Jan 8, 2024, China Startup Betavolt New Energy Technology announced the successful development of a miniature atomic energy battery. It uses nickel-63 nuclear isotope decay and China’s first diamond semiconductor (4th generation semiconductor) module to successfully realize the miniaturization of atomic energy batteries. It has modularization and low cost. The battery can provide power for 50 years while a lithium/iodine pacemaker battery can last about ten year. The amount of power delivered is about 0.1 milliwatts (100 microwatts). A typical iPhone needs about 450 milliwatts when it is on a black screen.
China has achieved innovation in the two high-tech fields of atomic energy batteries and fourth-generation diamond semiconductors at the same time. There are competing European and American companies working on this semiconductor based nuclear battery technology.
It is called the BV100. The world’s first nuclear battery to be mass-produced. The power is 100 microwatts, the voltage is 3V , and the volume is 15 X 15 X 5 Cubic millimeters are smaller than a coin. Nuclear batteries generate electricity every minute, 8.64 joules per day, and 3153 joules per year. Multiple such batteries can be used in series and parallel. They plans to launch a battery with a power of 1 watt in 2025. If policies permit, atomic energy batteries can allow a mobile phone to never be charged, and drones that can only fly for 15 minutes can fly continuously.
Its energy density is more than 10 times that of ternary lithium batteries. It can store 3,300 megawatt hours in a 1- gram battery . It will not catch fire or explode in response to acupuncture and gunshots. Because it generates electricity automatically for 50 years, there is no concept of the number of cycles of an electrochemical battery ( 2000 charges and discharges). The power generation of atomic energy batteries is stable and will not change due to harsh environments and loads. It can work normally within the range of 120 degrees above zero and -60 degrees below zero, and has no self-discharge. The atomic energy battery developed by Betavolt is absolutely safe, has no external radiation, and is suitable for use in medical devices such as pacemakers, artificial hearts and cochleas in the human body.
Betavolt has also communicated with China’s professional nuclear research institutions and universities, and plans to continue research on using isotopes such as strontium- 90 , promethium- 147 and deuterium to develop atomic energy batteries with higher power and a service life of 2 to 30 years.
Brian Wang is a Futurist Thought Leader and a popular Science blogger with 1 million readers per month. His blog Nextbigfuture.com is ranked #1 Science News Blog. It covers many disruptive technology and trends including Space, Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, Medicine, Anti-aging Biotechnology, and Nanotechnology.
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A low power source could charge a capacitor on a light sail over the course of its twenty year journey to Proxima Centauri.
Once the sail is approaching its target, the sail can deploy lengths of thin wire, charge them, and use the star wind to slow and/or maneuver.
Then, after a period of recharging, the sail can, in concert with others in its swarm, transmit data back to Earth in pulses.
Every couple of years, the swarm can resend the data to allow for filling in of dropped bits.
In robotics, this tech could provide enough juice to maintain “cognitive processes” in the event of a bot being buried under debris from an asteroid impact for a few decades.
Playing down by the river, the group of youth saw the shine of a metal limb sticking out of the eroded bank.
Hearing the shouting and cheering children approach, the villagers come out of their skin-covered dwellings to see them leading a still somewhat confused bot, muddied, semi-functional, through the gap in the pallisades.
As the people crowd into a circle around the awakening metal man, it asks, “How may I be of assistance?”
I think this will be practically useless as it stands. It is too weak to power anything. BUT, can these batteries be connected in series? If so then what about this:
15mm x 15mm x 5mm = 1.13 x 10^-6 cubic meters.
So 1 cubic meter would hold 888,889 batteries in series. Let’s take 20% off for wiring, cooling etc, and round it down to closest 100k and we get 700k batteries.
If each battery produces 0.1 milliwatts of power than 700k produces 70 watts.
Now how about we place these 1 cubic meter cubes on a 100m x 100m field. That’s 700KW now!
Why stop there. Let’s dig 10m deep and bury the lot. That’s 7MW of power!
