Tiny 'nuclear batteries' unveiled

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8297934.stm

by FreeRadical • 17 years ago

43 43 17 years ago

news.bbc.co.uk

Mongoose• 17 years ago

I'd be interested to read what Energizer and Procter & Gamble think about this kind of tech.

ars2• 17 years ago

This is going to make tiny flying spy machines possible.

Micromechanical Flying Insect: http://robotics.eecs.berkeley.edu/~ronf/mfi.html/

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/10...

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/04/flighttheory/

The biggest unsolved problem for these is the power-to-weight ratio (real bugs are amazing). Nuclear batteries is exactly what they need, if they can be made very small.

joeyo3• 17 years ago

Another possibility that I have heard discussed, specifically with respect to spy bugs, is "spray on" battery technology.

pyre5• 17 years ago

> (real bugs are amazing)

Real bugs don't have to record/transmit a/v data or record/transmit controller signals. They also spend most of their time refueling or in search of fuel.

gfodor• 17 years ago

Unfortunately they're already calling them "nuclear" so I doubt this is going anywhere unless some better buzzword takes hold -- it's a shame but people are just too scared of the word.

berntb• 17 years ago

How about "radioactive"? :-)

IMHO, the green movement is important and necessary, I just wish a larger fraction of them weren't fanatics and/or idiots.

Xichekolas• 17 years ago

One of the newer technologies (there are several ways to skin the nuclear-battery cat) is refered to as "betavoltaics". Presumably this make them sound enough like solar panels to sneak by. ;) The name actually is related to how they work at least (beta particles into semiconductors).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betavoltaics

gcv• 17 years ago

I wonder if that's a generational thing. When I hear "nuclear," I tend to hear "exciting source of relatively clean renewable energy." Of course I know about weaponry, and I know about Chernobyl, better than most, but I also hold that atomic power is a tool, just like any other --- dangerous in the wrong hands, and dangerous if misused, but also a source of progress.

pyre5• 17 years ago

There are plenty of 'eco-activists' today that are very anti-nuclear. People still think that anything relating to 'nuclear' means that I could make an atom bomb out of it in my backyard with bubblegum and baling wire.

chrischen5• 17 years ago

atomic batteries?

pmorici3• 17 years ago

What kind of current can a dime sized nuclear battery supply and at what voltage? All the article says is "useful" amounts of power.

tigerthink• 17 years ago

The University of Missouri team says that the batteries hold a million times as much charge as standard batteries.

Does that help?

bprater• 17 years ago

I suspect that is the duration of the charge and not the amount of power it can put out at any given moment.

m_eiman• 17 years ago

No, that says nothing about the current and voltage. It could trickle out a teensy bit of current for a very long time, which wouldn't be useful for e.g. a laptop.

pmorici3• 17 years ago

I don't think it does... ...charge is more like the total energy stored in the battery. Amps and Volts will tell you how fast that power can be used. A battery can have a million times the charge but if it can only release that charge over 100 billion years then it isn't going to be able to power small electronics, like cell phones for example.

drhodes• 17 years ago

I believe "a million times as much charge" refers to the total energy content in Joules. The parent was referring to voltage. The original press release from missouri.edu:

http://munews.missouri.edu/news-releases/2009/1007-mu-resear...

It references a published paper (likely behind a pay wall), otherwise the content is almost identical to the original link.

pmorici3• 17 years ago

I found this company, http://www.betabatt.com/index.html BetaBatt that makes nuclear powered batteries. They don't give the amps or volts either but, it does say,

"[beta batteries can be] Paired with chemical batteries for high current, limited duty cycle applications BetaBatteriesTM increase shelf life and ensure readiness by acting as a trickle charger, thus enhancing capability, reliability and useful life."

In other words this dime sized battery probably doesn't have enough current to power electronics continuously w/o some help.

ramchip• 17 years ago

I have access to the paper. The device is interesting, but as usual journalists want to inflate the balloon some more...

They report a maximum of 16.2nW, open-circuit voltage of 899mV, short-circuit of 107.4nA. To give hackers a reference, in its current state, you'd need something like 50,000 of them to power a single 0.85mW Arduino chip.

In the U of Missouri article they say "The radioisotope battery can provide power density that is six orders of magnitude higher than chemical batteries", but as far as I can see from the article they're not talking about their own battery; it's a general statement quoted from an old paper (F.K.Manasse,J.J.Pinajian,and A.N.Tse, IEEETrans.Nucl.Sci. 23,8601976).

The article in question is "Radioisotope microbattery based on liquid semiconductor" (Applied Physics Letters 95).

teuobk• 17 years ago

Medtronic made some nuclear-powered implantable pacemakers in the 1970s. Supposedly, they worked fine, but adoption was hindered by the word "nuclear."

