Chinese Company Announces Mass Production of Small Nuclear Battery With 50-Year...
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Chinese Company Announces Mass Production of Small Nuclear Battery With 50-Year Lifespan
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"Chinese company Betavolt has announced an atomic energy battery for consumers with a touted 50-year lifespan," reports Tom's Hardware:
The Betavolt BV100 will be the first product to launch using the firm's new atomic battery technology, constructed using a nickel -63 isotope and diamond semiconductor material. Betavolt says that its nuclear battery will target aerospace, AI devices, medical, MEMS systems, intelligent sensors, small drones, and robots — and may eventually mean manufacturers can sell smartphones that never need charging...
[T]he BV100, which is in the pilot stage ahead of mass production, doesn't offer a lot of power. This 15 x 15 x 5mm battery delivers 100 microwatts at 3 volts. It is mentioned that multiple BV100 batteries can be used together in series or parallel depending on device requirements. Betavolt also asserts that it has plans to launch a 1-watt version of its atomic battery in 2025. The new BV100 is claimed to be a disruptive product on two counts. Firstly, a safe miniature atomic battery with 50 years of maintenance-free stamina is a breakthrough. Secondly, Betavolt claims it is the only company in the world with the technology to dope large-size diamond semiconductor materials, as used by the BV100. It is using its 4th Gen diamond semiconductor material here...
[T]he Betavolt BV100 is claimed to be safe for consumers and won't leak radiation even if subjected to gunshots or puncture... Betavolt's battery uses a nickel -63 isotope as the energy source, which decays to a stable isotope of copper. This, plus the diamond semiconductor material, helps the BV100 operate stably in environments ranging from -60 to 120 degrees Celsius, according to the firm...
Betavolt will be well aware of devices with a greater thirst for power and teases that it is investigating isotopes such as strontium- 90, promethium- 147, and deuterium to develop atomic energy batteries with higher power levels and even longer service lives — up to 230 years.
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader hackingbear for sharing the news.
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But "smartphones"? That is just a marketing lie. Also note prices are mentioned nowhere. This is likely for sensors in expensive, hard to reach places and the like. May also be for implanted medical devices.
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Similar tech was proposed in the Soviet Union to power pacemakers. I guess you can figure why it didn't really catch on:)
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Ah, I see. But these are thermoelectric, based on alpha-decay. The natural decay alpha particles are entirely stopped by a very thin shield, I was commenting on the beta decay type, which were similar to the "new" Chinese tech; some betas would fly through shielding that will block all alphas, and I expect you don't want too big a battery in your chest.
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With beta decay, you an treat a cancer tumor and power a pacemaker at the same time.
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I know it is a joke, but no.
You want to treat cancer with heavier particles like protons or nuclei, because their Bragg curve (stopping power vs travelled length) has a peak that depends on the energy - so you can tell where the particles will stop, and you'll make them stop inside the tumor.
Those damned pesky electrons, on the other hand, will go where they please.
https://www.researchgate.net/p... [researchgate.net]
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Pacemakers with RTGs were used worldwide (e.g. made in the US by Cordis, Medtronic and Coratomic). Exposure to the patient from gamma emissions that passed through the titanium case was estimated to be about 100 millirems per year. They fell out of favour following improvements in lithium battery technology.
The device described in the article is not an RTG. An RTG works by converting decay heat to electricity with thermocouples or other solid state devices, and is inherently quite inefficient. This company is claiming to have developed a consumer-ready betavoltaic device.
A betavoltaic device captures emitted beta particles (i.e. high-energy electrons) directly to generate electrical power. This is far more efficient than an RTG, so your source doesn't need to be anywhere near as radioactive for the same power output as an RTG (you can use less source material, or source material with a longer half life). An added benefit is that it produces far less waste heat for the same power output as an RTG.
There have been rumours floating around for years that intelligence agencies have developed betavoltaic devices for powering spy satellites. However this seems to be the first time someone's claimed to have a betavoltaic device this small, cheap and robust.
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I specifically mentioned similar tech, that is, using beta decay.
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It's only similar in that the power comes from a decay source of some kind. The mechanism for producing electricity is completely different. This is supposed to be a tech site - that isn't similar in nerd terms.
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Hey, my alkaline batteries are similar too! They both induce electron flow across a circuit.
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Don't you want a smartphone battery that lasts 50 years so you can throw away the smartphone in 2 years?
