The company plans to launch a more powerful single-watt version this year
For comparison, the Betacel boasted 25 microwatts per cubic centimeter, and this Betavolt battery appears to have 88 microwatts per cubic centimeter. This will also have a longer lifetime also.
The Betacel was successfully used to power pacemakers. I suspect there will be more applications for power sources in this range today.
I wonder what it tastes like…
The company plans to launch a more powerful one-watt version later this year, with uses ranging from consumer electronics to drones capable of flying continuously without recharging.
The idea of using this for a drone is laughable. Their coin-size battery produces 100 uW of power, so a small drone drawing a couple dozen watts would need to somehow carry hundreds of thousands of these batteries. Even if they’re only a gram each, that’s still hundreds of kilograms of weight.
Use in consumer electronics is also a terrible idea. Ionization smoke detectors are already regulated due to their americium content; imagine how hard it would be to get regulatory approval for something 100,000 times more radioactive.
Yeah but the drone might still work. What if a second drone (armed with the same battery) follows around the first drone and supports the battery through use of a tether? Then the weight isn’t relevant.
If it’s a small battery intended to be used a long time, pretty much a guarantee these are going to end up in the general landfill waste stream.
I wonder how much contamination one of these will cause if it goes through a waste incinerator. If they have 50 Curies of activity, that’s more than a million times what’s in a smoke detector.
Eh, it’s likely not an issue. There’s radioactive material in water runoff and all kinds of places. A small amount is not noticeable. Even in the worst case, these aren’t an issue. If they can be near your body 24/7 without causing problems, them getting spread out into even smaller pieces can only be less significant than that.
People are too scared by radiation. It usually isn’t an issue and you’re constantly interacting with it. It’s only in very rare circumstances where you need to worry.
There’s a lot of radioactive thorium to be found in coal ash leftover from power plants. I am not worried about this.
They’re probably going to be used in medical devices like pacemakers. So they’ll be in the land but not necessarily a landfill
They decay into copper, which can be easily recycled.
Yeah, but it’s radioactive nickel-63 for many decades until it all decays.
There’s radioactive and then there’s radioactive. It beta decays with particles that would only penetrate 5 cm of air or .01 cm of tissue.
You could get a thousand of these batteries, grind them up into a powder, explode them in a crowded place as an improvised dirty bomb…and you would still cause less harm than if you did the same with countless chemicals you can buy at the hardware store.
There are many forms of radiation. Something like this going into a landfill is perfectly safe.
Yeah, that’s how the battery works.
Which is why your suggestion of simply recycling copper won’t work. You don’t have copper, you have a radioactive alloy.
Not after 50 or so years. Then it’s just non-radioactive copper.
Patience is a virtue (and profitable!)
A half life of 100 years many that after 100 years half of it is copper while the other half is still nickel 63. It does NOT mean that after half that time all of it will be copper
That’s not how radioactive half lives work.
Learn about radioactive decay and what half life means.
Prove it. Prove that the manufacturers claim that it can be recycled after it degrades into copper are false.
Your link doesn’t do that.
I want this in a four function calculator
Why not Solar? I have fairly recent Casio (FX-260 Solar II) and it works in dimmer lighting conditions than I’m comfortable working under anyway. Under normal lighting (for being able to see while doing math with pencil and paper) it’s rock solid!
Casio G-Shock / Fallout Collab?
Casio F-91W☢️
