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Your numbers are ahem a bit off. An iPhone 15 has a 3367 mAh battery. Around 12 watts. It lasts longer than 1 hours 12m. Probably even running full tilt. I thi

Your numbers are ahem a bit off. An iPhone 15 has a 3367 mAh battery. Around 12 watts. It lasts longer than 1 hours 12m. Probably even running full tilt. I think your post indicates a narrow "can this power the whole phone" thinking that is over-applied when considering this power source. The power here is faint, but the energy is vast, & we should assess that merit too. The previous post called this is a 100mW battery. That's not enough power for active use for a phone, but it's probably enough to idle a phone ok, and if designed well leave some extra capacity for very slow charging a conventional battery, depending on the phone. That might be enough for some light phone use and being net neutral on any given day! It might be enough to run some flip phones during calls, possibly. Anyways, you've over hyped the requirements by 100x what's on offer here. I think even 2 or 3x what's available here is probably enough to make a phone than many people might never have to recharge, if supplemented by a higher power store (conventional chemical cell) to bank some of the output energy. The idea still sounds risky & scary to me, but I at least want us to be looking at vaguely the right order of magnitudes when we assess.

fastneutron 3y ago
Whether it's 1 Watt, 1000 Watts or 0.0001 Watts is utterly irrelevant. It's the activity that matters. Even at the power quoted in the article of 100 microwatts, you're still talking activities on the order of a full Curie, assuming 100% efficiency (betavoltaics are down in the 10s and 20s, realistically). Curie-quantities of activity in a package the size of coin is real activity, not the nanobananas of tritium in the pacific the media likes to segfault over. No nuclear regulator in their right mind, in any country on Earth, would generally license, let alone exempt, a Curie-level quantity of any isotope for widespread consumer usage. The title of the article was "A tiny radioactive battery could keep your future phone running for 50 years." I can assure you this will not be going in anybody's personal electronics. At best, it will power some board-level electronics operating in the Arctic or at the bottom of the ocean, maybe a cubesat or keep-alive circuit on a space probe. Militaries, government agencies and companies with the motivation and resources to deal with the licensing could definitely have a use case here. Your average Joe will remain stuck with smoke detectors, tritium keychains, polonium static brushes, and uranium rocks as the hottest isotopes they can (legally) get their hands on.

fastneutron 3y ago

Whether it's 1 Watt, 1000 Watts or 0.0001 Watts is utterly irrelevant. It's the activity that matters. Even at the power quoted in the article of 100 microwatts, you're still talking activities on the order of a full Curie, assuming 100% efficiency (betavoltaics are down in the 10s and 20s, realistically). Curie-quantities of activity in a package the size of coin is real activity, not the nanobananas of tritium in the pacific the media likes to segfault over. No nuclear regulator in their right mind, in any country on Earth, would generally license, let alone exempt, a Curie-level quantity of any isotope for widespread consumer usage. The title of the article was "A tiny radioactive battery could keep your future phone running for 50 years." I can assure you this will not be going in anybody's personal electronics. At best, it will power some board-level electronics operating in the Arctic or at the bottom of the ocean, maybe a cubesat or keep-alive circuit on a space probe. Militaries, government agencies and companies with the motivation and resources to deal with the licensing could definitely have a use case here. Your average Joe will remain stuck with smoke detectors, tritium keychains, polonium static brushes, and uranium rocks as the hottest isotopes they can (legally) get their hands on.