According to google you need 25 acres or about 100,000 sqm for 5MW of installed solar capacity. But if these nuclear batteries can be chained up as I’ve described, then we could have guaranteed 70MW of power out of an area the same size!
Our nearly full spent fuel pool(s) (~500 tons spent fuel/ea) make like 1-3 MW of decay heat depending on time elapsed since recent discharge. It is nearly full because the DOE is slow walking cask loading (they have to reimburse expense).
Long story short there isn’t 700MW of beta emitters in the world, outside of the 450 reactor cores currently fissioning (some ~10% of 200 MeV emerges as prompt beta).
Now imagine going up, building skyscraper like structure from these batteries. Let’s say 500m-2km high, set up infra under city streets and set up points where you can charge whatever you want wirelessly.
I wonder if this is doable and practical when we will become more advanced
where will you get the beta emitter by the ton?
When improved and used in large numbers(thousands), can it be used to power a car?
Not really the best application. The battery produces power constantly and cannot stop or be stored for later use like gasoline or charge in a battery. Also, is not very energy dense. A 1,125 cubic millimeter battery will generate 0.0001 Watts of power initially before it slowly dies down from radioactive decay. Assuming the battery is being used to recharge a Tesla power bank with an energy storage capacity of 100 kWh or 360 megajoules.
Power density = 0.0001 watts ÷ 1125 mm^3 = 8.89×10^-8 watts/mm^3 × (1×10^9 mm^3 / 1 m^3)
Power density = 88.9 watts/m^3
Assuming there will be 360 megajoules available every day, that’s an average power of
Average power = 3.6×10^8 J per day ÷ 86,400 seconds per day
Average power = 4.17 kW
Volume of nuclear battery = 4170 watts ÷ 88.9 watts/m^3
Volume of nuclear battery = 46.9 m^3
To put that into perspective, the Tesla has a maximum total cargo volume (5 passengers + the trunk) of 22.9 cu ft or 0.648 m^3.
Even if the nuclear battery was limited to just one hour per day, the volume of the nuclear battery would be 72 times the volume of the total interior space of the Tesla it would power for one completely charge every day.
To further drive the point across, the average American home is 2,000 square feet with an average ceiling height of 9 feet (all of these values being pulled from Google BTW). That’s 18,000 cubic feet or 509 m^3.
So, you could have a charging station that is roughly the size of a garage or large shed to charge your Tesla for one complete charge per day and it could last you decades before the radioactive half-life causes the power output to dip before what is needed to charge your Tesla (Ni-63 has a half-life of 96 years, so 70% of its peak output should be available after 50 years).
The power density is too low for transportation which requires high density sources of power. However, it could be used to charge an high density energy storage system (that’s assuming it didn’t cost you so much money that you’re better off staying on the electric grid).
> Its energy density is more than 10 times that of ternary lithium batteries. It can store 3,300 megawatt hours in a 1- gram battery
I don’t know where you obtaining these numbers, but I think it’s not right.
A tritium disintegration are 5700 electronvolts on average.
3 grams are aprox an avogadro number of atoms if I’m not wrong.
So a gram of tritium is 2e23 atoms aprox . 14e25 electrovolts are 6,23 kwh that are released in a logarithm curve across the average lifetime of 12,3 years.
That’s more than 100.000 hours.
So, on average, in that timeframe the power would be more like 31 mwh (milli watts hour). Not plain, average, but enough to have a reference of what order of magnitude of power we can expect.
That’s the reason I don’t expect high powered betavoltaic batteries.
Still very long duration mwh power has it’s uses, so I expect some market for them. Just not the high power one.
The energy density claim is from the Betavolt press release and website.
However, the energy in the devices are completely different. 50 years of 0.1 milliwatts.
There are working with many kinds of isotopes. They are completely different. Far more different than lead vs lithium nickel batteries.
NOTE: the technology already exists for plutonium and uranium for radiothermo devices with hundreds of watts of power.
A sample of pure plutonium-238 (Pu-238) produces about 0.54 kilowatts/kilogram of thermal power. However, RTG conversion efficiency has never been higher than 10%, resulting in an effective production of 0.054 watts per gram.
