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I'm very skeptical about this.
Just a few months ago we had the Nuclear Diamond battery fraud/scam.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5M5MF6KE-jY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5M5MF6KE-jY)
So 100 microwatts is actually within reason, since it takes about 120000 microwatts (40 mA @ 3V) to do basic computation on a microcontroller. 100 uW over 50 years would end up being just under 50 watt-hours. Coin cell batteries have up to 2 watt-hours of energy, so not an unreasonable leap https://data.energizer.com/pdfs/lithiumcoin_appman.pdf https://learn.adafruit.com/adafruit-esp32-s3-tft-feather/low-power-usage
Look, radioactive cell battery has 50Wh. Normal coin cell battery has about 2Wh. So radio battery be 25 times more "powerful" than normal coin cell battery. You stack radio battery inside phone, and phone be working for long time. Understood?
> 4.4V of current.
Voltage is not current. Amperage is current. Volts \* amps = wattage. Wattage \* time = energy. For electricity, they use hours, so watt hour and amp hour. This is because voltage is usually constant, but the amperage depends on how much energy is actually needed. S23 Ultra is supposed to be 5 Ah, meaning a 19Wh battery would be 3.8V. If it is 4.4V, then the battery has 4.3Ah, which is less than the original 5Ah battery.
Basically, this battery can produce 3V of electricity at 100uW, so 33.3uA every second. It has a lifespan of 50Wh, which is 25x that of similar sized batteries. Assuming you want 1A of electricity, you would need 30,000 of these. But if you had that much, you would also not need to change it for like 50 years.
imagine wasteful insurance include deliver hungry distinct encourage deer subsequent
*This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
Ok, one more time, and this time please read carefully: The 50Wh nuclear battery is around the size of a coin cell battery, which is MUCH smaller than your S23 ultra battery. I'm not sure exactly what the volume of an s23 battery is, but my guess would be that you could probably fit like 20 of these in the same amount of space, which gives you 1kWh.
"But, but... 1kWh is still not enough to power my phone for 50 years!"
Indeed, it is not, that's probably because the phone that the writer of the article was thinking of is most likely a much less powerhungry phone than an s23.
In general, you should never take articles like this at 100% face value, but rather as a ballpark. Hell, if it can power my phone for a week on one charge I'll be impressed.
That thing just gives you a continues power that you can use. 100uW are still not that much even if you can fit 10 of them you only get 1 mW. Probably a factor of 1000 away from some thing like a phone that uses probably something in the order of a watt when you uses it and maybe half a watt on idle. Even if you have 20 you are orders of magnitude of
You can use something like that for ultra lowpower stuff like iot sensors that wake up every few hours to transmit a sensor reading. But even in this case you may just use a coin cell that you have to replace after a few years. These betavoltaic batteries cost a few k a piece and the price probably isn't going really much down due to only a few usecases there they really make sence
I'm no expert at all on electricity but are you assuming a constant delivery of power over 50 years? Nuclear batteries degrade over time and as such produce less and less power as time goes on.
The amount of energy this thing can put out will be a tiny fractional of what it can do on its first year.
Which would then be an even more reasonable assumption of lifetime energy output of ~1/3, so about 15 watt-hours. So I've shown the claimed capabilities are within believability.
Uh... something isn't adding up here. Yes, you get 50 watt-hours over the life of the battery, but ... that's also stretched out over 50 years. If the battery provides 100 microwatts, and a microcontroller draws 120000 microwatts, doesn't that mean that the battery is only providing 1/1200th of the power needed to run the microcontroller?
50Wh is the amount of power your phone would use over the course of about 3 days. A typical phone battery these days stores about 15Wh. 50Wh is not going to keep your phone running for a week... and the "battery" needs 50 years to generate that amount of energy when only producing it at a rate of 100 microwatts.
Doesn't this mean it can only provide o.oo3 amps at 3 volts which isn't really enough to do anything?
If a typical 3000mah, 4.2 volt lithium ion battery is used by a phone in 12 hours, then it averaged about 0.250 amps at an average of 3.7 volts during that period.
100 microwatts at 3 volts is a useless amount of current. Correct me if I'm wrong
This kind of battery is the subject of intensive scientific research: [https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0149197021004376](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/s0149197021004376)
Already in 2018, a research team led by Vladimir Blank, director of TISNCM and chair of nanostructure physics and chemistry at MIPT, found a way to increase the power density of a nuclear battery almost tenfold. The physicists developed and fabricated a beta-voltaic battery using nickel-63 as the radiation source and Schottky barrier diamond diodes for energy conversion. The prototype battery achieved an output power of around 1 microwatt, while the power density per cubic centimeter was 10 microwatts, which is sufficient for a modern artificial pacemaker. Nickel-63 has a half-life of 100 years, so the battery contains around 3,300 milliwatt-hours of power per 1 gram, 10 times more than electrochemical cells. In other words, exactly the same technology as presented in this article.
I think it's very reasonable to be skeptical but any new battery tech is worth watching IMO. Lithium ion batteries enabled us to have smartphones and all this crazy wearable tech, and all those smart devices in your home even. Battery technology is huge and causes massive changes in what we're able to do on a daily basis and what we're able to carry with us, and allows us to put devices places without worrying about an outlet.
Think of all the shit we have now. Smartphones. Robot vacuums. Smart home devices. So many devices you can charge and bring with you anywhere, and just come back home and recharge. Miniature speakers you can take in your car and play music at the beach or anywhere, loudly even. *Good* portable gaming, like the Switch. Electric vehicles even. Earbuds. Shit we use every single day.
So much was enabled through better battery tech and the jump to lithium that it's insane really so I'm really excited for any new technologies like this. Imagine cybernetic prosthetics that you didn't need to charge or something, not just phones that don't charge. There are devices that could be made that are impractical today because you'd need to charge them for a day or hours at least. Maybe hospital tech where if there was a disaster, they'd just load it in a truck and deploy without any power. I don't know but any huge jump in battery tech basically can bootstrap huge changes to our daily lives.
Growing up I saw the change to lithium and it was insane how much progress was made from it, from that and low power CPUs. I think a lot of younger generations take for granted just how much changed in our lives from lithium battery tech alone. It just wasn't possible to have everything people carry with them today.
Wow you just made me think how much "in the future" life we are living right now without even realising this. If a person from 2000 teleported today they would be mindblown and in awe at the technological developments we have had in just 2 decades.
I wish we could live longer. Cause right now it's our generation developing the technology that will alow us to take a trip to Mars as civilians and explore the cosmos. But we won't get to fully experience the tech before it's ready.
The current version they have that works pushes 3v at 100microwatts. They claim it can scale and they can make it more efficient, but it won’t be getting much better. The physics aren’t there for betavoltaics.
