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Tiny nuclear battery be commercialised?
- MCUmaster 3y agoHow many 5 volt amps hours is 8.64 joules per day?
- foobarian 3y agoThat's enough to lift 8.64 apples 1 meter high once a day.
- chasd00 3y agofor those confused, 1 meter is approximately 0.66 Ariana Grandes https://twitter.com/GatorsDaily/status/1524768862465576962?lang=en https://twitter.com/GatorsDaily/status/1524768862465576962?l...
- pi-e-sigma 3y agoAmpere-hour is a unit of electric charge, not energy
- dmonitor 3y ago5V amp-hours is watt-hours, which is joules, which is energy.
- pi-e-sigma 3y agoyou are right, somehow I skipped the "5V" part. My bad.
- lodovic 3y agoThe 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.
- actionfromafar 3y ago5000 of those, right?
- shadowpho 3y ago8.64 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.
- gpm 3y agoTake the easy route when it's presented like that! 2.4 mW hours is 0.1 mW days, dividing by 1 day (i.e. doing nothing / applying the "per day" part of the original units) and 5v gives you 0.02 mA.
- meatmanek 3y agoYou could also just go back to the sentence just before "8.64 joules of energy per day" and see that it produces 100 microwatts (or 0.1mW).
- pi-e-sigma 3y agoWe can safely assume that anything containing radioactive material that is not tightly controlled will not be commercialized.
- serf 3y agoionization 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.
- willcipriano 3y ago> ionization smoke detectors It would be unpatriotic to ban americium.
- pi-e-sigma 3y agoThey are not banned because it's very old tech from the times where the regulation was much more lax.
- dabluecaboose 3y agoCloser analogy would be tritium vials/dials, which are also beta emitters, and are also not banned in the US.
- pennomi 3y ago[dead]
- mint2 3y agoAh ni-63. It’s a pure low energy beta emitter. Can’t detect with a Geiger counter, best detected with liquid scintillation swabs. Makes it annoying to detect. As long as it’s outside the body it’s harmless. Ingesting or inhaling is not recommended, will harm you once inside. Also as a side note, battery is a bit of a misnomer for nuclear batteries, they’re more of a constant current source. Use it or lose it.
- pennomi 3y ago[dead]
- shadowpho 3y ago100 uW is not a lot. You'd have to collect it and burst to run anything more then a couple of gates.
- gh02t 3y agoIt'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 https://www.microchip.com/en-us/solutions/low-power
- tempestn 3y agoYou could also use more than one of these sources.
- shadowpho 3y agoCouple of problems here. So let’s say you use one of the chips running at 25 uA (lowest run mode). First of all the does not include any peripherals. UART/i2c/timer/adc/dac don’t run in that example. And god forbid you want to do RF! Then we also need to allocate power to rest of the board. The power supply is going to have quiescent (30uA if not more… probably more as it’s probably a HV source). Then you need to allocate power to sensors and rest of board, and the uA go fast.
- gh02t 3y agoYes that's what I mean that you have to take great care, I was trying to say that it's not easy to engineer around these, just feasible. You still want some capacitor buffer, work in short bursts, sleep everything aggressively, etc. And while there are definitely useful applications they aren't gonna be as revolutionary as the headlines that always come up about these things seem to imply. But you can do more than power a few gates. Regarding power supply, I'm not sure what these exact ones are, but other betavoltaic batteries are not high voltage. They're in the range of a volt or two and these are probably the same since these work more or less the same way as every other betavoltaic battery with a bit of extra proprietary sauce. Edit: Also regarding RF, you can do passive RF via backscatter or a complementary RF energy harvester. Imagine a temperature sensor that logs data a few times a day powered off the battery, and someone with a handheld scanner comes by and reads it out every so often. Or an active tamper seal that spends most of its life making sure a wire isn't broken. Just brainstorming, but something like an RFID tag that can do stuff while it's not being interrogated is the main proposed use I've seen for these.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- Animats 3y agoNickel-63. Not too bad. It's a beta emitter. The risks are low, unless you eat the thing.[1] "By placing a 2 micrometer-thick nickel-63 thin film between two diamond semiconductor converters, the decay energy of the radioactive source can be converted into electrical current, creating an independent modular unit." Nice. Packaged that way, it's not likely to become airborne pollution. Even in a fire. As is usual for battery articles, the claims of applications are excessive. This could be useful for many small items that need battery replacement, but is unlikely to be enough for drones, etc. Watch-sized wearables, maybe. A similar concept was announced in Russia in 2018.[2] The one from China seems further along. [1] https://ehs.princeton.edu/laboratory-research/radiation-safety/radioactive-materials/radioisotope-fact-sheets/nickel-63 https://ehs.princeton.edu/laboratory-research/radiation-safe... [2] https://phys.org/news/2018-06-prototype-nuclear-battery-power.html https://phys.org/news/2018-06-prototype-nuclear-battery-powe...
