the RTGs. Someone scavenged the generators and removed the radioactive cores from them.
Two of the radioactive sources were discovered by men gathering firewood in the forest. They decided to bring them to their camp(!) and cozy up to them to keep warm during the night(!!). Despite showing symptoms of radiation poisoning they kept the cores on their person while loading their truck(!!!). They all suffered terrible radiation injuries.
There are more sources "lost" from the same batch which remains unaccounted for to this day.
Yes, there's a Russian movie with a guy that is guarding a weather station in the North and playing games all day. He somehow gets into a conflict with his supervisor, dissasembles a RTG beacon and uses the Strontium 90 to poison his supervisor's dried fish supply. They both get irradiated and the military cleans up the mess.
It would take some kind of complete revolution. It’s not happening.
These batteries have very poor power density and are very inefficient. The advantages of nuclear-powered batteries are:
- They generate power over a long time, decades,
- They generate some heat.
They don’t generate much power. If you have a building, you would definitely think of a nuclear RTG as a “very shitty battery”, and that’s even if you don’t care at all about radioactivity.
Thinking of these as a “battery” is also a bit misleading, IMO. These are really just small power plants, which generate heat and turn the heat into electricity. The heat is powered by radioactive decay of Pu-238, and then turned into electricity with the extremely inefficient Seebeck effect. If you had a source of heat you wanted to turn into electricity, it’s much more efficient to use that heat to turn a turbine which is connected to a generator. And if you want an efficient, cost-effictive turbine, you make it big. At that point, you have a power plant.
While Pu-238 is an alpha emitter, so it is difficult to capture the decay energy in any other way than by converting heat into electrical energy, for the radioactive isotopes that are beta emitters there is an alternative where the nuclear batteries function in a way very similar to a chemical battery.
The beta decaying substance is connected electrically to one electrode of a capacitor, while the electrons emitted due to the beta decay are able to pass through the insulating layer of the capacitor, reaching the other electrode.
Thus the capacitor is charged directly by the beta-decay and it can provide electrical energy to the external circuit.
Thanks for the insights. I was thinking if we can make nuclear power generation small, it can avoid the stigma associated with big nuclear power plants. At that point it might become a viable source of energy to replace fossil fuels.
RTGs can’t do that. Compact nuclear reactors, however, can.
The problem is that a nuclear reactor is a dynamic system, with some moving parts. It requires thermal management. It requires dynamic control. It is really hard to design a fully self-contained nuclear power system which wouldn’t require any human intervention to operate.
And even if we could, there is also a problem of waste management. Nuclear waste is not too dangerous, if you don’t touch it. It is, however, quite dangerous, if you grind it into fine particles and spray a large city with it by a crop duster. Our world is crazy. There are people like that out there, who might be interested in it. It is relatively hard to obtain hot nuclear waste from centralized large power plants. It will be really easy in the case of small building-scale reactors.
We'd need to have a lot of money, a disregard for return of investment and a lot patience: Current RTGs can do that, but they're rather expensive for heating houses and problematic from the nuclear materials POV (waste / profileration), not to mention the regulatory and licensing for using it a neighbourhood - better budget the time and money for lobbying for some legislation changes.
If by building we mean say 10 apartments, and each needs 10 kW, the RTG would need hundreds of kg of Pu-238 plutonim dioxide [1].
It's hard to cite the exact cost for that since it's not a freely traded commodity but that's a lot of plutonium. Eg NASA said that with a $75-90 million investment they can make 1.5-2 kg per year of it. [2]
Not related to nuclear, but the startup Bloom Energy was aiming this by fuel cells. A small box could power a house for a year, as they claimed. Trouble was the box internals run at very high temperatures (800°C) and there was potential for things going awry.
This is established and commonly installed technology in Japan. It's called EneFarm. Lots of newish houses connected to natural gas have these largish boxes out front. The odd name leaves most people confused.
The EneFarms used to be heavily subsidized by the japanese government in a long term program to encourage fuel cell development and manufacturing. Over time prices have decreased such that the subsidy is either already expired or could be soon expired.