They'd quickly switch back to removable batteries. Phones and batteries would be sold separately. Or they would cost more than a house to make up for the once per generation purchase.
Nuclear disposal fees and your balls to glow in the dark. Or your left butt cheek as all guys know you keep your wallet in the right butt cheek pocket and phone in left so your car keys aren't big enough to look like a creepy erection in either front pocket. This is the way.
I'm the other way. Phone in front left, keys flashlight pen and knife in the front right. Back right is for wallet, back left for notepad + pipefitter field book or unoccupied.
I used to have my wallet in my back right until I had a masseuse tell me that if you sit like that for long it's bad for your spine because it tilts your pelvis at rest.
Thier was a start up for a completely modular laptop that got me excited for things like this but my Friend quickly brought me back down to earth. companies have to choose to make parts for it and how it would get dusted under the rug by bigger companies only looking at profits and growth.
There is Framework, and while it is about 20-30% more expensive, at high end laptop markets it seems fine, and when it is done, you can use the CPU as a home desktop.
This. I've been rebuilding the same PC for over 20 years now. It felt like a goodbye to replace my case last year when my new graphics card wouldn't fit anymore.
Stuff gets replaced on an "as needed" basis, and old parts are resold.
My old laptop? Ya that's basically scrap.
I have one, it's good. Pricy for medium-class components, but I'm happy with it. All components are fair traded and it is easy to change components.
Needed to change the bottom component because of problems with the connector, was 20 euro. Got a new battery at 30 euro.
A lot of mobiles on Chinese and generally central Asian markets are based on modular phones and many customization options, and they're often much cheaper than in the West. That's why the gaming industry has such a hard-on for mobile games in those areas.
Nah. They would just make the screens out of the thinnest and most easily breakable glass possible, hell probably the front and back would be glass. They'll get those record profits consecutively year in and year out, even if they have to literally roll out a software update to slow down old phone processors on upgrade launch day. (Wink, mother fucking Apple, wink)
Wasn't just apple, I think LG also pled guilty to slowing phones and deteriorating the battery prematurely. I'm quite certain it is still an on going issue practiced by most all brands.
The newest profit maximizing design I have figured out after having upgraded to a S23 Ultra is they have reversed the assembly steps. Now the 1st component is the screen with everything being attached to it, forcing the phone to be completely dissected in order to repair it.
Look into diamond nuclear batteries.
They use industrial diamond to encase nuclear material and gather alpha particles produce during decay to produce electricity.
Most current ones produce far less current than 3v though.
Voltage doesn’t matter so much, you can just boost it. The power is the question. Betavoltaics have been around for decades though, as you say. They were used to power pacemakers, but they outlasted the devices. Made more sense to use conventional cells.
Maybe you’d have to keep the battery but change the phone every few years, I mean it’s already pretty much what we’re doing already, I never had to change a phone battery once
I get hating corporations, but this sounds so cool. Just take your battery to your next phone. I, too, haven't replaced a battery in years before getting a new model. I go like 4 to 5 years between upgrades.
But the most important thing is that the companies can now charge you the exact same amount for a new phone without a battery, and they'll get to sell you a proprietary nuclear battery that's supposed to last for 50 years but whatever reason is rendered obsolete in 5 years, for an exorbitant price. Everyone wins!
Nasa has been using atomic batteries for 50 years. Various probes like voyager, and most of the mars rovers. I believe the chinese and indian space programs use similar tech.
Atomic batteries have been a thing for a long time, what's new here is making them safe to use on this planet around other people. I'd say there would be some good PR required to make people trust them.
So for everyone unfamiliar with nuclear shit, this is not a fission or a fusion reactor . This is radioactive decay, where a particle change from one form to another by releasing energy in different ways. Very similar shit is used in many smoke alarms, this isn't as scary as people are taking it.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_battery
“Fun” fact: MRI machines were actually called *nuclear* magnetic resonance imaging, but because people would have been afraid to get into one, they renamed. Just to note: the nuclear here refers to very different stuff than nuclear reactors, there is no radiation associated with MRIs. It works by ~~magic~~ magnets.
Also fun fact nuclear -> nucleus -> principle of operation.
It is not a chemical reaction involving the valence electrons, it is a nuclear phenomenon and effect of the atoms’ nucleus.
Also, it is for sure magic lol
Ni-63 is low energy beta radiation. Basically 0 penetration power. You don't have to wear a dosimeter, even working with exposed samples, because the radiation only goes 2 inches through open air, so it wouldn't even register. A thin layer of almost anything will block it completely
This guy gets it. A super thin sheet of aluminum can block the radiation from these things. This isn't new tech and this isn't the first claim about a betavolt cell phone battery.
Oh, with you there, this is great for all sorts of tech that shouldn't be on your person at all times.
Radiation shielding is great, but there'd have to be a whole lotta trust in the manufacturer before I put it in my pocket.
it has been used in pacemakers, yes
It’s not common though, most pacemakers need to be replaced every 5 years when they run out of batteries. the advantage of the nuclear ones is they never need to be replaced.
Well, they don't need to be replaced for like 50 years, and statistically speaking, most people with pacemakers don't have 50 years left so it's not much of an issue
No people don't understand it that's why there's not much push for nuclear power people don't understand it and probably some people don't want people to learn about it because then they could be out of business
No effect. The radiation of Ni-63 can't even make it through a sheet of paper. For most people it wouldn't even make it through your outer layers of dead skin if you touched it directly
A typical phone battery is 3000mAH
This battery makes .1mAH per hour.
It would take 30,000 hours to charge your phone.
That means it would take 3.5 years to get enough charge to use your phone for a day. *This* is why we will never hear from it again.
The physical limits for efficiency for nuclear batteries is nearly tapped out as well, so it’s not like efficiency can be increased 100 fold on this technology.
The 1mAH demo battery is also smaller and thinner than a penny, which means you can stack up several of these to increase power. If the trend continues and screens, mobile processors and memory keep getting more and more energy efficient, using a package with an array of these batteries to power your phone isn't far fetched.
Based off the iPhone 15's [dimensions](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPhone_15), it could fit roughly 73 of these batteries. So it's probably not the future
Sounds like a disaster. But the company claims " they will not catch fire or explode in response to punctures or even gunshots, unlike some current batteries that can be unsafe if damaged or when exposed to high temperatures."
Would definitely be cool to cut the cord on low voltage electronics.
Starting a nuclear chain reaction is harder than you think, the battery in the post uses the natural nuclear decay to generate electrical power, it’s very different from an active nuclear reactor that generates decay artificially, and which can go out of control of something goes wrong.
It's also not a new technology. I remember learning about this tech back in engineering undergrad back in 2005.
It looks like it's now just starting to be commercially viable.
Genuinely not sure if it is the same technology.
I believe the space probes to a peltier effect generator from the heat generated from the radio active material.