My biggest concern is disposal. I don't like the idea of millions of these things ending up in landfills, even though I'm sure there would be an aggressive recycling campaign associated with their introduction.

ars2• 17 years ago

> My biggest concern is disposal. I don't like the idea of millions of these things ending up in landfills

Why not? You can replace 1 million regular batteries with a single one of these.

The radioactivity is not a problem, it's well enclosed in the device, and when the device is spent the radioactivity is probably close to background levels.

A landfill is the perfect place to put them and let them decay into passivity.

pyre5• 17 years ago

> The radioactivity is not a problem, it's well enclosed in the device, and when the device is spent the radioactivity is probably close to background levels.

It depends on how efficient the device is. That said, the problem if 'nuclear waste' is largely created by ourselves. All of that 'nuclear waste' is still useful, we are just too lazy to utilize it.

A good portion of that waste has completely spent its radioactivity. There is a portion of it that is useful as medical isotopes. There is still more that can be put to other uses. We just need to find applications for the waste rather than spend all of our time trying to find a way to store it.

RK• 17 years ago

Tons of radioactive waste is put in landfills all of the time. Usually, it just has to decay down to background radiation levels before it is allowed to be dumped there. Most US landfills have radiation detectors where the trucks enter. If your industrial trash sets off the alarms, they will usually ship it back to you and make you deal with whatever is setting off their alarms. This happens , for example, to hospitals sometimes, as they generate a lot of radioactive waste from nuclear scans, etc.

dkokelley2• 17 years ago

Adoption was hindered by the word "nuclear."

I propose we change the term from 'nuclear' to 'fusion' in all future nuclear (fusion) marketing copy.

something• 17 years ago

fusion is not at work in these batteries

icey2• 17 years ago

I'm not sure why you were getting downvoted; I have a few family members with pacemakers, and the first thing I thought of when I saw this was pacemaker batteries. Right now they have to get surgery every 7 to 9 years just to replace the unit due to dead batteries. I didn't know that Medtronic (who is still the big pacemaker company) had already tried that idea out before.

Pacemakers from the 70s were huge too; they were around the size of an Altoids tin (not quite as long). Now they're about the size of 2 silver dollars stacked together. Maybe a little thinner.

joeyo3• 17 years ago

At the risk of being very cynical, which do you think makes more money for the pacemaker manufacturer (and doctor and hospital, etc): a pacemaker with an eternal nuclear battery, or one that has to be replaced every few years?

themenace• 17 years ago

> adoption was hindered by the word "nuclear."

This is exactly why NMR machines are now called MRIs.

"NMR and MRI are essentially the same technique, except MRI is used to analyze the contents of humans instead of what is in a test tube. The name change is to alleviate patient fears associated with `nuclear'in NMR." -- http://www.princeton.edu/pr/pwb/98/1123/nmr.htm

chrischen5• 17 years ago

Oh great so I had radiation blasted at my abdomen. And I thought it was just magnets.

charlesju• 17 years ago

Lets start a list of applications we could use with nuclear batteries:

- Nuclear powered electric cars. Recharge like how one would change oil.

NathanKP• 17 years ago

From the article:

Nuclear power sources have already been safely powering a variety of devices, such as pacemakers...

It seems sort of strange that the article writer talks about how up until now nuclear batteries have had to be very large to work effectively. Yet then the statement is made that such batteries have been used in pacemakers, which I assume must be much smaller.

Does anyone know anything more about pacemakers and this claim that nuclear batteries have already been used to power them?

yannis• 17 years ago

Yes they did sometime in the 60's. I was actually involved with research in the early eighties where one option for an artificial heart (not a pace-maker) was to use a tiny Stirling Engine powered by an isotope heat source.

The general public has a revulsion for anything 'radioactive', however radio-active material if handled properly is quite safe. For many years people did not realized it, but all Smoke detectors had radioactive americium 241. If you ever renovate an old home just don't put them in your pockets :)

DanielBMarkham2• 17 years ago

The killer app for these: flexible nuclear battery-powered e-books with color e-ink and 20-year lifespans.

chrischen5• 17 years ago

Wow I can't wait for the day I can power my computer for a month on one charge! Actually these nuclear batteries probably won't be rechargeable, but they may outlast the electronic devices they power. Which means we could see computers and electronic devices being sold without the need for chargers. Just buy something and it works magically! That's probably the future.

DanielBMarkham2• 17 years ago

If these are truly a million times more powerful, and the average computer battery lasts about an hour, that means these batteries could last a million hours, or around 114 years.

I think that's long enough for me!

chrischen5• 17 years ago

Yea and think about Apple, who are crazy about making unremovable batteries. No more complaints about unremovable Macbook batteries. They can truly make a disposable self-contained product.

chrischen5• 17 years ago

And if the penny size can be 1 million times more, think about a regular laptop sized nuclear battery.

cmars232• 17 years ago

Reminds me of the Foundation series -- the 1st foundation miniaturized nuclear powered devices.

Tiny 'nuclear batteries' unveiled

Related Stories