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There are multple reasons to ditch a phone after 3-4 years
Usually the screen has multiple vreaks.
The overall performance has degraded as software bloat outpaces proceesor development.
The battery is shot for life
Etc.What i do see is 15x15x5 battery charger that constanly tops up the battery from regular usage
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WTF are you doing to your phones that the screens USUALLY break?!
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In the last 6 years i am on my fourth phone. All of them with screen damage.
My current phone is 1 year old that i got refurbished replcmanet for anothe screen break. It has scratches that make a certian part of the screen not respond to touches. Scratches cause by my titantium wedding band.
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Keep your phone in a shirt pocket whenever possible instead of your pants. They're made to fit in them and you can take them out without touching the screen because they're a bit longer than the pockets. That means that they're the same size as a Hollerith card or a Greenback.
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Invest in a screen protector.
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Battery and screen can be replaced fairly cheaply.
Software bloat is less of a problem than it used to be, as platforms mature and stabilize.
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You had me going for a second. Until I saw this last part:
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I've had mobile phones since the mid 1990s, I've yet to break a screen and as a truck driver my phones have a hard life.
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Keep the 10,000€ battery & swap out the 1,000€ smartphone.
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That is assuming the battery CAN be replaced.
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I am not so sure I want to put something that emits beta-radiation next to my head.
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I am not so sure I want to put something that emits beta-radiation next to my head.
Clearly a concern which needs addressing so I looked it up. The beta particles emitted by nickel-63 are relatively low energy and travel about 0.1 mm in tissue. I expect there's enough shielding on the battery that virtually none actually escape. If nothing else, you want to capture as many as possible to make the battery more efficient.
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I know it's a different company that was claiming to eventually charge EV's and the like, but the same tech nonetheless.
At least this company is being a little more realistic with their claims, but it sounds like their big breakthrough is to make the current tech either cheaper or in more volume then their competitors.EEVblog #1333 - Nuclear Diamond Self-Charging Battery DEBUNKED!
https://youtu.be/uzV_uzSTCTM?s... [youtu.be]EEVblog 1579 - Nuclear Diamond Battery FRAUD Lawsuit by SEC!
https://youtu.be/5M5MF6KE-jY?s... [youtu.be] -
You might be surprised how desirable this would be to a lot of industrial users. As an example, big infrastructure systems like water, roads, and bridges, benefit hugely from extended battery life for sensors.
Lots of buildings have a sub 50 year lifetime. You could embed sensors in them during construction, never to be replaced.
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> never to be replaced
Tell that to the fire water line that burst under the building at 7am on December 25th.
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This would be stuff like stress sensors, or very long term locator beacons transmitters. Stuff that if it breaks you either start enhanced testing or call the whole thing EOL.
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The sensor mentioned would be *HOW* you know there is a leak under the building on the 25th of December.
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If burst because its battery failed???
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Sure. But for a smartphone you need to be able to generate > 1W in RF for it to even work. No argument about other used with no or low-energy wireless connectivity.
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Without a plan to EOL these devices, they will rot in place and eventually contaminate their surroundings. A few dozen of these might not be a problem but what happens when there are literally millions of them embedded (and forgotten) around the world?
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"Betavolt's battery uses a nickel -63 isotope as the energy source, which decays to a stable isotope of copper."
I don't know having a bunch of copper laying around is a big deal. Also... cut a sugar cube in half. That's roughly the volume of one of these.
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Small nuclear batteries are great for long term energy, but they produce so little power. The most practical use for them is in places you will NEVER be able to replace the battery, like in space probes, where energy demands are low and heat isn't too big of a problem. (or in some cases, a useful by-product) TEGs are just so ridiculously inefficient, and there really hasn't been any breakthroughs in TEG design in decades.
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These aren't really batteries, they're electronuclear cells. We make batteries by putting together multiple electrochemical cells, and you could do the same thing here. The real problem is that they're not very energy dense.
You could improve that pretty easily. The problem then is that is the higher you make the energy density the more dangerous they get.
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I can't see this as a 'consumer' device because people
will chuvk them, burn them, shoot at them, swallow them,
put them in the microwave, short them, WHY.Pretty much anything other than safe disposal.
Count on it.
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To get nickel-63, one has to bombard nickel-62 with neutrons. What is the efficiency of that relative to lifetime energy output? If it's less than 50%, I don't see it being viable.