The tech is near, and allows getting a bit more energy out if natural gas. The gas companies hope it will allow them to eventually reuse their pipes to send hydrogen. Personally I think the combo of cheap solar panels and 400% efficiency heat pumps will outcompete gas.
Tritium-powered betavoltaic batteries are off-the-shelf products, and have existed for decades. You can buy them today. But they can only supply a current on the microamp scale, only useful for some niche sensor applications... On the upside, these batteries are fairly safe.
You could have something like that supplies heat to a building by nuclear decay, but generating useful amounts of electricity from relatively small temperature differences is hard. You could theoretically have a steam-generating nuclear reactor in a building, similar to what you'd find in a nuclear-powered submarine, but it wouldn't be small or safe or simple, and it would require large amounts of cold water.
Small research reactors exist, but they tend to generate in the neighborhood of tens of watts.
Far better would be a Pebble Bed Reactor, which more or less fits into a couple of shipping containers and provides a building's worth of power and heat for about ten years with a similar level of maintenance as a diesel genny.
I saw a video about a recent advancement in nuclear diamond batteries. Basically look like normal AA batteries but used depleted uranium and lab diamonds to make them save and long lasting
The headline situation obviously needs an entry or two in the "If I Was An Evil Overlord" List.
Best that you not discover that little detail when you're trying to "seal the deal" with an ultra-powerful Eldritch Abomination, which you summoned from Far Beyond Mortal Realms, and are pulling the still-beating heart from your live human sacrifice for that kinda-critical part of the Horrific Ritual.
And it's clearly a detail which any Faithful Lieutenant should check when "procuring" sacrifice victims. And yet another reason for any survival-oriented members of the Evil Overlord's Legions of Terror to request postings in distant and sleepy bits of the EO's Empire - far from the glory and promotion opportunities...
On the one extreme, you have the Elephant Foot at Chernobyl, which even today will kill you if you, like, go up and lick it. But it's not going to sneak up behind you, so just don't go over there.
On the other extreme you have the release of radioactive water from Fukushima, which instantly dilutes to nothing in the vastness of the ocean. Meh.
In the middle, you have radiation sources like this, which are small enough to be unnoticed and highly mobile, but clumpy enough to still kill you dead if you get too close. Unless you have a radiation detector, you could step on one on your way home today and never know it.
There’s another scary Goldilocks aspect too, which is what I thought your comment was going to be about when I started reading it.
Stuff with a really short half life is horribly radioactive, but not for long. Stuff with a half life of millions of years sticks around forever, but it’s not throwing off that much radiation. But stuff in the middle (a half life of perhaps decades to a thousand years) can be very dangerous and remain that way for a long time.
I wish phones had radiation detectors(Aside from camera based ones that aren't accurate and use battery). If 100M people had radiation detection, I'm sure we'd get a few hits every once in a while.
Plus it can probably be done in roughly a headphone jack sized spot.
This also happened in Taiwan. A metalworks reused Cobalt-60-contaminated rebar and then hundreds of apartment buildings were constructed with it in the 80s. The government tried to find and buy them, but it seems that some people didn’t want to sell because of the amount offered. There are still some of them around.
It seems like an amazing coincidence that they were able to work out so much about how this happened. It makes you wonder how often this happens and noone finds out.
My father built our house in Chihuahua city around 1985. We lived in that house for 25 years. I never thought about it until we had a case of brain cancer in the family 3 years ago.
It was a thing in the US too. My favorite coffee shop in the suburbs of Chicago got a shipment of tables that had contaminated metal from this incident.
This whole thing was a complete failure of bureaucracy from that start and the only entities that deserve any blame are those responsible for leaving nuclear waste in an abandoned facility after being told about it.
I think putting it this way absolves the Brazilian government too much. What happened is 100% their fault.
The hospital moved to a new site but as there was disagreement with their previous landlord they were prevented to move equipments by the police despite trying to secure the source which was later stolen and having repeatedly warned of its danger.
