Tiny nuclear battery be commercialised? (opens in new tab)

The article says it produces 100 microwatts continuously for 50 years, with a 1 watt version coming in 2025. Just make a stack of 5 of those.

That's enough to lift 8.64 apples 1 meter high once a day.

8.64 joules = 2.4 mW hours. Dividing by 5v gives 0.48 mA*hrs, so you can run a 5v load for 1 hr if it takes 0.48 mA.

Ampere-hour is a unit of electric charge, not energy

> Unless you eat the thing

Normal batteries aren't good for you if you do that, either.

Weirdly I was listening to a radio show about the Voyager space craft a few days ago and they talked about the nuclear batteries powering those, making me wonder if this was something that could be used here on earth. I know absolutely nothing about this tech so thanks for this useful tempering of the hype.

> many small items that need battery replacement,

environmental sensors maybe?

I have real doubts about this tech being viable on the market. For one thing there's a huge psychological barrier for many people, as anyone who has worked in nuclear power can tell you. There's also the issue that this relies on Nickel-63, and while unfortunately info on total demand/production is significantly paywalled, I don't think it's enough to support something like this. Outside of chromatography and explosives detection, there isn't a huge market for it, which implies low production.

It is also true that it isn't as dangerous as many other isotopes, but unless these batteries are sealed to last 100+ years, disposal/recycling is going to be an issue. That will add cost, even if the production of Nickel-63 can be scaled up from (probably) 10's of kg's to 1000's of kg's annually.

It's enough to keep a low power microcontroller and maybe a low power sensor or two alive. You can get chips and sensors that will work with that budget, you just have to be very conservative and sleep aggressively. E.g. there are PIC chips that consume 25 uA/MHz at a couple volts while active (not sleep) and can do useful tasks: https://www.microchip.com/en-us/solutions/low-power

I mean, it's about 100B of them to power a high end Tesla at peak output. You could likely just use 1 billion of them and couple them to a capacitor bank.

That's not quite as outlandish as it sounds, given that they're very small, 15x15x5mm

And of course, this is an early gen product, not ridiculous to assume they'd be able to make these smaller, and with higher output, in the future, so we very well might get there in time. In terms of applications, there are a ton of viable applications between "occasionally used low power environmental sensor" and "car" of course.

ionization smoke detectors and radium clock dials come to mind, neither of which are banned in the U.S., although you won't find any new radium dials.

while I don't think these are going to work unless they can get a 5 watt battery the same size as a phone battery, if they actually have a 50 year lifespan like the company claims that would be WAY more than the lifespan of the device. If it actually existed you'd actually have the opposite problem. "My battery is fine but this device just isn't keeping up, can I transfer my battery to my new device?"

In your mind, someone makes a battery that works, then sells it, then what happens?

Given the structure of the thing, it seems closer to the original voltaic pile

That thing used the heat. A Beta battery just has new electrons appear, "magically".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betavoltaic_device

These things are awful from both a size-to-power and weight-to-power ratio.

In other words, any application where size or weight is an issue (nearly all consumer portable electronics such as laptops, phones, tablets, power tools, and especially cars), these won't be good enough.

The last time I heard of a radioactive battery (btw, this concept is not new), I'm pretty sure someone did the math and found that you'd need one the size of a typical car battery just to get enough wattage to power a phone. To power a car, it'd have to be the size of a semi trailer.

That said, their life is certainly huge. If size and weight isn't an issue, they can be an incredible boon, but I imagine at the scales I'm thinking of (like needing a few kilowatts to power a 5-person outpost somewhere), the cost ends up being the major factor.

Running the math suggests 0.1 mW. Which... the specs of many uCs I play with can theoretically drop down to 100uA or less of current (especially if I have capacitors to store energy while the uC sleeps).

But ugggh. This won't be easy to design around. A lot of capacitors will give you 10uA of leakage already. Assuming 3V uCs, that'd be 30uW of precious energy just in leakage current.

I think most people would rather use a AA battery. Is it really that big of a deal to replace the AA batteries every 10 years?

Yarrr, it be fine.

I don't think it's even possible. The term "battery" may not be the apprpriate one to use here, it's more of a "constant electrons generator", than a battery per se. Betavoltaic batteries just keep "creating" electrons, at a constant rate, for a long time. You can't simply "create" 1000 times more electrons on a single moment and release it suddenly. These things are a lot safer than lithium ion batteries when you look it from this angle.