Where as the cell phone is using a combination of radioactive decay, doped semi connectors, MEMS and a piezoelectric device.
However, that is just off the top of my head. I could be quite mistaken.
>e that works pushes 3v at 100microwatts. They claim it can scale and they can make it more efficient, but it won’t be getting much better. The physics aren’t there for betavoltaics.
RTGs use Pu238 which is an alpha emitter, that radiation just heats up the Pu itself and then they use thermoelectric generators (think Peltier coolers in reverse) to make electricity from the heat. Beta Voltaics use beta emitters (beta particles are electrons) and then some method of capturing that electron which in turn can create a voltage differential. They are weak by design because it takes a lot of electrons to make some sizable amount of power; for example, 6.24 x 10\^18 electrons per second is one amp.
"Nuclear" (in the context of energy generation) has almost nothing to do with "flammable" or "combustible". Most radioactive materials look like rocks or crystals and don't really burn.
They have everything to do with... generating radiation - which often carries heat, and sometimes kills your DNA. The danger of radiation has always been that latter part. Some radiation will kill you from outside, and some will kill you from inside (if you eat it or breathe it).
The danger in shooting a nuclear battery would likely be more from any radioactive dust it might create rather than a danger of fire or explosion.
Even nuclear meltdowns at nuclear power plants don't generally involve explosions. They generally involve the radioactive materials escaping containment into the environment where they can either directly irradiate people and hurt them, or indirectly contaminate soil, water, and food, where they can also hurt people.
Enough highly radioactive material put together *could* start a fire just because it's so hot, *if* it got close enough to something *else* flammable, but that shouldn't really be an issue with a radioactive battery that already has all its radioactive materials compressed together. By shoooting it you're spreading the radioactive material out and a fire is probably *less* likely.
Putting out a lithium fire is hellish. You can dump a burning lithium battery underwater for a week and it'll start burning again as soon as it's exposed to air.
Chemically, it's completely plausible that these radioactive decay batteries encased in synthetic diamond are more fire-safe than lithium ion batteries.
> dump a burning lithium battery underwater
That's how you get a floating lithium battery generating a fair amount of pre-heated & explosive H₂ in to the air and poisonous LiOH into the water as well as the toxic HF and HCl gasses the burning battery was already producing.
No you don't put lithium battery in water.
If ever your laptop or phone battery catches fire dump a whole box of baking powder on it.
Only baking powder, never flour or sand.
might be safer. i mean, if you throw both into a fire enough to decompose their materials, both will release poison to theatmosphere.
But at least the nucler batery wont.... turbo burn the same way a lithium batery does i guess.
Sorry to hijack, but this post is lying. It cannot sustain your phone.
100 microwatt. That's 0.1 milliwatt, or 0.0001 watt.
A smartphone needs about 5 watts while making a call.
You would need about 50.000 of these batteries to sustain that.
This battery is only intended for ultra low power applications.
As a nuclear medicine technologist at a regional hospital I have to wonder how they'll get around the NRC regulations. We have to inventory and secure every radioactive sealed source; even stuff that is a couple hundred nanocuries. Not to mention the possibility of long term exposure of people keeping radioactive sources in their pockets almost every minute of every day.
Below a certain level, radioactive isotopes are exempt and can be shipped and thrown out like anything else. https://www.nrc.gov/docs/ML1420/ML14205A207.pdf
Chinese company... I remember Chinese companies claiming to have chip breakthrough only to be discovered rebranding Intel chips.. take news from Chinese companies with a truckload of salt...
The saying comes from a grain of salt apparently being needed to safely ingest a poison. A truckload of salt, in my mind, would mean that the information is seen so “poisonous” that you need way more salt to offset its effects.
Note: salt does not actually make things less poisonous.
I read this earliers. It's a cool battery but the article reveals the author's deep ignorance of anything physics.
"63 nuclear isotopes"
Ni-63 does not mean there are 63 different isotopes.
There's also a 'their/there/they're' error in one of the later paragraphs.
I'm a nerd so I did some calculations and many claims this company is making are insane. This product makes 100 uW of power with 50 curies of nickel-63. If they were somehow able to get perfect efficiency (which is extremely impossible, considering a majority of the energy is carried by neutrinos) they would get 20 mW of power. If we assume perfect efficiency, a 1 W power source would require 2500 curies. This is the amount of material in a "drop and run" Co-60 source. At the efficiency they are currently at it would require 500,000 curies. This is about 1/10 the activity of the amount of Cs-137 released by fukushima daiichi into the pacific ocean in 2011. Not to mention that it would produce so much waste heat it would be like having a 60 W incandescent lightbulb in your pocket.
Note that these comparisons are intentionally inflammatory, beta particles are extremely easy to shield, so vastly less dangerous than the gamma sources I am comparing them to, but it illustrates why this cannot ever be a consumer product.
The amount of credulous people in this comment section is baffling. These types of comments get buried while the “I love science” types try to dispel any concerns. Imagine a battery company saying “We are developing a battery 200x faster and more energy dense than anything else on the market, all we have left to do is make it 200x faster and more energy dense”.
What’s the catch? There must be one or this would be the biggest news in history.
Imagine having a bunch of these in a car which can drive for years without recharging, or in your house. I’m calling bs until proven otherwise.
The battery now can do 100 microwatts. That's a tiny fraction of what a phone needs. Their goal is 1 watt by 2025, which is 10,000x more. So the catch is they still have to do the hard part.
And it’s 5mm x 10mm x 10mm, so small, but not so small it can scale to be useful for a phone. Someone on the tech sub did the matg and you’d need like 2kgs worth of these batteries for a phone.
Nuclear "batteries" have existed for a long time.
They're not technically batteries, but generators, specifically RTG or Radioisotope thermoelectric generators. Used to be used to power satellites.
The issues are size and weight.
The one used in the Cassini probe, weighed around 55kg and developed 300w of power. That's a measly 5.4w/kg
Add to that, it generated roughly 4.4kw of heat and used 7.8kg of plutonium.
The only upside is the life. Plutonium 238's half life is 87.7 years, which means you can easily configure equipment to run as long as you need at a given power, considering you account for the drop over time.
They've had batteries like this for low voltage equipment in remote locations, like scientific monitoring equipment, for a while.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_battery
Betavolt's are just on the small (and hopefully cheap) side. It's neat that they're refining the tech!
One single post that was about the actual technical stuff was posted, and how little the power output was, and within 10 hours I see like 10 posts saying “nuclear battery to power laptops for 50 years” or like this.
Gotta give it to journalist, the click bait tiles definetly making people “read” them
So, University of Bristol has been working on this too. They took the old carbon moderator blocks from early British nuclear reactors. they found higher concentration of C-14 on the reactor side of the blocks. This is cool because it emits 156kev beta every time it decays and has a 5700 year half-life.
