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Comment by habibur | Hacker News Reader

These batteries provide milliwatt level power. Enough to power, maybe a clock circuit without display.

My water company installed a smart meter. Inside is a 30 year battery. When the battery is depleted it should be time to replace the whole meter.

Probably good for the dark, remote, lots of space applications. E.g. a radio beacon near the poles.

Maximum wattage of the battery would also be maximum wattage of the radio signal.

Wouldn't it be feasible to add a tiny battery or capacitor? Assuming the radio doesn't need to transmit continuously it can be powered via those which are then powered by the "forever battery".

Yeah you'd need a lot of them. Instead if a AA battery maybe you need a truck's worth of this. But if it means you dont need to go back for a while...

RTGs (radioisotope thermoelectric generator) are already in use for both deeps space and remote applications. Not sure how this differ. Maybe better efficiency? Still, why is it called a battery instead of a generator?

Oh, maybe size as RTGs are bulky.

edit: there have been very small RTGs for use in pacemakers. The difference is really that these are not thermal but use the beta flux directly.

The Soviet Union also had mass-produced RTGs for powering equipment in remote locations on earth, like light houses

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beta-M

Oh, RTG pacemakers were already betavoltaic [1]. So this is really an incremental improvement on existing tech.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betavoltaic_device.

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