RTGs, or radioisotope thermal generators, use thermocouples to convert thermal energy into electrical energy. The natural decay of Pu-238 produces heat that is then transferred to one side of the thermocouple.
Pu-238 is the most common isotope used on NASA RTGs. It has a high decay heat of 0.56 W/g, which makes it useful as an electricity source in RTGs. The half-life of Pu-238 is about 90 years.
Different RTG models use different amounts of Pu-238 and generate different amounts of electrical power:
MHW-RTG
Uses 24 pressed Pu-238 oxide spheres to generate about 157 watts of electrical power at the beginning of a mission.
GPHS-RTG
Uses about 8.1 kg of Pu-238 to generate about 300 watts of electrical power at the beginning of a mission.
Pu-238 is a very special case, because in fact, it doesn’t decay to stable isotope in one or two steps, but after a very long chain with a lot of different paths, with a high total energy emission.
But, in exchange, that chain includes a lot of different decay modes, including positron emissions and numerous gamma emissions.
So, the problem is that it generates a lot of harmful radiation. It’s not suitable for a light shielded battery in a human environment.
Doesn’t expect high quantities of Plutonium in consumer products where that plutonium can be exposed to people just by a simple accident.
If you solve it in nitric acid, you have a weapon to poison entire cities. Perfect for dirty bombs.
And the Mississippi River is large enough to drown every single human being on the planet but the possibility of that happening isn’t worth damming it up and then draining all the water from it to “just be on the safe side”.
I’m really getting sick of setting the bar to “any nonzero possibility = BAN IT” for something that is about as likely to happen as terrorists buying up homes contaminated with radon gas just to harvest it up and use it in a dirty bomb.
“deuterium to develop atomic energy batteries” – Tritium rather? Deuterium is a stable isotope,
Would small personal devices or even devices to power houses or buildings really be safe from radiation exposure? We don’t need more of that. I need to read more about how this would he safe.
That said, though, it’d he great if all houses could have individual batteries to power them instead of a power grid. A battery like this being the power generation in homes would cut down on energy costs. It’d destroy the status quo power industry(?), but industry is going to evolve as technology evolves and that’s fine.
“If policies permit”
Policies permit for seismographs on the Moon and Mars, do not permit inside of LEO.
Can we stop pretending we are going to let gen Z run around with radioisotope powered Samsung phones? This is one of the most absurd marketing pitches I have heard in my life.
It is not a self evidently bad idea.
Once you go down the nuclear battery path there is no turning back, it can, and will, disrupt every energy sector. Between electric vehicles, agi, and robotics, everything will be nuclear powered. Nuclear waste will be recycled and used by the Nuke-batt industry. Imagine aircrafts, sea vessels, trucks and cars that need no fuel or recharging.
Think of all the wonderful gadgets and homes that will require no external power. Solar and wind will become irrelevant, as will petroleum, etc.. Diseases we know will disappear, other unknown diseases will surface. Flies and mosquitoes will vanish and once the waste products leach into the water supply everyone will be a Chemo Joe and have unpigmented hair and skin.
Chinese-made nuclear batteries in your mobile and pacemaker? What could possibly go wrong?
There’s an American alternative: Nanodiamond batteries (full disclosure: I am an early investor in the company): https://ndb.technology/news/
By using diamond barriers, the public is shielded from radiation and thermal dangers.
The company needs to move to market faster in light of increasing competition.
If this can be mass produced then nuclear waste will be an asset, not liability and nuclear energy will be cheaper as result.
“Sure we could have buried our nuclear waste in deep underground repositories but where’s the fun in that when we can uniformly distribute it a millicurie at a time in the smartphones of populace!”
Is it any worse than the toxic chemicals inside the current cellphone batteries that can leak through the soil into groundwater? Pick your poison: toxic chemicals from lithium batteries or radioactive diamond dust from a cracked nanodiamond battery? Me personally, the nanodiamond batteries would be easier to contain than leaky batteries. Also, lithium batteries can explode if cracked and in contact with water.