A tiny radioactive battery could keep your future phone running for 50 years
techradar.com
techradar.com
What the company is apparently saying:
"To create the radioactive battery, Betavolt's scientist used nickel-63, which is a radiactive element, as the energy source... "
The author describing this in his own words:
"The compact battery uses 63 nuclear isotopes to generate..." "
- "Beijing-based Betavolt said its nuclear battery is the first in the world to realise the miniaturisation of atomic energy, placing 63 nuclear isotopes into a module smaller than a coin."
https://www.independent.co.uk/tech/nuclear-battery-betavolt-...
Are they both copying this text from some other source?
Some back of the envelope math to illustrate why:
- The decay energy of Ni-63 is 66 keV, but since the energy is split with an irrecoverable neutrino, the average recoverable energy per decay is more like 17 keV.
- The typical power consumption of an iPhone is about 10 watts, give or take.
- Converting (1eV = 1.6e-19 J, 1W = 1J/s), we get 2.72e-15 Watts per decay.
- Assuming 10 Watts for your phone, we get 3.68e15 decays/second, 3.68e15 Bq, or *99364 CURIES* of activity
- The US NRC exempt quantity for Ni-63 is currently 1e-5 Curies (10 micro-Curies) (10CFR30.71, Sched. B)
For reference, the activity of the Am-241 in a typical smoke detector is on the order of 0.1 MICRO Curies. A betavoltaic battery for a smartphone would need a full 20 orders of more activity per unit, 18 orders of magnitude higher than the current regulatory limits, and we're talking about a product that nearly every person in the country owns. The item would be physically warm to the touch, could never be turned off, and would need piles of paperwork to track the origin, transfer of custody, and proper disposal.
Maybe this makes sense for remotely-deployed military equipment and other niche applications where the user would go thorough the necessary licensing steps, but for consumer products, forget it. Absolute fiction.
The cost would be immense, the benefits would be slim at best.
That would be a cool exercise to make it comsume the tiniest amount of power as possible.
Not as cool obviously!
I think your post indicates a narrow "can this power the whole phone" thinking that is over-applied when considering this power source. The power here is faint, but the energy is vast, & we should assess that merit too. The previous post called this is a 100mW battery. That's not enough power for active use for a phone, but it's probably enough to idle a phone ok, and if designed well leave some extra capacity for very slow charging a conventional battery, depending on the phone. That might be enough for some light phone use and being net neutral on any given day!
It might be enough to run some flip phones during calls, possibly.
Anyways, you've over hyped the requirements by 100x what's on offer here. I think even 2 or 3x what's available here is probably enough to make a phone than many people might never have to recharge, if supplemented by a higher power store (conventional chemical cell) to bank some of the output energy. The idea still sounds risky & scary to me, but I at least want us to be looking at vaguely the right order of magnitudes when we assess.
I find it highly unlikely that there will be double production of devices for the EU market on one hand and the rest of the world on the other (and the biggest producers are not going to be pulling out of the market for obvious reasons).
[0] https://www.europarl.europa.eu/news/en/press-room/20230609IP...
[0] https://www.macrumors.com/2024/01/15/app-store-to-be-split-i...
As long as you don't ingest the battery you will be fine.
iPhones straddling your genitalia is considered "safe"' today. Can't wait to hear from science towards the end of the century.
Now every 6 months we have a study about low and lowering sperm count in males, and between that and food changes and microplastics overabundance and ... It feels like that's a lost cause.
Someone really helped when they renamed Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Imaging to MRI
If you want to be scared, CT is beter. They send you a lot of x-rays. The x-ray can produce cancer, so the total dose should be low to be safe, so you can't take a CT everyday.
But PET is better to be scared. They inject you wit a radioctive liquid that produce positrons. Positrons colide with your electrons and produce two gamma photons. The photons are detected and after a lot of calculatons you get an image. Don't take one eveey day.
There are a few more. They have a small risk, but used correctly the benefit outweight the risk. Ask your medical doctor and don't take they just for fun.
Well, DUH! Obviously if you live in the 'Land of the Midnight Sun', you have to be also living in 'The Land of the Midday Darkness'. I suppose it would pay me to engage my brain before putting my mouth(keyboard) in motion.