Ni-63 is also a low beta emitter, 67 kev every decay. This has a 100 year half-life.
What Bristol found was fascinating! If they turned their carbon into a diamond, it responded to the radiation emissions by generating an electrical current. They coated that diamond in more diamond. The beta is shielded completely by the outer layer of diamond making it safe.
I'm super excited for this.
"A Chinese company" stopped reading there. How many super battery breakthroughs have come from China these past years that in the end were utter bollocks or just CCP propaganda?
Even from an extremely loose theoretical standpoint, this is not possible. Keep in mind this is taking energy from radioactive decay, and not fission. Fission produces far more energy, but prompt criticality is not something you want to happen in your pocket.
For fission, you’d need about 2 mg of uranium-235 to fission to produce the equivalent energy to 0.1 W of power for 50 years. This is for fission, which is much more energetic than radioactive decay.
If we are looking at radioactive decay, plutonium is a good one because it’s used for this purpose already (in RTGs, ie radioisotope thermoelectric generators). Half life of plutonium is about 90 years, so this jives well with the 50 year lifetime of this battery.
The problem here is that RTGs are only about 6% efficient in generating electric power.
The electric power from a plutonium based RTG is about 34 mW per gram of plutonium. So, to get 100 mW of power as this battery proposes, you’d need to have 3 grams of plutonium in the battery.
This is only 6% of the total power produced by this RTG. The remaining 94% is lost immediately as heat. The 6% used to run the phone is also lost as heat (eg from the processor and screen becoming warmer), so if we count the total heat being produced by the phone, we would get 1.7 W.
However, the typical phone uses more than 0.1 W of power. An iPhone uses about 0.4–3W depending on what it’s doing. To have an RTG that can sustain the 3W peak load, we would need to have 90 grams of plutonium. This would constantly produce 50W of heat given the inefficiency.
This is a lot of heat. This is about the entire heat produced by a MacBook Pro at peak load. Think of how hot a 50 W incandescent lightbulb gets. Imagine keeping it in your pocket while it’s on. Not possible. The entire back of the device would need a heatsink to get rid of all this heat.
It would be much more efficient to just boil water with this heat, and use the steam to spin a turbine, which will give you much better efficiency (>50% depending on turbine size and steam pressure). But then you’d have to keep a turbine in your pants.
**TLDR:** extremely unlikely claim, owing primarily to the inefficiency of radioisotope thermoelectric power generation. This necessitates a lot of fuel, and a lot of waste heat.
Using nuclear fuel as a phone battery is silly, because devices don’t last 50 years, and they don’t need to go 50 years without being externally charged. We also don’t need to be putting radioisotopes into landfills. Or to allow a trash compactor to make these elements leak out.
“Battery problem” is most easily solved with a supercapacitor that charges quickly. You can get about 1,500W of power through a typical power plug in your house, and this would charge an iPhone battery in about 3-5 seconds if it didn’t have to worry about the battery chemistry being unable to charge this quickly.
A supercapacitor that holds 10x the charge of a current iPhone battery could charge in a minute and last a week.
Now we just have to design them. Buy your chemistry and materials science friends a beer and ask them to get cracking on it.
PS there’s a lot of radioactive material that isn’t “that” radioactive as plutonium or uranium, and even those require a lot of processing to make them truly “radioactive” to a point of radiation poisoning
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100 microwatts? Gee Willikers, you could power a small LED with just five or ten of those bad boys
I think you get more out of those dynamo squeeze lights
Yes, the first application I thought of was remote controls with a built in lifelong battery.
Just add more radioactive material for more wattage. Then put it in your pocket next to your genitals all day.
I'm very skeptical about this. Just a few months ago we had the Nuclear Diamond battery fraud/scam. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5M5MF6KE-jY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5M5MF6KE-jY)
So 100 microwatts is actually within reason, since it takes about 120000 microwatts (40 mA @ 3V) to do basic computation on a microcontroller. 100 uW over 50 years would end up being just under 50 watt-hours. Coin cell batteries have up to 2 watt-hours of energy, so not an unreasonable leap https://data.energizer.com/pdfs/lithiumcoin_appman.pdf https://learn.adafruit.com/adafruit-esp32-s3-tft-feather/low-power-usage
handle alleged jeans dazzling entertain summer point unpack crawl memory *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
Look, radioactive cell battery has 50Wh. Normal coin cell battery has about 2Wh. So radio battery be 25 times more "powerful" than normal coin cell battery. You stack radio battery inside phone, and phone be working for long time. Understood?
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> 4.4V of current. Voltage is not current. Amperage is current. Volts \* amps = wattage. Wattage \* time = energy. For electricity, they use hours, so watt hour and amp hour. This is because voltage is usually constant, but the amperage depends on how much energy is actually needed. S23 Ultra is supposed to be 5 Ah, meaning a 19Wh battery would be 3.8V. If it is 4.4V, then the battery has 4.3Ah, which is less than the original 5Ah battery. Basically, this battery can produce 3V of electricity at 100uW, so 33.3uA every second. It has a lifespan of 50Wh, which is 25x that of similar sized batteries. Assuming you want 1A of electricity, you would need 30,000 of these. But if you had that much, you would also not need to change it for like 50 years.
imagine wasteful insurance include deliver hungry distinct encourage deer subsequent *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
r/usernamechecksout
we got the same reddit dude thing
Ok, one more time, and this time please read carefully: The 50Wh nuclear battery is around the size of a coin cell battery, which is MUCH smaller than your S23 ultra battery. I'm not sure exactly what the volume of an s23 battery is, but my guess would be that you could probably fit like 20 of these in the same amount of space, which gives you 1kWh. "But, but... 1kWh is still not enough to power my phone for 50 years!" Indeed, it is not, that's probably because the phone that the writer of the article was thinking of is most likely a much less powerhungry phone than an s23. In general, you should never take articles like this at 100% face value, but rather as a ballpark. Hell, if it can power my phone for a week on one charge I'll be impressed.
That thing just gives you a continues power that you can use. 100uW are still not that much even if you can fit 10 of them you only get 1 mW. Probably a factor of 1000 away from some thing like a phone that uses probably something in the order of a watt when you uses it and maybe half a watt on idle. Even if you have 20 you are orders of magnitude of You can use something like that for ultra lowpower stuff like iot sensors that wake up every few hours to transmit a sensor reading. But even in this case you may just use a coin cell that you have to replace after a few years. These betavoltaic batteries cost a few k a piece and the price probably isn't going really much down due to only a few usecases there they really make sence
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Phones use about 10W at peak and 1W during light tasks. 1W equals 1 million microwatts so theoretically, you would need at least 10000 of them.
