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).
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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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 :)
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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
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.
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?
That would make way more sense if the average age of a pacemaker recipient was much younger. I don't get the feeling that they'd be eliminating that many units for sale - figure the average age of a first time pacemaker recipient is in their 60s or 70s; you're talking 2 or maybe 3 units in total.
That number rises of course with people who get them much younger (which is the case in my family), but even then you're not talking about a gross amount of units. Maybe 7 or so in a lifetime.
I'm sure the up-front cost of the pacemaker is greater when it has a nuclear battery. As far as doctor and hospital? I doubt that they factor into the equation when Medtronic makes their business decisions.
I completely disagree with your second point. The manufacturer necessarily markets almost exclusively to the doctor. Most patients will happily go with whatever their doctor says is the best device on the market. And health insurance is probably paying for it anyway, so it's not like the vast majority of people receiving pacemakers actually have to make the decision based on the cost of the device.
Any differentiation between product lines will have to do with ease of implantation, ease of servicing or other clinician-facing features.
