It’ll possibly be commercialised in ~2025, but they announced this week the first model : the BV100.
It gives 3V(, only 100μW but it’s very small and can be used in series and parallel, they’re aiming for 1W as soon as next year). 1gr. can store 3.3kWh(, ten thousand times more than lithium batteries, and 100 times more than hydrocarbons) !
It doesn’t need to be charged for 50 years, which means a truly zero-cost car for instance, even more reliably than by using solar panels ; or a phone/drone/… with infinite battery.
Furthermore, it doesn’t even produce radioactive waste since the nickel-63 turns into stable copper, so it’s even more easily recyclable than current lithium&chemical batteries, as well as more stable, being able to withstand temperatures between -60°C and 120°C.
It very likely intends to be affordable if it’s intended for commercial use, but we’ll see if they will be able to.
There must be a catch somewhere though, we’ll see in the future.
to read more : https://www.laitimes.com/en/article/6d8um_6tl5g.html
just to ‘talk about’/perceive something else than wars(, waged because of our ‘hegemonic desire’/‘opposition to peace/coexistence’,) in the future.
I don’t think you understand what “energy density” means here. You can’t just choose to extract that energy at whatever rate you want like a battery or fuel cell or gasoline, it comes from radioactive decay which occurs at a fixed rate. There’s a lot of energy to extract but that energy is distributed constantly over several decades. That’s why you’d need a betavoltaic cell the size of a cube 20 meters on a side to power a modern electric car (and you’d actually need far more because you’re now hauling around a solid battery the size of a building). Venting tens of thousands of watts of waste heat is a comparatively minor problem.
It’d be very interesting to think of a hybrid system in which the betavoltaic cells are coupled with lithium batteries to give them some kind of natural regeneration over time(, a phone or computer could recover go from (50, or 20, or )0 to 100% overnight/‘when it’s not used’)
This current model only gives 8.64 joules per day, but that’s because 86400 is the number of seconds in a day, so if i divide 8.64 per 86400 i obtain 10^-4 , so officially that’s 100μW for 1125mm^3(15155mm)
To drive 100km in an hour(, i’ll get to the accelerations after this), we’d need 100*200W=20kWh, or 2.10^4 Wh.
Most electric cars would only enable 4 hours at this rate with 80kWh, but since this nuclear “battery” needs to able to deliver 24h a day, we’d need 24 * 2.10^4 ≈ 4,8.10^5 Wh
Hence, if we need 4,8.10^5Wh and we have 100^-6 Wh for 1,125.10^3 mm^3 , a rule of three would give us 4,8.10^5 * 1,125.10^3 / 100^-6 mm^3, that’s 5,4.10^12 mm^3, which is indeed 5400m^3 and not realistic.
Even a 200Wh computer would still need 54m^3, and a 10Wh phone would need 2,7m^3, the size of a car.
If the output was mutliplied by a thousand(, 100mV instead of 100μV,) then it’d be 2,7dm^3, the size of a bottle and still a bit too big for a phone, but a “free” energy for 50 years, and if i’m keeping the thought above of an hybridation with a self-regenerative battery it’d fill a 240Wh battery every day(, 24*10Wh,) but that’s only if the output was multiplied by a thousand, which is unlikely.
Thank you very much for the correction, i didn’t know that.
What you’re describing is similar to what the Curiosity rover does, but it uses a RTG instead.
These are tiny generators, and not very good ones when scaled up to the power requirements of motors. But with a 1W battery planned for 2025 this does have a lot of potential applications for low power electronics in remote or undeveloped areas.
If you want to get excited about Chinese power technology that does have applications for trains and cars by way of the power grid, I recommend looking into their new thorium molten salt reactor.
I don’t know if you have the answer but, if i understood correctly, such 1W battery would produce/refill 24Wh every day ?
If we put 10.000 BV100 in parallel, that’d theoretically be 10 000 * 1125mm^3 = 1,125.10^7 mm^3 = 11L for 24Wh and 110L for 240Wh filled per day, which is a third result in between my two previous conclusions(, although closer to the second one), i’m quite sure now that i made a mistake somewhere, ah well, w/e 🤷♂️.