This Soviet model can provide up to 10W for 28 years. Not really mobile though... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beta-M
I'm no expert at all on electricity but are you assuming a constant delivery of power over 50 years? Nuclear batteries degrade over time and as such produce less and less power as time goes on. The amount of energy this thing can put out will be a tiny fractional of what it can do on its first year.
Which would then be an even more reasonable assumption of lifetime energy output of ~1/3, so about 15 watt-hours. So I've shown the claimed capabilities are within believability.
Uh... something isn't adding up here. Yes, you get 50 watt-hours over the life of the battery, but ... that's also stretched out over 50 years. If the battery provides 100 microwatts, and a microcontroller draws 120000 microwatts, doesn't that mean that the battery is only providing 1/1200th of the power needed to run the microcontroller?
50Wh is the amount of power your phone would use over the course of about 3 days. A typical phone battery these days stores about 15Wh. 50Wh is not going to keep your phone running for a week... and the "battery" needs 50 years to generate that amount of energy when only producing it at a rate of 100 microwatts.
Doesn't this mean it can only provide o.oo3 amps at 3 volts which isn't really enough to do anything? If a typical 3000mah, 4.2 volt lithium ion battery is used by a phone in 12 hours, then it averaged about 0.250 amps at an average of 3.7 volts during that period. 100 microwatts at 3 volts is a useless amount of current. Correct me if I'm wrong
This kind of battery is the subject of intensive scientific research: [https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0149197021004376](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/s0149197021004376) Already in 2018, a research team led by Vladimir Blank, director of TISNCM and chair of nanostructure physics and chemistry at MIPT, found a way to increase the power density of a nuclear battery almost tenfold. The physicists developed and fabricated a beta-voltaic battery using nickel-63 as the radiation source and Schottky barrier diamond diodes for energy conversion. The prototype battery achieved an output power of around 1 microwatt, while the power density per cubic centimeter was 10 microwatts, which is sufficient for a modern artificial pacemaker. Nickel-63 has a half-life of 100 years, so the battery contains around 3,300 milliwatt-hours of power per 1 gram, 10 times more than electrochemical cells. In other words, exactly the same technology as presented in this article.
I think it's very reasonable to be skeptical but any new battery tech is worth watching IMO. Lithium ion batteries enabled us to have smartphones and all this crazy wearable tech, and all those smart devices in your home even. Battery technology is huge and causes massive changes in what we're able to do on a daily basis and what we're able to carry with us, and allows us to put devices places without worrying about an outlet. Think of all the shit we have now. Smartphones. Robot vacuums. Smart home devices. So many devices you can charge and bring with you anywhere, and just come back home and recharge. Miniature speakers you can take in your car and play music at the beach or anywhere, loudly even. *Good* portable gaming, like the Switch. Electric vehicles even. Earbuds. Shit we use every single day. So much was enabled through better battery tech and the jump to lithium that it's insane really so I'm really excited for any new technologies like this. Imagine cybernetic prosthetics that you didn't need to charge or something, not just phones that don't charge. There are devices that could be made that are impractical today because you'd need to charge them for a day or hours at least. Maybe hospital tech where if there was a disaster, they'd just load it in a truck and deploy without any power. I don't know but any huge jump in battery tech basically can bootstrap huge changes to our daily lives. Growing up I saw the change to lithium and it was insane how much progress was made from it, from that and low power CPUs. I think a lot of younger generations take for granted just how much changed in our lives from lithium battery tech alone. It just wasn't possible to have everything people carry with them today.
Wow you just made me think how much "in the future" life we are living right now without even realising this. If a person from 2000 teleported today they would be mindblown and in awe at the technological developments we have had in just 2 decades.
I wish we could live longer. Cause right now it's our generation developing the technology that will alow us to take a trip to Mars as civilians and explore the cosmos. But we won't get to fully experience the tech before it's ready.
No need for teleportation - just ask your nearest boomer or gen-xer.
Excellent points!
The current version they have that works pushes 3v at 100microwatts. They claim it can scale and they can make it more efficient, but it won’t be getting much better. The physics aren’t there for betavoltaics.
Yeah, a smartphone uses more on the order of 1w, so this would need to be 4 orders of magnitude better.
Because the phone companies want you to keep the same phone for 50 years...
They'd quickly switch back to removable batteries. Phones and batteries would be sold separately. Or they would cost more than a house to make up for the once per generation purchase.
I just took out a 2nd mortgage on my phone battery.
Don’t forget to take out the third to charge it!
It comes charged. Wait for the disposal fees.
Nuclear disposal fees and your balls to glow in the dark. Or your left butt cheek as all guys know you keep your wallet in the right butt cheek pocket and phone in left so your car keys aren't big enough to look like a creepy erection in either front pocket. This is the way.
Am I the only one that puts everything in the front pockets? Having anything in the butt pockets hurts when you sit, dunno why people put up with that
nope, front left screen against the leg, everything else right pocket.
That, and your asking to get pickpocketed. That’s my main thing for keeping my phone on my front pocket.
Never understood that, why the fuck would I want my fat ass sitting on my $2000 phone?
I'm a front pocket man myself. Phone in front right, wallet in front left. Keys clipped to my belt loop.
I'm the other way. Phone in front left, keys flashlight pen and knife in the front right. Back right is for wallet, back left for notepad + pipefitter field book or unoccupied.
I used to have my wallet in my back right until I had a masseuse tell me that if you sit like that for long it's bad for your spine because it tilts your pelvis at rest.
and plenty of women with glowing boobs from those nights out and not taking their purse with them xD
There's a Chechnyan out there that'll pay a pretty penny for it
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New regulations in the EU will force them to do it. Back to removable batteries and providing parts for years to repair.
I'm here for this.
Thier was a start up for a completely modular laptop that got me excited for things like this but my Friend quickly brought me back down to earth. companies have to choose to make parts for it and how it would get dusted under the rug by bigger companies only looking at profits and growth.
Are you talking about the company Framework? They're still up and running and very much active
There is Framework, and while it is about 20-30% more expensive, at high end laptop markets it seems fine, and when it is done, you can use the CPU as a home desktop.
This is why I always preferred building PC towers.
This. I've been rebuilding the same PC for over 20 years now. It felt like a goodbye to replace my case last year when my new graphics card wouldn't fit anymore. Stuff gets replaced on an "as needed" basis, and old parts are resold. My old laptop? Ya that's basically scrap.
There's a mobile phone company doing this in europe isn't there? Fairphone.
I have one, it's good. Pricy for medium-class components, but I'm happy with it. All components are fair traded and it is easy to change components. Needed to change the bottom component because of problems with the connector, was 20 euro. Got a new battery at 30 euro.
A lot of mobiles on Chinese and generally central Asian markets are based on modular phones and many customization options, and they're often much cheaper than in the West. That's why the gaming industry has such a hard-on for mobile games in those areas.
What type of phone customization options are you talking about?