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You make a good point. Efficiency is an important factor.
Another factor would be convenience. Even a horribly inefficient battery could be useful in remote places or in military application where cost is less important. -
Efficiently is totally irrelevant for devices like this. It is not about energy storage. It is about getting a long-term energy supply in places where you cannot get it any other way or only even more expensive ways.
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The output of the 100 microwatt battery for 50 years is less than a 100 watt bulb for 1/2 hour. I imagine it has an efficiency of less than 0.1% and is still cheaper than changing the battery once on sufficiently inaccessible equipment.
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I did a review of betavoltaic technology a dozen years back; https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/ab... [ieee.org] . A bit out of date now, I'm afraid.
The efficiency of converting the electron energy into electrical power isn't that bad, although still low compared to other power systems. But efficiency per se isn't the point; the objective is a small long-lived power source with no moving parts.
Diamond's a good semiconductor for this; at low electron fluences you want the largest bandgap you can get. Back when I did the review, diamond semiconductor technology wasn't there yet.
There are companies in the US working on betavoltaics and also companies (and universities) working on diamond semiconductors, but this is the first I've seen this tech ready to market..
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Hey! No fair bringing actual knowledge or expertise to/. threads! How are we supposed to argue about the existence (or non existence) of God if you give us his bloody telephone number?!?
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No worries, we'll just argue endlessly about whether whoever or whatever answered, passed the Turning Test.
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It isn't really relevant but the Turing test isn't very useful beyond our current state of the art. We already have humans that wouldn't pass a Turing test. Moving the goalposts now on the same kind of test isn't going to change that for the better.
It's bad enough that computers can solve CAPTCHAs that I can't.
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Tried that number, it's busy all the time. Will try again tomorrow.
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Maybe. But since these devices get "charged" once, you have to add all other power consumption in manufacturing and then efficiency sucks. But obviously, as you say, efficiency is not the point here at all.
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So, compare it to the AA cell you buy at the convenience store. These produce about 0.0039 kilowatt-hours each, but still are sold by the billions per year.
Indeed.
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At least Betavolt got the technology out the door. It would have been nice if the SF company was able to do this, but it seems that the race was lost there. Overall, this doesn't seem like an important technology now, but it can have a ton of uses. Heck, just strain gauges with sensors embedded in concrete might be something that prevents a building collapse.
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To get nickel-63, one has to bombard nickel-62 with neutrons.
Ni-63 is common in nuclear waste.
If it's less than 50%, I don't see it being viable.
As others have said, efficiency doesn't matter. Nobody cares if powering their mom's pacemaker costs 2 cents instead of 1 cent.
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My watch is self winding- no battery at all.
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Actually it's not. If you leave it on a spot for a long long time, it just stops. It depends on movement to wind itself.
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Modern high-tech rubbish! My wrist-sundial doesn't need to wind itself and has only one (enormous) moving part.
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You may need a special case for those, though. There is an entire accessory market for watch winding stands for self-winding watches, that sync to exactly how the watch's mechanism works. I've seen people pay insane amounts of money for redundant power so their storage case for all their luxury watches is able to keep them going.
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The Timex has you.
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>"A watch battery that never needs replacing"
Meh, I already have that. A Casio WaveCeptor. Not only is the entire face solar, it also sets the date/time automatically. So far have had it 12 years and has never run out of power or lost perfect time. I suppose eventually the rechargeable battery will wear out, though. https://www.casio.com/us/watch... [casio.com]
A modern smart phone would need tremendously more energy than this type of battery will likely ever provide (in a reasonable amount of space/weight).
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Also what I wear. Nearly the perfect timekeeping-only watch.
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>"Also what I wear. Nearly the perfect timekeeping-only watch."
Plus it is very nice looking, lightweight, and strong. Has dual analog/digital, alarms, stopwatch, and a light. Plus it doesn't cost a fortune. The glow-in-the-dark thing isn't that useful, though.
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If you're in the market for a watch like this, Casio has a number of solar watches, both digital and analog, that use a capacitor instead of a battery. They can run for decades without swapping the cap.
There are also "self-winding" mechanical watches that use a counterweight and ratcheting mechanism to wind the watch from arm movements. These are purely mechanical devices and *can* run for decades but really should be serviced every few years. There is an infinitesimal film of oil on the jewel bearings t
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Similar batteries with the same characteristics - very expensive and providing miniscule power - have been available for a very long time. Guess why they haven't caught on. Because of the cost and low power.
