New Light Glows For 12 Years

I went to the web site and the paint will glow for 12 hrs not 12 years

Anonymous: I looked at the sources and they both said 12 years.

There must be something bad about it, otherwise we would have seen it everywhere in the world today.

The paint the company currently makes lasts for 12 hours, the new material is supposed to last 12 years.

It's so Homer Simpson. LOL :D

Bio-degradable? Would be awesome as a tattoo!

The only way they could generate light continuously for 12 years, without any energy input, is if it was using a radioactive source. They say it is "lead-free and non-radioactive", but their own patent application reveals that they use a radioactive gas (almost certainly tritium) encapsulated with a phosphor. They say the radioactive gas can't escape the microsphere. I wonder how much wear and tear the material can take before tritium starts escaping.

Makes me nervous.

in the comments on treehugger a lot of people say this is radioactive. I have not looked into it myself, just repeating what other people have said.

Ha, Ellobie, that was my first thought, too - it would be GREAT in a tattoo! Radioactivity be damned, I have always wanted to glow in the dark =)

12 hours per light recharge. I bought the sampler kit to give it a try.

12 years, 12 hours--either way, it's still cool and I still want it! :-)

--TwoDragons

Does anyone else remember reading about this in OMNI magazine about 20 years ago?

Not bad as long as no one puts it in their pocket. Radioactivity tends to sterilize men. ;)

Traser made something very similar, a glass tube coated with various types of phosphor and filled with tritium. It works remarkably well, once I lost my keys and it was only a couple of nights later when I wondered "what's that blue glow in the grass?" that I spotted them. Yeah, I should really mow the lawn before it covers the 1st floor windows, but still, trasers kick ass.

I once worked in a laboratory building where we used small amounts of radioactive phosphorus compounds (for tracing DNA in genetic engineering experiments). The regulations and restrictions placed on this very routine work are quite strict. We had to log how much material came into the lab and how much went out in the hot waste. In addition, we needed to calculate the amount that was lost to decay, since the tracer has a half-life of only 14 days or so.

One day, I was looking up at an EXIT sign over a door, and noticed a "Caution: Radioactive" sticker on it. I got on a chair and read the label, and found that the glowing EXIT sign was powered by tritium (a radioactive isotope of hydrogen). The exit sign contained 14 Curies of radioactivity (This is one of the many units used to describe levels of radio-activity).

Our lab might transact about 3 microcuries in a week (a microcurie is, naturally, one one-millionth of a Curie). While it was a small lab, I'd imagine that the entire research building may take in as much as 4 millicuries a month (four-thousandths of a Curie), so one EXIT sign has about three thousand months of radioactivity in it.

Of course, it was a 3-story building with stairwell exits on each end (six EXIT signs), plus another 2-story research wing (four EXIT signs) and an office area (four more), making a total of 14 signs at 14 Curies each. That amounts to about a quarter kiloton or so (Just joking!).

In the event of a fire, the least of the worries would be the release of the miniscule amount of research-related radioactivity in the building. I wonder if the EXIT signs were to be discarded in the regular trash when they were to be replaced?

In fairness, I must say that the radioactive phosphorus that we used is "sticky" compared with other chemical tracers. It tends to adhere to other things and also react with other chemicals, making it more likely to get caught in your body. Also, since it is in the form of a DNA component, it can be metabolized and incorporated into your body to a small degree. Tritium, on the other hand, is much more inert. It would most likely burn up in a fire, becoming incorporated into water molecules and dispersing into the environment. This would dilute its effects to insignificance. Still, the difference in handling rules for EXIT signs vs radioactive tracers is amazing.

...
Don't get me started about the janitor who set off alarms because she was given a Technicium tracer at the local hospital; or the radio-iodine laden cat poop that was caught at the landfill.

Update on the technology:

The 2007 NASA Tech Brief's Grand Prize award winning light source from MPK CO. was just disclosed in this years contest to create electricity when applied to solar cells. Versatile, abundant and low cost electrical energy - this can power micro devices, electric car, homes, etc. for 20+ years. Green Tech the world needs today!

The technology aims to replace batteries, generating low-cost electricity for everything from micro devices to utility applications has groundbreaking implications and potential to turn the battery business upside down.

Litroenergy is made from litrospheres, which are self-illuminating micro particles that, when they are placed on or sandwiched between solar cells, generate electricity. The light-emitting micro particles are not affected by heat or cold and can be used in sheet form for easy application on solar cells.

“The many novel, versatile and far reaching applications/benefits for low cost on-going durable, solid state power generation without using any additional resources and being extremely environmentally friendly has ground breaking implications for our energy consuming world.”

Litroenergy.com