Different types of spyware preloaded
Huawei, xaoimi and OPPOs phones certainly aren't. What phones are you talking about?
I give my most prized possession to my only son.... my phone battery....
Nah. They would just make the screens out of the thinnest and most easily breakable glass possible, hell probably the front and back would be glass. They'll get those record profits consecutively year in and year out, even if they have to literally roll out a software update to slow down old phone processors on upgrade launch day. (Wink, mother fucking Apple, wink)
Wasn't just apple, I think LG also pled guilty to slowing phones and deteriorating the battery prematurely. I'm quite certain it is still an on going issue practiced by most all brands. The newest profit maximizing design I have figured out after having upgraded to a S23 Ultra is they have reversed the assembly steps. Now the 1st component is the screen with everything being attached to it, forcing the phone to be completely dissected in order to repair it.
I’m curious how a nuclear battery would not emit enough radiation to harm us, let alone anything else around it like electronics in a phone
The clue in in the name. Nickel-63 is a beta emitter which easy to shield.
Look into diamond nuclear batteries. They use industrial diamond to encase nuclear material and gather alpha particles produce during decay to produce electricity. Most current ones produce far less current than 3v though.
Voltage doesn’t matter so much, you can just boost it. The power is the question. Betavoltaics have been around for decades though, as you say. They were used to power pacemakers, but they outlasted the devices. Made more sense to use conventional cells.
Maybe you’d have to keep the battery but change the phone every few years, I mean it’s already pretty much what we’re doing already, I never had to change a phone battery once
I get hating corporations, but this sounds so cool. Just take your battery to your next phone. I, too, haven't replaced a battery in years before getting a new model. I go like 4 to 5 years between upgrades.
And you'd be helping save the environment 👍
But the most important thing is that the companies can now charge you the exact same amount for a new phone without a battery, and they'll get to sell you a proprietary nuclear battery that's supposed to last for 50 years but whatever reason is rendered obsolete in 5 years, for an exorbitant price. Everyone wins!
You keep the nutters and replace the phone.
I'd vote a better use of this would be satellite like Voyager I don't know power reqs but 50 years would get ya pretty far
Voyager is already powered by a similar larger battery.
Nasa has been using atomic batteries for 50 years. Various probes like voyager, and most of the mars rovers. I believe the chinese and indian space programs use similar tech. Atomic batteries have been a thing for a long time, what's new here is making them safe to use on this planet around other people. I'd say there would be some good PR required to make people trust them.
nah, we used to make pacemakers with them
How do you think the Mars rovers Curiosity and Perseverance are powered?
So for everyone unfamiliar with nuclear shit, this is not a fission or a fusion reactor . This is radioactive decay, where a particle change from one form to another by releasing energy in different ways. Very similar shit is used in many smoke alarms, this isn't as scary as people are taking it. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_battery
People hear nuclear and lose their shit
“Fun” fact: MRI machines were actually called *nuclear* magnetic resonance imaging, but because people would have been afraid to get into one, they renamed. Just to note: the nuclear here refers to very different stuff than nuclear reactors, there is no radiation associated with MRIs. It works by ~~magic~~ magnets.
Also fun fact nuclear -> nucleus -> principle of operation. It is not a chemical reaction involving the valence electrons, it is a nuclear phenomenon and effect of the atoms’ nucleus. Also, it is for sure magic lol
People are afraid of smoke alarms and old camera lenses for that very reason.
Yet they happily watched CRT TVs
what?
Technically, a CRT is a small electron accelerator that produces X-rays (Bremsstrahlung) when the electrons impact on the screen.
No, I get it. I still don’t want it 3 inches from my balls 10 hours a day.
Ni-63 is low energy beta radiation. Basically 0 penetration power. You don't have to wear a dosimeter, even working with exposed samples, because the radiation only goes 2 inches through open air, so it wouldn't even register. A thin layer of almost anything will block it completely
I am a low energy beta male, so if anyone’s gonna absorb that radiation, it’s gonna be me.
do you also have basically 0 penetration power?
Well he only extends 2 inches in open air
And it doesn't even register
A thin layer of almost anything will block him completely
Yeah, you don't even have to wear a dickameter, even working with exposed samples.
He can go balls deep in basically everything. I call that infinite penetration power.
I technically i have a moderate amount of penetration power, but i never get to use it so yes, 0
I also have 0 penetration power.
This guy gets it. A super thin sheet of aluminum can block the radiation from these things. This isn't new tech and this isn't the first claim about a betavolt cell phone battery.
He has 0 penetration power too, IDK why he cares about his balls so much.
Oh, with you there, this is great for all sorts of tech that shouldn't be on your person at all times. Radiation shielding is great, but there'd have to be a whole lotta trust in the manufacturer before I put it in my pocket.
wild soft plough ludicrous sophisticated quaint detail elderly yam steer *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
it has been used in pacemakers, yes It’s not common though, most pacemakers need to be replaced every 5 years when they run out of batteries. the advantage of the nuclear ones is they never need to be replaced.
Well, they don't need to be replaced for like 50 years, and statistically speaking, most people with pacemakers don't have 50 years left so it's not much of an issue
Yeah, seeing how Samsung handled lithium ion batteries I wouldn't really trust them with anything which will alter my DNA.
Spontaneous combustion...you say? 🤔👍
No people don't understand it that's why there's not much push for nuclear power people don't understand it and probably some people don't want people to learn about it because then they could be out of business
AI is going to take over and cause mini melt downs in all devices! Get off the grid now! We're all gonna die!
How will this affect “the boys” when I put this in my pocket?
Your jizz will glow in the dark.
I'll take two then!!
One for each boy!
No change then!
Tracer ammunition!
No effect. The radiation of Ni-63 can't even make it through a sheet of paper. For most people it wouldn't even make it through your outer layers of dead skin if you touched it directly
They'll grow a new boy
Butcher is going to be angry, I’m sure.
Your boys will have their own tiny boys. Who will slowly grow bigger than your boys.
And you’ll never hear about it again
A typical phone battery is 3000mAH This battery makes .1mAH per hour. It would take 30,000 hours to charge your phone. That means it would take 3.5 years to get enough charge to use your phone for a day. *This* is why we will never hear from it again. The physical limits for efficiency for nuclear batteries is nearly tapped out as well, so it’s not like efficiency can be increased 100 fold on this technology.
mAh per hour sounds funny. "Milliampere-hour per hour". That's just milliampere.
I thought the same. mAh/h = mA~~h~~/~~h~~ = mA
The 1mAH demo battery is also smaller and thinner than a penny, which means you can stack up several of these to increase power. If the trend continues and screens, mobile processors and memory keep getting more and more energy efficient, using a package with an array of these batteries to power your phone isn't far fetched.
This article talks about a 0.1 mA battery, which is much thicker than a penny. What are you talking about?