The first thing I thought of when I saw the pacemaker photo was to adapt the miniature RTG to power a digital watch. People have Nixie tube watches, I want my RTG powered watch.
I'd use a capacitor to accumulate a charge which would power one of the really old-school LED digital watches of the early 70s.
Totally impractical, dangerous and illegal? Sign me up!
No. It lasts years because pacemakers have a really tiny power draw.
There's not a miniature nuclear reactor in there, it's just a RTG, which is simple but also very inefficient. So it doesn't get the crazy amount of power from a tiny amount of material a fission reactor does.
> There's not a miniature nuclear reactor in there, it's just a RTG,
I believe these are not RTGs (radioisotope thermoelectric generators.) Rather they use radiovoltaic conversion, probably alphavoltaic conversion judging by the use of Pu-238. Such devices convert alpha or beta radiation directly to electricity using semiconductors, not unlike photovoltaic cells.
But your point still holds, these atomic batteries produce a tiny amount of power.
It would take about 50,000 hours (5.7 years) to charge a 10 Wh iPhone. A solar cell on the back of the iphone would take roughly a full sunny day to charge an iPhone, with ~2 watts peak output.
For actual power, no it would be wildly impractical. However there is a concept of a nuclear top-off battery which keeps your main chemical battery from draining during long periods when not it use. So you could throw a charged phone in a drawer and come back months or years later and it's still good to go. Good for applications like an emergency kit.
Readit News
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1279940/
Thus begins one of my favorite Ian Banks novels, starting with exactly this event.
WTF!?! We have plutonium powered pacemakers?
http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2015/ph241/degraw2/
Ah, okay we had.
> Despite the often longer life-expectancies, nuclear pacemakers quickly became a part of the past when lithium batteries were developed. Not only did the technology improve, allowing for lighter, smaller, and programmable pacemakers, but doctors began to realize that this excessive longevity of nuclear pacemakers was excessive. Lithium pacemakers often last 10-15 years allowing for doctors to check in on their patients and replace either the batteries or the pacemakers themselves with new and improved technology as it is develops in those 10-15 year spans.
I cynically read this as "we needed to get more money out of these patients"
Additionally, any kind of implanted device is significantly prone to a wide range of problems that range from inconvenient to devastating. The human body is very hostile to foreign objects, often with few warning signs. Clots and fibrous capsules (and eventually, calcified capsules) form around ANY implant, and that's the best case problem.
Titanium is extremely biocompatible. It forms a thinner capsule than most materials. It integrates with bones beautifully, due to surface treatments that allow bone to grow into microscopic surface cavities, with strong molecular bonds. But also sometimes, for no apparent reason, all the bone around a titanium implant will just start dying and resorbing. It's rare, but if you get a hip replacement you absolutely need to check on it regularly because if you don't you'll lose use of the leg completely (and quickly, and permanently).
In and around the heart is one of the most challenging places to implant things, aside from maybe the brain. Any moving part of the body will constantly stress any mechanical part, and build up scar tissue around and rubbing spots. The only reason the brain is worse is because its fragile and changes size significantly when you sleep.
Recently we started using leadless pacemakers. Even before that pacemakers were continually getting smaller, and smaller pacemakers are less irritating and experience less stress and movement. Even if that weren't true, it would still be worth checking in on pacemakers, because they're doing incredibly hard jobs and if they fail people can die faster than they can get to a hospital.
EDIT: oh, and heart disease is the #1 cause of death in the US, while heart surgery is one of the most difficult specialties to get in to. They are absolutely never short on patients, lol.
[0] When the pacemaker detected a problematic arrhythmia it would give a couple of defibrillation shocks just like the paddles but right on the heart muscle. He said this felt like getting kicked in the chest by a horse and came completely out of the blue with zero warning. So it could be quite disruptive. He wanted a feature where it would tingle or beep or something just a few seconds ahead of time so he could mentally prepare; apparently the second one that was expected was a lot less traumatic. Anyway, the docs thought it was a good idea, and passed it up, but it never happened before he passed.