- jiveturkey 3y ago> many small items that need battery replacement, environmental sensors maybe?
- EA-3167 3y agoI 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.
- orenlindsey 3y ago> Unless you eat the thing Normal batteries aren't good for you if you do that, either.
- chrisweekly 3y agoTitle grammar nit: maybe change "battery be" to "battery to be"?
- p1mrx 3y agoYarrr, it be fine.
- cm2187 3y agoFrom the article it seems to have only advantages. Is there any downside? Why shouldn't it be used in every portable electronics?
- dragontamer 3y agoRunning 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?
- Sohcahtoa82 3y agoThese 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.
- ComputerGuru 3y agoI wonder how prohibitively expensive (or not) this will be. The other comments talking about lack of applications they're able to think of on the spot are rather besides the point, the only questions are whether this will be produced at scale and at what cost.
- colinng 3y agoHow is this the “world’s first micro-atomic energy battery”? Didn’t the USA do this in 1966? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plutonium-238#Nuclear_powered_pacemakers https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plutonium-238#Nuclear_powere...
- actionfromafar 3y agoThat thing used the heat. A Beta battery just has new electrons appear, "magically". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betavoltaic_device https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betavoltaic_device
- colinng 3y agoThanks for the article. But then it points to the Betacel, USA 1970s (60 pacemakers implanted by 1973). https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betacel https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betacel I’m not trying to dismiss a wonderful invention, I just want journalistic integrity. It’s not a first if someone already made a product in 1973.
- debarshri 3y agoWhat happens when the battery explodes?
- kikokikokiko 3y agoI 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.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- chankstein38 3y agoAren't batteries going bad the main reason people replace devices right now? Sealed in so that it's difficult to replace them or get them replaced? I feel like that's why we wouldn't see this. It's like a cure for a disease that people are making a ton of money treating instead of curing.
- from-nibly 3y agowhile 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?"
- CyberDildonics 3y agoIn your mind, someone makes a battery that works, then sells it, then what happens?
- chankstein38 3y agoPeople don't buy another one for a long time and they go out of business? It's not like planned obsolescence isn't built into so much of what we own and buy today. I guess maybe I don't understand the question?
- CyberDildonics 3y agoI guess maybe I don't understand the question? Correct, I'm glad you asked. Most batteries are embedded in electronics and have dozens of different form factors. Are you under the impression people buy a single battery and replace it when it wears out? Under this logic wouldn't rechargeable battery makers have put themselves out of business a long time ago?
- chankstein38 3y ago
- LASR 3y agoSorry to be critical/cynical, but isn't this just a resurfacing of the widely-discredited nuclear diamond battery? [1] This looks identical. 100µW, diamond etc. How they plan to go from 100µW to 1W is dubious at best. They'll stack 10k of these? Ok. Maybe. Then how they go from that to powering drones? Come on. ~100W minimum for a small consumer drone with a camera. So stack 1 million? [1] EEVBlog: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5M5MF6KE-jY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5M5MF6KE-jY