IMO the headline here isn't the minimally powered batteries, it's that this is a potential solution to the (very) secure storage of nuclear waste. In the US, for example, the proposal to store essentially all of our nuclear waste at one site (Yucca Mountain in Nevada) is a truly terrible idea that would create the world's most coveted terrorist target. Encapsulating the waste in small diamond shells that could be distributed among several sites seems like an ideal solution if they can get it to work at scale.
Why would anyone attack that facility? Its extremely easy to secure - If you somehow neutralize everyone protecting it you still wont get in and out with any meaningful amount of material before a military response comes in and removes your ability to actually do anything.
Note that Yucca Mountain doesn't just have piles of fissile material - all the waste is in the same concrete capsules they arrived in. The ones that need a crane to be moved[1][2].
You could argue that these will fail before we know what to do with them and that they will leak radioactive material over time, but that still wouldn't make it a good terrorist target.
NOTE: Sources don't say that you cant move these without cranes, they just say that these are larger than a person and made of steel and reinforced concrete so I thought it would be a safe assumption these are a pain to move.
I think you are misunderstanding the tech in question. This doesn't work on all radioactive waste, just the graphite (which admittedly is a decent portion of it). You'd still want secure facilities to store what you haven't recycled.
I won't claim to know much about this, but the article claims that the graphite works because it emits "short-range radiation", which I'm assuming refers to the carbon-14 emitting beta radiation.
Depleted Uranium and the stuff that comes out of depleted uranium (which I think would account for most of the spent fuel in the United States) emits beta and even shorter alpha radiation. Does that mean that the concept could work with depleted uranium?
What do you think about this documentary re: Finland storing waste in their version of Yucca:
>This film explores the question of preparing the site so that it is not disturbed for 100,000 years, even though no structure in human history has stayed standing for such a long period.
"Every day, the world over, large amounts of high-level radioactive waste created by nuclear power plants are placed in interim storage, which is vulnerable to natural disasters, man-made disasters, and societal changes. In Finland, the world’s first permanent repository is being hewn out of solid rock – a huge system of underground tunnels – that must last the entire period the waste remains hazardous: 100,000 years."