Heart problems are funky.
Most patients don’t survive those 10 years anyways.
Unfortunately in the OECD I think its possie for an American to read it this way due to the unusual health system. Don't get me wrong... things are changing elsewhere too... it used to be a great shame to go sue a surgeon for anything but reckless intentional negligence... after all we all have bodies that age and decay and the surgeon is provided freely as a public service and their profession is to try as best and compassionately as they can with their training they recieved freely to delay or prevent the suffering inevitable from life... now people sue here for like an orthopetic surgury that simply didn't produce any result ... we are becoming more like america it is sad.
Dead Comment
Same. In what world can a lifesaving device run excessively long? One with our health system is where...
What a strange phrase. I would say it was because of the concern of the risk of radiation, not "despite" it, leading to the precautions built into the device, that the risk was reduced to "almost non-existent".
Or is this a claim that the shielding was unnecessary?
Even though people might worry about radiation from the device, the actual risk (due to all the shielding) is almost non-existent.
Short summary: Soviet engineers installed RTG powered radio relays to support the construction of a damn in Georgia. Political instability lead to the abandonment of the RTGs. Someone scavenged the generators and removed the radioactive cores from them.
Two of the radioactive sources were discovered by men gathering firewood in the forest. They decided to bring them to their camp(!) and cozy up to them to keep warm during the night(!!). Despite showing symptoms of radiation poisoning they kept the cores on their person while loading their truck(!!!). They all suffered terrible radiation injuries.
There are more sources "lost" from the same batch which remains unaccounted for to this day.
https://m.imdb.com/title/tt1588875/
Only the Soviets were daft enough to build RTGs using Strontium 90.
https://www.emergencylights.net/collections/self-luminous?gc...
They aren’t generating electricity though.
These batteries have very poor power density and are very inefficient. The advantages of nuclear-powered batteries are:
- They generate power over a long time, decades,
- They generate some heat.
They don’t generate much power. If you have a building, you would definitely think of a nuclear RTG as a “very shitty battery”, and that’s even if you don’t care at all about radioactivity.
Thinking of these as a “battery” is also a bit misleading, IMO. These are really just small power plants, which generate heat and turn the heat into electricity. The heat is powered by radioactive decay of Pu-238, and then turned into electricity with the extremely inefficient Seebeck effect. If you had a source of heat you wanted to turn into electricity, it’s much more efficient to use that heat to turn a turbine which is connected to a generator. And if you want an efficient, cost-effictive turbine, you make it big. At that point, you have a power plant.
The beta decaying substance is connected electrically to one electrode of a capacitor, while the electrons emitted due to the beta decay are able to pass through the insulating layer of the capacitor, reaching the other electrode.
Thus the capacitor is charged directly by the beta-decay and it can provide electrical energy to the external circuit.
The problem is that a nuclear reactor is a dynamic system, with some moving parts. It requires thermal management. It requires dynamic control. It is really hard to design a fully self-contained nuclear power system which wouldn’t require any human intervention to operate.
And even if we could, there is also a problem of waste management. Nuclear waste is not too dangerous, if you don’t touch it. It is, however, quite dangerous, if you grind it into fine particles and spray a large city with it by a crop duster. Our world is crazy. There are people like that out there, who might be interested in it. It is relatively hard to obtain hot nuclear waste from centralized large power plants. It will be really easy in the case of small building-scale reactors.
We'd need to have a lot of money, a disregard for return of investment and a lot patience: Current RTGs can do that, but they're rather expensive for heating houses and problematic from the nuclear materials POV (waste / profileration), not to mention the regulatory and licensing for using it a neighbourhood - better budget the time and money for lobbying for some legislation changes.
If by building we mean say 10 apartments, and each needs 10 kW, the RTG would need hundreds of kg of Pu-238 plutonim dioxide [1].
