This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
And now for 50 years worth of security updates for a phone like that. Not to mention what people might do with throwing a phone in the trash or something
I'd take it if it was a reasonable price, like 1k, and if I could just swap it into new phones every time I upgraded.
The problem is, power requirements tend to increase as computation power increases. And no doubt battery tech will improve in those 50 years.
They already sell phones over 1k that are expected to last ~4 years. You'll need to tag another zero or two to that price to incentivize manufacturers.
The EU are going to mandate removable batteries in phones, so I don't see any reason you can't take a standardised battery that lasts decades and swap it into your next phone, if they're all designed properly with compatibility with this miracle battery in mind :-D
Perfect. Then they'll sell the battery separately and it'll cost $5000
At this moment, 1 gram of radioactive Nickel-63 costs around 4,000 USD. Nickel-63 isotope does not occur in nature, it is obtained by irradiating Nickel-62 inside a nuclear reactor.
The world needs breeder reactors anyways, build out a lot of gen 4 plants and make Nickle-63 to boot.
What happens when the casing get punctured? When you mass produce these devices these things will happen.
Probably the same as with tritium lumes. Only dangerous if you swallow the unshielded nickel.
Surely the battery itself would have sufficient protection on top of the devices chassis offering protection.
I can't say a Lithium Ion battery leaking in the body would bode very either.
Standford?
It's a a rival of Hardvard.
Like a phone would last 50 years.
A tiny radioactive battery could keep a piece of e-waste using power for 48 years
With the EU requireing replaceable batteries, I could imagine buying a battery and changing the phone for it.
I could go for that.
Sounds like alot of infertility and ass cancer in the future... lets see how this plays out
How long can it power a disposable vape? Lol jk
Nuclear power at small scale is already in use in devices. Some medical devices, smoke detectors etc. As long as there is proper shielding, the enclosure is robust enough, and the overall device is made easily serviceable, I'm all for it. I can understand the fear sentiment of anything flagged as radioactive, but radiation is all around us already. Idk, but the less we can ditch super toxic and explosive lithium the better.
The radioactive source isn't used for power in smoke detectors, it's used to detect smoke. What small scale devices use radioactivity actually for power?
My grampa had a pacemaker that was.
Edit: Source - https://osrp.lanl.gov/pacemakers.shtml
Edit2: For the smoke detectors, i know its not what powers it per se, as far as the electronics that sound the alarm and such. More pointing out it contains radioactive material, and is something in every (hopefully) house, and you likely walk by it often.
Here's the real issue with the bs fluff title and complete fabrication of what these can be used for. It says in the article the battery makes 100 microwatts at 3v. Well that's an insanely small wattage. Your phone requires like 2 to 10 watts when youre on it. Regular watts.
One single watt is 1,000,000 microwatts. It would take 10,000 of these radioactive 50 year batteries ran together in parallel for just a watt of power. You'd need like 100,000 of them in your phone to cover all power requirements.
The issue is not the radioactivity, it's the power density. Per the article, this is ~24x smaller than an average phone battery, but can supply only 100uW.
I have a relatively conservative phone use, and on average, my phone uses 450mW. That means that you'd need 4500 of those batteries in your phone. But the battery would also need to cover the power usage peaks, which are multiple times higher than the average power consumption.
Finally, Asimov got it right
He got it right in a lot of aspects, partially because he didnt gave many details about certain stuff, but I remember a pretty good description of a nuclear powered e reader... if I remember it correctly, the nuclear part was a tiny nuclear reactor though
Seemed like all the writing of that era was under the spell of nuclear power. I remember thinking "wtf?" to a nuclear-powered desk side trash incinerator in one of Asimov's books. Maybe Foundation.
Battery scam #364256373
I'm seeing at least 5 of these per week now, can we PLEASE stop this bullshit?
Also, batteries from radioactive elements is one of the stupider ideas that has been floated around, sounds about at the same level as the thorium powered car.
It would be so nice if tech sites could write about actual tech and not CGI bullshit dreamed up by a guy who really isn't going to scam you, he just needs a little bit of start up capital for his Ferrari.
Some of the people here don't realize that our smoke detectors have radioactive elements inside it
Depends, in my country ionization detectors have been banned over 20 years ago, you'll mostly find optical / photoelectric detectors here.
Some people havent read the article where it states they use radioactive batteries like this in pacemakers and that there is no external radiation from the battery.
I don't put smoke detector next to my head for every night.
Or right next to my balls for like 10 hours a day.
Flight safe, or nah?
What if it gets caught or crushed in the seat or luggage?
I've heard of these kinds of batteries before and it'd be cool to have long-running electronics, but would these produce enough power?
They do, if you give them enough room. And if you are born into an oil family.
The power density is about 0.01125m³ per watt. A high end smartphone (11w of peak power) with a body size similar to Galaxy s23 ultra, would be almost 10 meters thick.
To be fair, it only needs to cover the phone's average power draw if you put in a supercapacitor or small conventional battery.
But there's another problem.... if I understand how this works correctly, for a 1W battery, the radioactive element must be outputting AT LEAST 1W of radiation energy at all times, whether it's being consumed as electricity or not. Ideally that's all trapped inside as heat in a best case scenario, but having to cool your battery while it's not in use is kind of a deal breaker for anything more than milliwatts (or it will have to have a heatsink as big as the battery)
Not last I saw. They produce way too little power at that scale.
Yeah. Sure.