Overall it sounds like a terrible idea though due to what happens when the phone reaches end of life or is smashed. Phone can’t be shredded and materials reclaimed without manually removing the battery. Phone releases free radioactive material into the environment if smashed. Terrible terrible idea for consumer electronic.
The real safety issues is if people pry it open and ingest or inhale the radionuclides.
Phone OS developers: Challenge accepted.
Side note - if they can't sell as many phones anymore, I bet that we'll see some Android+ or iOS+ appear at some point, for the low low cost of 39.99 per month. I'm quite surprised it's not there yet
Well, what happens when you throw the non-decayed thing in a firepit or run it through a wood chipper?
Just sounds like using something with a longer half life.
Also 50 Ci is an awful lot of activity to produce 100 µW. Being anywhere near a hypothetical 1W version would be quite scary.
> less than a coin at 15 x 15 x 5mm
Slightly smaller than a stack of four US dimes.
Edit oh microwatts not milliwatts
Personally I'm interested in putting this in a watchy [0], that can get around on tens of microwatts average consumption because of deep sleep states and an e-paper screen.
The nuclear process can most likely not be controlled, and will just provide energy the whole day long. A small sidecar battery may hold charge for peak usage, but still the nuclear battery have to churn atoms all the time to provide the mean power. And the conversion process usually is not very efficient either (but I don't see numbers for this particular device).
Dimension it for just a little more than the average consumption and use a super capacitor or battery to soak up the excess when the phone is idle. I imagine one would need the battery anyway to cope with short term high demand such as photography.
Edit: commenter seems to be editing without noting their edits. This comment was written against a their comment in a different revision.
> Nuclear submarines and aircraft carriers are powered by onboard nuclear reactors. Atoms in the nuclear reactor split, which releases energy as heat. This heat is used to create high-pressured steam. The steam turns propulsion turbines that provide the power to turn the propeller. Additional turbines also make electricity for the ship. As the steam cools and condenses back into water, the water is directed back through the system, and the process starts again.
https://www.epa.gov/radtown/nuclear-submarines-and-aircraft-....
I'm thinking we could treat those as emergent behaviors of flawed human nature.
I get that they are confident they can produce more power, but usually these diamond/nuclear batteries produce really small amount of power.
And somehow the radiation doesn't travel beyond the thickness of the battery and phone.
So the battery produce 0.1 mW or 0.0001 W: what "phone or drone" works with this microscopic power ? It isn't sufficient to power a sigle LED.
IMHO this article is a sum of: clickbait + incompetence and, if the translation from Chinese is accurate, scam. The phrase "uses 63 nuclear isotopes" also make me ROFL.
Having an onboard power source coupled with storage is an amazing win. And these power generators (not batteries really) are very small.
So, when phone is "off" it pulls some mW from each of the many such power cells onboard to charge battery, then when phone is "on" it works like normal.
It is maybe too bulky. It is maybe too lower power. But my comment was not incorrect, just as your skepticism is not incorrect.
Looking back at your original post, I was simply saying that "you can't even run an LED on this" does not mean it's useless, and you may be able to scale it up. So I think we violently agree about the difficulty. I do see how my comment may have made someone think I meant that this could actually be used in phones as is. I mistakenly used phones as an analogous device.
1. The use in phones is a silly illustration. You can ignore phones. No one in this thread specified a form factor or power output requirement except you to bring up counter examples for an argument I'm not even proposing.
2. The math you did makes sense, but doesn't disqualify this conceptually as a generator. Even if it's of laughably small power that's literally all I said was it's just a small generator.
3. The use of the terminology of battery is misleading, these are small power generators. It's not a scam until someone says it's useful for X, where X is someone it's not useful for. We agree on all the X so far.
That's it. Cheers.
2. No, it's related to "phones and drones", I've explicitly written that this device make sense in niche application, microvolt application like "preserve the state of small amount of RAM";
3. I don't think the name matter, can be battery, generator, whatever: microamperes remain; Moreover isotope based battery isn't a new technology, you can buy these kind of battery from electronic industrial shops. EEVBlog on Youtube also did tests and debunking.