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The older model is Radioisotope thermoelectric generator https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] using e.g. a Stirling engine to generate electricity; this one is Optoelectric nuclear battery https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] it uses the radioactive glow to power photovoltaic cell. Also works as a pocket dirty bomb.
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My mistake, it is not optoelectric, it uses electrons to bombards a semiconductor junction.
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It is an electron capture of some sort, these were widely discussed (and some produced) in the Soviet Union in the 60s and the 70s.
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Just to get the terminology right:
--Thermoelectric conversion converts heat energy from a radioisotope source into electricity using thermoelectric conversion (Seebeck effect). These are no moving parts converters.
--Stirling engines are an example of dynamic conversion, turning heat energy into motion using a heat engine. The motion (e.g., a piston for Stirling-cycle engines, a rotor for Brayton-cycle) is then turned into electricity with a generator.
-- Alpha- and beta-voltaic devices turn the charged particle emission of an isotope into electrical power using the energy of the particle to create electron-hole pairs in a semiconductor, without the intermediate step of turning the radioactive decay into heat first. This is essentially the same operational principle as a solar cell, but with charged particles instead of photons. They are also no-moving parts devices.
--Thermionic energy conversion does a similar thing with a vacuum diode instead of a semiconductor.
--Optoelectric nuclear conversion is an old-fashioned word for an alpha- or beta-voltaic conversion that uses an intermediate phosphor to convert the charged-particle radiation from a radioisotope source into light, which is then converted into electricity by a photovoltaic cell.There are a few other conversion technologies to turn radioisotope decay into electricity (I'm a great advocate of thermoradiative technology), but those are the main ones.
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Finally, the age of the atomic batteries of the Foundation series of Asimov!
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Yes! Personal shields and blasters must be right around the corner.
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Well, lasers are effectively blasters. Weapons grade lasers aren't exactly portable though. And shields....well, those haven't shown up yet.
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and may eventually mean manufacturers can sell smartphones that never need charging...
and if you can't find it, turn of the lights and look for the blue glow...
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Yeah... how about no?
Because I'd hate to hand the tinfoil hatters that think cellphones cause brain damage the victory...
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I have 10 year batteries in my smoke detectors, when they are empty, I throw the device away anyway and put in a new one.
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Funny you mention smoke detectors. The ion type have a small bit of radioactive material in them. americium is the material.
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"Funny you mention smoke detectors. The ion type have a small bit of radioactive material in them. americium is the material."
I watched 'Better call Saul'.
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...to the 8 year old that comes with his great invention painted in crayon "that's a nice thing you invented there, mommy is proud of you. Now go build it and let the grownups continue working".
In other words, wake me when it's done but don't bother me until.
Aside of that, I have to wonder if I really want landfills full of decaying radio isotopes...
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> I have to wonder if I really want landfills full of decaying radio isotopes...
The lifetime of these things is short enough I wouldn't be too concerned.
Also... the lifetime of these things is long enough they better always be removable so you can transfer them to new devices rather than throw them out bolted into obsolete electronics.
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Well, technically their lifetime is eternal. After 50 years the radiation is just too lower to power the battery anymore.
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Technically at some point there will be less than 1 atom of radioactive material at which point it is 'dead'. Zeno only works in your head, not reality. Even then, technically the whole mass could spontaneously decay instantly; half-life is a statistical measurement and it's not impossible for randomness to produce results wildly different from the expected average.
And if that's not good enough for you, the universe ends in something like 300 trillion years which will take all the atoms with it.
So not 'et
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We don't know when the universe will end. We could be living in a "false vacuum", which could fall out of its metastable state at any time...and could be doing so right now. OTOH, dark energy could weaken space-time enough to allow another big bang, and the universe could continue forever.
Theories allow a lot of possibilities. And, of course, we also know that there's something wrong with out theories, we just can't figure out what. (Quantum theory and General relativity disagree...but only in places th
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They are d
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Is it April 1 already?
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Well, 230 years should be long enough for anybody yakking on a cell phone.
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My daughter is planning on staying in one long group Facetime call with her friends at least that long.
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Lots if applucations. Imagine never having to charge your smart-watch. Imagine never replacing batteries in smoke detectors, remote controls, etc..