It's hard to cite the exact cost for that since it's not a freely traded commodity but that's a lot of plutonium. Eg NASA said that with a $75-90 million investment they can make 1.5-2 kg per year of it. [2]
[1] https://drinksavvyinc.com/blog/how-much-does-a-radioisotope-... gives 2 kW per 5 kg [2] https://www.space.com/20774-plutonium-spacecraft-fuel-nasa-b...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloom_Energy
The EneFarms used to be heavily subsidized by the japanese government in a long term program to encourage fuel cell development and manufacturing. Over time prices have decreased such that the subsidy is either already expired or could be soon expired.
The tech is near, and allows getting a bit more energy out if natural gas. The gas companies hope it will allow them to eventually reuse their pipes to send hydrogen. Personally I think the combo of cheap solar panels and 400% efficiency heat pumps will outcompete gas.
Small research reactors exist, but they tend to generate in the neighborhood of tens of watts.
Best that you not discover that little detail when you're trying to "seal the deal" with an ultra-powerful Eldritch Abomination, which you summoned from Far Beyond Mortal Realms, and are pulling the still-beating heart from your live human sacrifice for that kinda-critical part of the Horrific Ritual.
And it's clearly a detail which any Faithful Lieutenant should check when "procuring" sacrifice victims. And yet another reason for any survival-oriented members of the Evil Overlord's Legions of Terror to request postings in distant and sleepy bits of the EO's Empire - far from the glory and promotion opportunities...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goi%C3%A2nia_accident
On the one extreme, you have the Elephant Foot at Chernobyl, which even today will kill you if you, like, go up and lick it. But it's not going to sneak up behind you, so just don't go over there.
On the other extreme you have the release of radioactive water from Fukushima, which instantly dilutes to nothing in the vastness of the ocean. Meh.
In the middle, you have radiation sources like this, which are small enough to be unnoticed and highly mobile, but clumpy enough to still kill you dead if you get too close. Unless you have a radiation detector, you could step on one on your way home today and never know it.
Scary!
Stuff with a really short half life is horribly radioactive, but not for long. Stuff with a half life of millions of years sticks around forever, but it’s not throwing off that much radiation. But stuff in the middle (a half life of perhaps decades to a thousand years) can be very dangerous and remain that way for a long time.
Plus it can probably be done in roughly a headphone jack sized spot.
Nah... You will know it quite soon.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ciudad_Ju%C3%A1rez_cobalt-60_c...
There were houses built of contaminated rebar! The story gets crazier the more you read about it.
A caesium-137 source from an industrial sensor has been lost and ended up inside a concrete wall of an apartment building; four people died from it.
https://www.upi.com/Archives/1984/04/02/Radioactive-tables-r...
https://navajotimes.com/reznews/grand-canyon-gateway-chapter...
They've been begging the EPA for help for decades.
Is it “stealing” if it’s abandoned?
This whole thing was a complete failure of bureaucracy from that start and the only entities that deserve any blame are those responsible for leaving nuclear waste in an abandoned facility after being told about it.
The hospital moved to a new site but as there was disagreement with their previous landlord they were prevented to move equipments by the police despite trying to secure the source which was later stolen and having repeatedly warned of its danger.
Dead Comment
I'd use a capacitor to accumulate a charge which would power one of the really old-school LED digital watches of the early 70s.
Totally impractical, dangerous and illegal? Sign me up!
There's not a miniature nuclear reactor in there, it's just a RTG, which is simple but also very inefficient. So it doesn't get the crazy amount of power from a tiny amount of material a fission reactor does.
I believe these are not RTGs (radioisotope thermoelectric generators.) Rather they use radiovoltaic conversion, probably alphavoltaic conversion judging by the use of Pu-238. Such devices convert alpha or beta radiation directly to electricity using semiconductors, not unlike photovoltaic cells.
But your point still holds, these atomic batteries produce a tiny amount of power.
Maybe it would make people put phones in the sun all the time and wear out batteries with heat.
However I do not trust the public to dispose of recyclable waste properly, let alone radioactive devices.