And since you brought up atmospheric carbon removal, here’s an interesting, and balanced, article about that from the NYT:

The New Climate Gold Rush: Scrubbing Carbon From the Sky

And since all isotopes of an element are chemically identical, there is no cheap, chemical method of extracting the C14 from coal or CO2 or any other source of carbon. Think of it this way: U235 is about 5% of raw Uranium (U238),
This is why we needed Oak Ridge to fuel one nuclear bomb (just a few pounds of U235 to use on Japan, and this is why Iran is having to invest so much on centrifuges to enrich their Uranium to weapons grade.

This sounds as physically impossible as those lunatic schemes for “sequestering excess carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere”. Some things can’t be done, even if they do not violate the laws of physics.

This research is using C14 to provide tiny, lightweight power sources for applications that require very low levels of long-lasting energy, but must be safe and durable enough to withstand the rigors of space travel. For example, in microsats. Maybe the C14 power source can run the night light, but certainly not the com laser.

RL is skeptical, but then he’s skeptical about everything lol. Perhaps there’s something about this new process that we don’t know we don’t know? Yeah that thing again.

98.93% of all Carbon is C12. 1.07% is C13. That adds up to 100%, at least when you round to two decimal places. The fraction of natural C14 is only a trace. There are other isotopes as well, but they are radioactive with half-lives so short they do not exist in nature. They decayed away a long time ago.

We are very good at measuring tiny quantities of these isotopes which allows us to do carbon dating, but it is very difficult to separate C14 from Carbon. Remember, all isotopes of an element are chemically identical, there is no easy way to extract one isotope from the rest. Yes, a 5g sample of C14 (in diamond form) might be a potent power source, generating electricity from the heat of radioactivity, but how do we go about isolating that much of it? We already know how difficult and expensive it is to enrich U235 to weapons or fuel grade.

The amount of C14 in the atmosphere is constant because it is continuously being replenished by cosmic ray bombardment of the CO2 in the air. The C14 is in equilibrium, that is, the amount newly created exactly equals the amount that decays away. The Carbon 14 in plants, animals, and rocks is not replenished cosmically, so it is constantly diminishing. If we need C14 in bulk, we must harvest it from the stratosphere where its concentrations are most elevated and then separate it from the other isotopes.

We CAN manufacture small quantities of C14, it can be done by using particle accelerators or nuclear fission reactors (and bombs!). It involves using great energies to add or subtract neutrons from other atomic nuclei. C14 is slightly heavier than C12, so maybe we can use centrifuges or membranes or ionization like we do with Uranium. But I suspect the amounts are tiny, and the costs enormous.

Perhaps we can harvest or make C14 and compress it into diamond so it can be used as a compact, long-lived thermoelectric battery. But there may be many other radionucleides that can do the job better.

C14 Buckyballs. What a concept.

However, my post titled “I would think a 1 gram (5 carat) diamond could contain a very large amount of carbon-14″ was actually about a Diamond Sandwich used to encase carbon-14 in the new battery prototype RL and I were discussing. The technology is using manufactured diamonds as a shell around carbon-14 to create a microwatt battery. You’ll have to read from where I wrote “WOW CHECK THIS OUT RL” all the way down to RL’s last post in the thread to get the full discussion.

I’d absolutely enjoy reading your thoughts on it. Especially in light of this comment:

I suppose you could make a 5-gram diamond of C14, but you’re not likely to find one in nature.

And please leave my BuckyBalls out of this conversation!
lol