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.
Nuclear battery
Bullshit.
Nah, they’re real and they’re super cool. Without them, Voyager 2 would have been dead in the water decades ago. We’d never have gotten the incredible images of Jupiter and Saturn from the Voyagers nor Galileo and Cassini.
It’ll be interesting to see terrestrial consumer applications and adoption given the general overwhelming fear response to anything nuclear.
Those aren’t batteries, those are radioisotope thermoelectric generators and they are very different in function from a battery. Also quite different from what this article is about too.
Although commonly called batteries, they are technically not electrochemical and cannot be charged or recharged.
Strap a couple those to a gameboy and you could finally play it the whole time on a long car trip without the batteries running out!
I’m a bit confused. Where does the radiation go? They talk about a conductor absorbing heat and transferring it into energy, but radioactive heat comes directly from radiation.
Unless this thing comes with a briefcase carry case made of lead, isn’t this a downright horrible idea? Especially for consumer products?
Further, when a lithium battery fails, it catches fire or explodes. What happens when one of these batteries fail? It won’t be a nuclear fireball, but wouldn’t that cause very massive issues? No technology has ever had a 100% reliability rate.
Since it’s already in use for decades with pacemakers i don’t think that the radiation is that hard to stop, no need for inches of lead
See, pacemakers, spaceships, and research installations are fairly understandable though, no one is going to be taking out their own pace maker, and science endeavors are extremely regulated. However, you just know some idiot is going to build a dirty bomb with these if given the chance.
Also, using the computer programming standard. Never underestimate the end user. Some idiot will try to drill through it or “stress test” a battery like this.
Plus those batteries cost tens of thousands if not millions of dollars depending on size. We have to definitely wait to see the cost.
Oh yeah, i wouldn’t advise anyone to take this breakthrough as a promise for the future(, as someone who used to read futurism.com i’m well aware of that).
But i could counter your objections if you’re interested :
- it can already be done currently : David Hahn built a nuclear reactor with the radioactive material extracted from clock hands. The nickel-63 is already present elsewhere(, armour plating, boat propeller shafts, …), as well as many other radioactive materials ;
- **but it’s probably not feasible :**A stronger argument is that the radioactive material is composed of a layer only 2µm thick, in between two layers of diamond, i don’t know enough about the subject to confirm or deny that such extraction would be too difficult/expensive ;
- and even if it were other materials would be a better choice : Finally, at first sight and in my ignorant opinion, i don’t think it’d add much to a bomb, it seems like it’d only infect people in the vicinity, and is only described in the first scenario here(, see the article titled “Terrorism: Nuclear and Biological Terrorism”), which considers it more useful for polluting water reserves for instance, contrary to ^137 Ce, ^131 I, ^32 P, or ^67 Ga.
You’d probably have to drill through more than a few of them to have enough radioactivity leaking, at this point the number of people dying because of their stress testing would probably be equivalent to those dying because of chemical batteries explosion. It’d be up to the authorities to estimate the risks correctly and, as you said, we’ll see how much a battery made to last 50 years will cost.
These will never be used in cars or anything like that. Betavoltaics are very cool for applications that need a tiny, reliable, constant power source but for something like a car you’d need one an order of magnitude bigger than the car itself. And then of course there’s the problem that these don’t have an off switch, so if you decide to stop or even just slow down in your hypothetical betavoltaic car, then you need to either store that excess energy in a big battery or radiate it as heat (for an electric car, we’re talking up to tens of thousands of watts).
Anyway all that to say this isn’t a battery and can’t replace a battery in the overwhelming majority of applications. This is a tiny radioactive generator that lasts for decades and can’t be turned off.
You’re probably right but if your only argument is knowing how to get rid of the excess heat then i can hardly see that as a problem.
Furthermore if this technology encounters enough success then we’ll probably find a way to have an impact on the rapidity of the reaction chain, as we do with nuclear reactor, but on a microscopic level, perhaps with a material that can emit the equivalent of carbon atoms, i.d.k., it doesn’t seem impossible.
But yeah, once again you’re probably right, we’ll see 🤷♂️
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 WhHence, 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.
with a 1W battery planned for 2025
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 🤷♂️.