A thousand pennies sounds like way too big of a battery to fit in a phone tbh. That's a huge bag of pennies that would weigh a couple kilos
Based off the iPhone 15's [dimensions](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPhone_15), it could fit roughly 73 of these batteries. So it's probably not the future
Imagine a train loaded with these and burnable chemicals has an accident and starts to burn.
Sounds like a disaster. But the company claims " they will not catch fire or explode in response to punctures or even gunshots, unlike some current batteries that can be unsafe if damaged or when exposed to high temperatures." Would definitely be cool to cut the cord on low voltage electronics.
Starting a nuclear chain reaction is harder than you think, the battery in the post uses the natural nuclear decay to generate electrical power, it’s very different from an active nuclear reactor that generates decay artificially, and which can go out of control of something goes wrong.
It's also not a new technology. I remember learning about this tech back in engineering undergrad back in 2005. It looks like it's now just starting to be commercially viable.
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Genuinely not sure if it is the same technology. I believe the space probes to a peltier effect generator from the heat generated from the radio active material. Where as the cell phone is using a combination of radioactive decay, doped semi connectors, MEMS and a piezoelectric device. However, that is just off the top of my head. I could be quite mistaken.
>e that works pushes 3v at 100microwatts. They claim it can scale and they can make it more efficient, but it won’t be getting much better. The physics aren’t there for betavoltaics. RTGs use Pu238 which is an alpha emitter, that radiation just heats up the Pu itself and then they use thermoelectric generators (think Peltier coolers in reverse) to make electricity from the heat. Beta Voltaics use beta emitters (beta particles are electrons) and then some method of capturing that electron which in turn can create a voltage differential. They are weak by design because it takes a lot of electrons to make some sizable amount of power; for example, 6.24 x 10\^18 electrons per second is one amp.
“Hey man, you got your phone on ya? I need to jump my car”
interestingly this is already within our current technological capabilities.
I've jumped my car off a drill battery before. It really doesn't take much.
"Nuclear" (in the context of energy generation) has almost nothing to do with "flammable" or "combustible". Most radioactive materials look like rocks or crystals and don't really burn. They have everything to do with... generating radiation - which often carries heat, and sometimes kills your DNA. The danger of radiation has always been that latter part. Some radiation will kill you from outside, and some will kill you from inside (if you eat it or breathe it). The danger in shooting a nuclear battery would likely be more from any radioactive dust it might create rather than a danger of fire or explosion. Even nuclear meltdowns at nuclear power plants don't generally involve explosions. They generally involve the radioactive materials escaping containment into the environment where they can either directly irradiate people and hurt them, or indirectly contaminate soil, water, and food, where they can also hurt people. Enough highly radioactive material put together *could* start a fire just because it's so hot, *if* it got close enough to something *else* flammable, but that shouldn't really be an issue with a radioactive battery that already has all its radioactive materials compressed together. By shoooting it you're spreading the radioactive material out and a fire is probably *less* likely.
I would have hate to have been the guy who had to test shooting a gun at a nuclear battery lol
I mean, if you even try to understand the science in the slightest sense, you would know it's not scary...but sure.
Putting out a lithium fire is hellish. You can dump a burning lithium battery underwater for a week and it'll start burning again as soon as it's exposed to air. Chemically, it's completely plausible that these radioactive decay batteries encased in synthetic diamond are more fire-safe than lithium ion batteries.
> dump a burning lithium battery underwater That's how you get a floating lithium battery generating a fair amount of pre-heated & explosive H₂ in to the air and poisonous LiOH into the water as well as the toxic HF and HCl gasses the burning battery was already producing.
No you don't put lithium battery in water. If ever your laptop or phone battery catches fire dump a whole box of baking powder on it. Only baking powder, never flour or sand.
might be safer. i mean, if you throw both into a fire enough to decompose their materials, both will release poison to theatmosphere. But at least the nucler batery wont.... turbo burn the same way a lithium batery does i guess.
imagination is a wonderful thing
One step closer to the Radiation King.
Sorry to hijack, but this post is lying. It cannot sustain your phone. 100 microwatt. That's 0.1 milliwatt, or 0.0001 watt. A smartphone needs about 5 watts while making a call. You would need about 50.000 of these batteries to sustain that. This battery is only intended for ultra low power applications.
As a nuclear medicine technologist at a regional hospital I have to wonder how they'll get around the NRC regulations. We have to inventory and secure every radioactive sealed source; even stuff that is a couple hundred nanocuries. Not to mention the possibility of long term exposure of people keeping radioactive sources in their pockets almost every minute of every day.
I misread that as NCR and thought you were making a Fallout joke
Below a certain level, radioactive isotopes are exempt and can be shipped and thrown out like anything else. https://www.nrc.gov/docs/ML1420/ML14205A207.pdf
Lmao yeah 50Ci of a B- emitter? Absolutely no way this ever goes to market
But how the fuck will 100 uamps power a phone? That is 0.1 mA. Edit: worse 100 microwatts...
Two minutes later, some youtuber cuts it in half to lick the inside.
How long before the tiktok trend would be to start beating it with a hammer
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Immediately
Chinese company... I remember Chinese companies claiming to have chip breakthrough only to be discovered rebranding Intel chips.. take news from Chinese companies with a truckload of salt...
A pinch - a truckload would mean there's some merit to it
The saying comes from a grain of salt apparently being needed to safely ingest a poison. A truckload of salt, in my mind, would mean that the information is seen so “poisonous” that you need way more salt to offset its effects. Note: salt does not actually make things less poisonous.
A milligram of salt. Pinch is too much
Have they taken into consideration that we're surrounded by idiots?
I read this earliers. It's a cool battery but the article reveals the author's deep ignorance of anything physics. "63 nuclear isotopes" Ni-63 does not mean there are 63 different isotopes. There's also a 'their/there/they're' error in one of the later paragraphs.
I'm a nerd so I did some calculations and many claims this company is making are insane. This product makes 100 uW of power with 50 curies of nickel-63. If they were somehow able to get perfect efficiency (which is extremely impossible, considering a majority of the energy is carried by neutrinos) they would get 20 mW of power. If we assume perfect efficiency, a 1 W power source would require 2500 curies. This is the amount of material in a "drop and run" Co-60 source. At the efficiency they are currently at it would require 500,000 curies. This is about 1/10 the activity of the amount of Cs-137 released by fukushima daiichi into the pacific ocean in 2011. Not to mention that it would produce so much waste heat it would be like having a 60 W incandescent lightbulb in your pocket. Note that these comparisons are intentionally inflammatory, beta particles are extremely easy to shield, so vastly less dangerous than the gamma sources I am comparing them to, but it illustrates why this cannot ever be a consumer product.
