Another revolution in battery tech? Man, is it Friday already? Look how time flies…
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Time zones
Nay, witchery I say.
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UTC is only time.
But it is a miniature RTG…
It’s already Saturday, I was worried there won’t be the weekly fix of miracle battery news incoming. What a relief!
yeah, the battery mircacle day got moved from wednesday to saturday, to give miracle AIs the new prime slot on wednesdays
A 50 year, nuclear, 100 MICROwatt battery. But sure. Will def get approved.
100 microwatt is plenty for a lot of applications.
it ain’t replacing lithium on phones despite what the headline suggests tho.
Yup. Not for phones, but maybe something that doesn’t require much power, and would benefit from a very long battery life.
Maybe things like doorbells in situations where connecting them to mains electricity is too cumbersome a process.
Or fire alarms. I know of a couple of foolish people who, when the batteries died, they didn’t bother putting new ones in.
There are lots of possibilities for this type of battery.
http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2015/ph241/degraw2/
Medical devices is an obvious potential application for beta decay power. In the past, nuclear power sources were at a major size disadvantage and chemically powered cells can also provide very long service life at such small power draw.
So this definitely isn’t nearly as much of a new concept as the media is suggesting. The question is whether they have achieved a compact enough design to be preferential over competing chemically powered cells.
Another application would be cmos batteries for holding memory states. Using ssds in external enclosures is compelling to reduce the amount of time it takes to actually read and write a full drive. But ssds need to be powered every once in a while. If their internal power storage depletes they lose data. Backup ssd drives with an indefinite power source would definitely be a compelling option. I do however doubt if this technology could ever be cheap enough for such an application. The materials used seem rather expensive.
Is that even enough for a single LED to turn on?
100 microwatt per battery, but the battery itself is tiny, 15x15x5 mm. Average cellphone battery is ~ 30x60x5 mm, so you can fit 8 cell there. Is it enough to power a phone?
800 microWatts is still about 4 orders of magnitude short of a running a smartphone.
0.8 watts? Honestly, I think it gets closer than I was expecting.(edit: millli/micro, messed it up. This is a tiny amount of power. Needs to get near that 1W they are aiming for to be useful). Searching around, I see estimates of 5-20 watts when fast charging, and 1-2W in standby mode. The article says they are aiming for 1W in the next couple of years, which can probably do it. However, it’s not clear what peak output it. You would probably use half the space for a normal battery and half for this power source, so that the phone can charge itself but also have a higher output when it’s needed.It probably doesn’t even need to provide all the power. Imagine if your phone would trickle charge wherever you were. If you’re watching netflix you might run out of battery and have to charge. If you aren’t using it much, even if the output of these things can’t keep up, the battery could last days or a week on a charge before eventually running out.
800 microwatts would be 0.0008 watts so 4 orders of magnitude away from current phone power usage.
Oh shit, I mixed up milli and micro. Will edit.
The article says they are aiming for 1W in the next couple of years, which can probably do it.
They won’t magically improve the power density by three orders of magnitude. They’re just trying to defraud their investors.
According to this article, an average smartphone uses 2W when in use. That number will largely be dependent on the screen and SOC, which can be turned off or be placed in a lower power state when the phone isn’t actively being used. (The 5W - 20W figure is for charging a phone.)
With 8 of these cells, you’ll have 800μW, or 0.0008W, and you need 2W. You will need to add a few more batteries… About 19,992 more. If 8 of these batteries are about the same size as a regular smartphone battery, you will need the equivalent of 2,500 smartphone batteries to power just one phone.
Too bad they don’t say how much the new batteries weigh! It would have been fun to see…
If we ballpark it and assume something the size of a regular smartphone battery is 50g (1.7 oz), then our stack of 20,000 of these new batteries could be about 125kg (275 lbs).
I won’t be replacing any of my batteries just yet.
Sure, you might have to wheel around a super heavy cart full of batteries …but think of the CONVENIENCE of not having to charge your phone!
Also, the thickness of the phone:
The power density is about 0.01125m³ per watt. A high end smartphone (snapdragon 8 gen 3 uses 11w of peak power) with a body size similar to Galaxy s23 ultra, would be almost 10 meters thick.
A cell phone uses between 5 watts and 20 watts, according to google, so probably not currently.
Fission battery irl?
that contains 63 nuclear isotopes.
the nickel 63 isotopes
AI article?
Too many of those floating around. Another gem I recently stumbled upon was power consumption of 4.7 watts per watt.
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I wonder if that’s the efficiency, like heat watts to electric watts?
Nickel 63 has a half life of 100 years. So that means you have safely store these things for 500 years after using them. Yeah, sounds totally fine.
Sounds very similar to the old Soviet pacemakers with radioisotope batteries. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, records about them got lost and so a bunch of people have been buried with pretty radioactive stuff in their chest. I don’t think we (as developed societies) are going to take that risk for some phone batteries…
I don’t think we (as developed societies) are going to take that risk for some phone batteries…
Not unless it’s profitable, at least…
Fortunately for us, Nickel 63 decays to plain old Copper 63, which is stable. Science! However too much copper in the diet can be deleterious.
Yes. After a few centuries it will be harmless.
Can I just store it in the river behind my house?
That’s bad for the environment. You have to send them down the garbage disposal first!