If the price can be kept in a reasonable range, they could sell literally billions of these.
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What's the point of putting a 50 year battery into electronics that is irreparable so therefore will only last 3 to 5 years at best? Even if the device does somehow survive for a long time despite being made of Chinesium individual electronic parts have a finite lifespan.
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RitchCraft sneered:
What's the point of putting a 50 year battery into electronics that is irreparable so therefore will only last 3 to 5 years at best? Even if the device does somehow survive for a long time despite being made of Chinesium individual electronic parts have a finite lifespan.
Consumer electronics have a typical lifespan of ~2 years because their solder joints grow metal whiskers. They grow metal whiskers because, after California adopted the EU's 5% maximum lead content for solder, manufacturers opted to eliminate lead from their solder altogether.
The 5% lead standard was developed by NASA's Materials Research Lab based on Apollo-era experiments with lead-free solder joints [nasa.gov] in booster rockets (because lead is heavy, and there's a LOT of solder joints in a gigantic booster rocket). Short version: lead-free solder was a disaster, because the high current levels in many of the boosters' subsystems (especially LOX pumps) caused the nearly-instantaneous growth of tin whiskers that shorted out the rockets' electrical systems, causing blowy-uppy events.
NASA eventually determined that 5% was the minimum necessary proportion of lead in solder to prevent the development of tin whiskers in solder joints. The EU adopted that as its standard for consumer electronics, in an effort to reduce the amount of lead entering the waste stream. California - the seventh-largest economy on Earth - did likewise. CE manufacturers, on advice of their lawyers, decided that, if 5% was the maximum allowed for products sold in Cali, 0% would be even better from a liability standpoint. When their engineers pointed out that lead-free solder causes even moderate-current consumer electronics to grow device-killing tin whiskers after 2 years or so, their C suites promptly had orgasms over the prospect of the profits to be reaped from the infinite stream of replacement device sales, and lead-free solder as the CE default was born.
FWIW, also courtesy of NASA, we know that a 2-mil coating of polyurethane laquer is sufficient to contain more than 90% of tin and other metallic whisker growth. It also makes CE devices a lot less of a target-rich environment for metal-whisker-induced short circuits. Manufacturers know this, of course (again, courtesy of NASA [nasa.gov]), so they go to great pains not to employ polyurethane protective coating in CE devices.
Because profits...
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I have a lot of electronic devices in working order that are well over two years old.
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At least this should work. There was a company (IIRC) in SF which announced [popularmechanics.com] something similar a few years back. However, as per other articles [yahoo.com], it seems to have not have materialized.
Overall, these batteries seem to have a lot of promise. No, you won't be able to have a modern day Ford Nucleon, but when battery wattage can be scaled up, this might be something that can handle the refresh of DRAM, which effectively turns RAM into disk. This could be used for cache batteries, or even a high speed tier of
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Well, the batteries can be connected both in series and in parallel, so you should be able to get the voltage and watts you want...at the price of a lot more batteries. Since it's 3 volts at 100 microwatts, 9 volts at 1 watt should take 30 batteries.
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100 microwatts is 1/10000 of a watt. So to get 1 watt (voltage is irrelevant; that part is left as an exercise for the reader... go and convince yourself) you need 10,000 batteries.
I think you perhaps read it as 100 milliwatts instead of 100 microwatts.
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I'm less interested in the lifespan of the device than of the user.
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How do they get -63? Is it antimatter?
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The technical answer? Copying and pasting a hyphenated line break. And then HTML consolidates all white space even CR/LF into a single space (ASCII 32).
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Yes. It was a joke, but our./ overlords wiped out my html-like smirk.
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Dave Jones of eevblog covered this snake oil. 100mw at 3V gets me about 1/40th of the power of my cell.phone at 2/3 the voltage req'd. These things simply don't have the power in their current form to be useful for any devices that need watts of power.
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If only this could this be done with other types of batteries.../s
[(sigh) authors/editors]
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So, who'd they steal that IP (intellectual property) from?
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This sounds like the kind of tech that people welcome with open arms in the first 10 years, are glad of for the next ten, begin to worry a little about the next - after all, better tech is becoming available, regret ten years after that and then downright panic about after year 40.
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Deuterium is stable.
Maybe, just maybe, they meant tritium?
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Well played
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Every accusation is a confession.
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