I really hope it's not click-bait-vaporware, because I can think of several uses for these.
https://www.techspot.com/news/107357-coin-sized-nuclear-3v-battery-50-year-lifespan.html
I really hope it's not click-bait-vaporware, because I can think of several uses for these.
https://www.techspot.com/news/107357-coin-sized-nuclear-3v-battery-50-year-lifespan.html
18 Comments
China, so it might not be a joke, just a standard lie.
Article states that “A Chinese battery manufacturer has developed a breakthrough, sparking a worldwide race for compact nuclear energy. The innovation is a small coin-sized battery powered by a radioactive nickel isotope that decays into stable copper. While the initial cell is relatively weak, it can easily be layered to provide more power for up to 50 years.”
I haven’t found a hint on cost.
Amperage? My understanding is that the power density is really low despite the energy density being very high.
*Looks at calander* remind me in a few days if its not some April fools thing
If this isn’t an April Fools joke, it would be interesting, especially with their 1 watt version that’s slated to be released later this year. That’s enough to trickle charge a phone enough to counter idle power loss.
I remember a classmate in college coming in so excited about this technology. That time it was a nuclear laptop battery that would never need to be charged. She posted fliers about it all over our wing.
That was 20 years ago. Still waiting on these magical batteries, that will melt your device before it charges it, to actually appear on the market.
This is both vaporware and not vaporware.
Beta voltaics nuclear cells have been around for half a CENTURY. They’re nothing new. They’re not revolutionary, they’re not the perfect energy source. They output MINUSCULE amount of power, 0.1 mW in this case, and their conversion efficiency is garbage since it’s less than 3%.
But this product is real and this company actual achievement seems to be being able to produce them at large scale and relatively low price. This could mean cheaper implantable peacemaker, mostly, since it’s what these cells are mostly used today.
Just as comparison, TEG Peltier modules are known to be have a terrible efficiency and they still manage 3 times what beta voltaics manage on average.
This is still early stages for this technology. I suspect that in 2-5 yrs it will advance from an early stage curiosity to functional use in modern electronics. And costs will decline accordingly.
What is very attractive is the decay into non radioactive form.
I am curious as to the energy drop off towards end stage life.
But who is “they” and when can we buy a slightly more useful to the average consumer version that’s not earth shatteringly expensive?
I’d really like to replace the batteries in my TV remotes.
Enough to run some electronics with sensors. Would be cool if it was enough for a mesh network. Just bundle these things up and toss them around in secure locations for a city wide ISP free network.
its only 100micro watts; thats 1/1,000,000 of 1 watt.
So it will probably be limited to things like watches, remotes or intermittent devices where a capacitor can be charged up over time before doing ‘work’
Chinese lithium batteries have a very high fail rate. I’d hate to be around one of these when it fails.
Great. Can they put it in a Roku remote? It might last a month or so.
> Compact yet powerful, the BV100 is about the size of a small coin and delivers a power output of 100 microwatts at 3 volts.
I don’t know if “powerful” is the word I’d use. 100 microwatts is next to nothing, even for a 3v coin cell. That’s 0.00001 watt output. For comparison a typical coin cell can output something like 0.0006 watts. So, more than an order of magnitude more power. Granted, the energy storage is way higher in the nuclear battery. But the rate at which it can be used also matters. Gonna need to stack a lot of these things to get any real useful power output. And at that point you might have to worry about how much radioactive material your product contains.
Nuclear batteries with super long lifespans are not new tech. They used to put them in pacemakers.
The supposed big breakthrough seems to be that is uses materials that are not tightly controlled. (Old ones often had a speck of Plutonium in them.)
Alright now hook this up to a genetically modified plant election transport chain
“Hey guys, you thought heavy metals in the landfills were bad, huh?”
If this is real, electronics and battery waste streams will get more interesting…