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.
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 🤷♂️.