I noticed, by reading the article, that Nickel 63 decays to Copper 63 which is stable.
"Betavolt further states the battery is environmentally friendly. “After the decay period, the nickel 63 isotopes become a stable isotope of copper, which is non-radioactive and does not pose any threat or pollution to the environment,” the company explains. “Therefore, unlike existing chemical batteries, nuclear batteries do not require expensive recycling processes.” "
Here’s the summary for the wikipedia article you mentioned in your comment:
Naturally occurring nickel (28Ni) is composed of five stable isotopes; 58Ni, 60Ni, 61Ni, 62Ni and 64Ni, with 58Ni being the most abundant (68.077% natural abundance). 26 radioisotopes have been characterised with the most stable being 59Ni with a half-life of 76,000 years, 63Ni with a half-life of 100.1 years, and 56Ni with a half-life of 6.077 days. All of the remaining radioactive isotopes have half-lives that are less than 60 hours and the majority of these have half-lives that are less than 30 seconds. This element also has 8 meta states.Key word ‘after decay period’, which means after it’s lost all or most of its radioactivity… still a lot of time.
“it says can keep a device charged for 50 years.”
On a device that gets replaced every 1-3 years? 🤔
Better be user replaceable or that’s a lot of energy being stored in landfills.
Turning every landfill into a fission reactor is certainly one way to fix the landfill issue
Would be cool for long term, low power devices like sensors embedded in concrete in bridges and building structures for monitoring stresses.
Make devices BYOB (Bring Your Own Battery)
On a device that gets replaced every 1-3 years? 🤔
Who says the devices are going to be replaced every 1-3 years after we solve those problems like today’s non-replacable short-lasting batteries?
Planned obsolescence.
The battery tech isn’t the part that needs replacing. ;)
Smartphones are almost perfected now, the only “parts” that are making them obsolete after 2-3 years are batteries and operating system, both should be regulated to be changable and available for third-parties to make replacement.
100 microwatts.
Lol so the same as almost every other nuclear battery.
The article is really funny, because they talk about how this company’s innovation could be used in pacemakers. When they had betavoltaic pacemakers in the 1970s. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betavoltaic_device
The innovation isn’t the product, it is the manufacturing. The cells in pacemakers had the housing of the pacemaker to protect from puncture.
These devices are meant to go in portable electronics so puncture safety is far more critical.
Honestly radioactive copper as a low volt lifetime battery is an interesting idea. It won’t live power a phone but it could charge it while inactive.
Good for camping where solar isn’t viable.
You’ve touched on a great point. The power provided is so low that solar can effectively provide equivalent power in nearly every application except one where the continuous operating environment is pitch black. 15x15mm for 0.0001w is small. For comparison, that’s about 1/6 of the power that falls on a 15x15mm patch in an indoor office (300lux environment with led lighting), out about the same as could be harvested by an efficient solar panel off the same size. You could collect a full days power from this battery (and store it in a 2mm thick li cell behind the panel) in roughly three minutes of sunshine or ten to fifteen minutes on an overcast day.
There certainly are applications where it would be useful, but most could just as easily be served by a small solar patch and lithium cell or super capacitor.
Here’s the summary for the wikipedia article you mentioned in your comment:
A betavoltaic device (betavoltaic cell or betavoltaic battery) is a type of nuclear battery which generates electric current from beta particles (electrons) emitted from a radioactive source, using semiconductor junctions. A common source used is the hydrogen isotope tritium. Unlike most nuclear power sources which use nuclear radiation to generate heat which then is used to generate electricity, betavoltaic devices use a non-thermal conversion process, converting the electron-hole pairs produced by the ionization trail of beta particles traversing a semiconductor.Betavoltaic power sources (and the related technology of alphavoltaic power sources) are particularly well-suited to low-power electrical applications where long life of the energy source is needed, such as implantable medical devices or military and space applications.
It’s too late for mobile devices. Everybody expects a permanent internet connection, either WiFi or mobile internet, and therefore they all need much more than some microwatts.
However, medical implants seem appropriate.
The nuclear battery for a phone would be larger than the one in the article and likely paired with a capacitor battery. So the nuclear battery is constantly outputting 1w to a capacitor that stores energy that the device draws from.
Phones don’t use tons of power constantly and the standby power needs are fairly low.
Just calculate an average day’s energy example. Let’s say, you charge your 5000mAh battery once per day from “10%” 2,6V to “100%” 4,2V. That makes about 8Wh. So your average for the whole 24 hours is 0,3 W, or 300 mW or 300.000 μW.
Wait a minute. Are you telling me that this sucker is nuclear?
One day there will be a revolutionary battery but it won’t get funding because of these people making insane claims.
This sounds too good to be true.
Once they have a one watt version, this would be good for trickle charging when you are not using the device, such as when you’re sleeping. But you would definitely need a lithium battery alongside it for normal use.
It would be great to have an ultra-low power mode for emergency calls.
Yes, hybrid batteries could work
… but wont.
Could be good for a LoRa node. But obviously won’t hit the market.
LoRa still needs about 100mW when transmitting, which is a thousand times more than what this can do…
Yes I’m talking about recharging a battery sitting next to this; agreed that it can’t power a node directly. In the U.K. we are actually allowed to transmit up to 500 mW on the ISM band (provided we adhere to the utilisation quota, which I think is 15%)