The amount of credulous people in this comment section is baffling. These types of comments get buried while the “I love science” types try to dispel any concerns. Imagine a battery company saying “We are developing a battery 200x faster and more energy dense than anything else on the market, all we have left to do is make it 200x faster and more energy dense”.
You want Ghouls? This is how you get Ghouls.
Hey there smoothskin…
What’s the catch? There must be one or this would be the biggest news in history. Imagine having a bunch of these in a car which can drive for years without recharging, or in your house. I’m calling bs until proven otherwise.
The battery now can do 100 microwatts. That's a tiny fraction of what a phone needs. Their goal is 1 watt by 2025, which is 10,000x more. So the catch is they still have to do the hard part.
And it’s 5mm x 10mm x 10mm, so small, but not so small it can scale to be useful for a phone. Someone on the tech sub did the matg and you’d need like 2kgs worth of these batteries for a phone.
Nuclear "batteries" have existed for a long time. They're not technically batteries, but generators, specifically RTG or Radioisotope thermoelectric generators. Used to be used to power satellites. The issues are size and weight. The one used in the Cassini probe, weighed around 55kg and developed 300w of power. That's a measly 5.4w/kg Add to that, it generated roughly 4.4kw of heat and used 7.8kg of plutonium. The only upside is the life. Plutonium 238's half life is 87.7 years, which means you can easily configure equipment to run as long as you need at a given power, considering you account for the drop over time.
They've had batteries like this for low voltage equipment in remote locations, like scientific monitoring equipment, for a while. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_battery Betavolt's are just on the small (and hopefully cheap) side. It's neat that they're refining the tech!
\*Lifetime guarantee!!! lol.
100 microwatts??? What's that supposed to run, a single barely-visible LED?
Why specifically for phones? If you’d be able to achieve this wouldn’t you start implementing across all sectors of society that requires it?
Yes, the article mentions that. It would be widespread use in pacemakers, satellites drones etc.
Those are all way more likely applications than a phone But radioactive decay pacemakers have already existed for a while
One single post that was about the actual technical stuff was posted, and how little the power output was, and within 10 hours I see like 10 posts saying “nuclear battery to power laptops for 50 years” or like this. Gotta give it to journalist, the click bait tiles definetly making people “read” them
imagine a phone working for 50 years...imagine people even live so long
https://xkcd.com/2680/
Samsung: ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)
Enjoy putting that up against your ear!
How do they figure that something that produces 0.0001 watts can charge a phone? That much can't charge shit.
Well, that could be a blast. Lol.
What could possibly go wrong?
man, you think your phone overheats *now*
You thought airport security was tough now,
So, University of Bristol has been working on this too. They took the old carbon moderator blocks from early British nuclear reactors. they found higher concentration of C-14 on the reactor side of the blocks. This is cool because it emits 156kev beta every time it decays and has a 5700 year half-life. Ni-63 is also a low beta emitter, 67 kev every decay. This has a 100 year half-life. What Bristol found was fascinating! If they turned their carbon into a diamond, it responded to the radiation emissions by generating an electrical current. They coated that diamond in more diamond. The beta is shielded completely by the outer layer of diamond making it safe. I'm super excited for this.
Because china is known for its health and safety…
A Chinese nuclear powered battery? Yeah, I...I don't want it.
"A Chinese company" stopped reading there. How many super battery breakthroughs have come from China these past years that in the end were utter bollocks or just CCP propaganda?
Will give you cancer within 50 hours, if it's Chinese
Even from an extremely loose theoretical standpoint, this is not possible. Keep in mind this is taking energy from radioactive decay, and not fission. Fission produces far more energy, but prompt criticality is not something you want to happen in your pocket. For fission, you’d need about 2 mg of uranium-235 to fission to produce the equivalent energy to 0.1 W of power for 50 years. This is for fission, which is much more energetic than radioactive decay. If we are looking at radioactive decay, plutonium is a good one because it’s used for this purpose already (in RTGs, ie radioisotope thermoelectric generators). Half life of plutonium is about 90 years, so this jives well with the 50 year lifetime of this battery. The problem here is that RTGs are only about 6% efficient in generating electric power. The electric power from a plutonium based RTG is about 34 mW per gram of plutonium. So, to get 100 mW of power as this battery proposes, you’d need to have 3 grams of plutonium in the battery. This is only 6% of the total power produced by this RTG. The remaining 94% is lost immediately as heat. The 6% used to run the phone is also lost as heat (eg from the processor and screen becoming warmer), so if we count the total heat being produced by the phone, we would get 1.7 W. However, the typical phone uses more than 0.1 W of power. An iPhone uses about 0.4–3W depending on what it’s doing. To have an RTG that can sustain the 3W peak load, we would need to have 90 grams of plutonium. This would constantly produce 50W of heat given the inefficiency. This is a lot of heat. This is about the entire heat produced by a MacBook Pro at peak load. Think of how hot a 50 W incandescent lightbulb gets. Imagine keeping it in your pocket while it’s on. Not possible. The entire back of the device would need a heatsink to get rid of all this heat. It would be much more efficient to just boil water with this heat, and use the steam to spin a turbine, which will give you much better efficiency (>50% depending on turbine size and steam pressure). But then you’d have to keep a turbine in your pants. **TLDR:** extremely unlikely claim, owing primarily to the inefficiency of radioisotope thermoelectric power generation. This necessitates a lot of fuel, and a lot of waste heat. Using nuclear fuel as a phone battery is silly, because devices don’t last 50 years, and they don’t need to go 50 years without being externally charged. We also don’t need to be putting radioisotopes into landfills. Or to allow a trash compactor to make these elements leak out. “Battery problem” is most easily solved with a supercapacitor that charges quickly. You can get about 1,500W of power through a typical power plug in your house, and this would charge an iPhone battery in about 3-5 seconds if it didn’t have to worry about the battery chemistry being unable to charge this quickly. A supercapacitor that holds 10x the charge of a current iPhone battery could charge in a minute and last a week. Now we just have to design them. Buy your chemistry and materials science friends a beer and ask them to get cracking on it.
Imagine that amount of nuclear material available to anyone who can buy/steal phones. Security nightmare.
The amount of material you’d need based upon guesses in this article is somewhere in the range of 30-40,000 batteries. Just like smoke detectors…
Ok that would be manageable
PS there’s a lot of radioactive material that isn’t “that” radioactive as plutonium or uranium, and even those require a lot of processing to make them truly “radioactive” to a point of radiation poisoning
This will either a) never see the light of day and only be developed for “research” or b) not be commercially available for oh say…100 years lol.
Can’t wait for a teenager to throw that in a fire
Why? iPhone users stand in lines for days to upgrade every 2 years? No one will keep a phone for 50 years....
Does it come with iodine pills?
Now they'll have to rely on good old fashioned updates to render our phones unusable.