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A tiny radioactive battery could keep your future phone running for 50 years::A glowing horizon for phones
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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.
So literal death sentence, got it.
I mean so is drinking a gallon of bleach. Fortunately, there’s a pretty simple preventative measure for both:
Don’t do it?
What gave you the idea that swallowing a small amount of mildly radioactive material is fatal?
Man, I figured the joke was obvious but I guess not.
“tiny amount of radioactive material whose radiation stopped by thin plastics is a literal death sentence” is, I thought, pretty clear hyperbole.
A lot of people are really irrationally afraid of anything involving radiation. I mistook you for one of them.
No worries. Glow it up, let’s get some extreme energy density up in this bitch. I went for nuke in the old days where I enlisted in the military.
I have a healthy respect for radiation. That’s why I leave handling the good stuff to the professionals.
I’ve actually got some small isotope samples in a lockbox from an old highschool demonstration lab for Geiger counters. No Geiger counter though yet. I haven’t even opened it since I got it to check the contents were intact.
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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.
Most prestigious school in all of milwalkee
Like a phone would last 50 years.
A tiny radioactive battery could keep a piece of e-waste using power for 48 years
Generating power…
… that go on to mutate rats who grow old and train mutant turtles in the ninja arts.
With the EU requireing replaceable batteries, I could imagine buying a battery and changing the phone for it.
I could go for that.
How long can it power a disposable vape? Lol jk
Don’t give them any ideas…
Sounds like alot of infertility and ass cancer in the future… lets see how this plays out
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.
That is well cool
.
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.
So, you’re saying there’s a chance :p
The sentiment for me here, is any overall betterment of portable power is good. Yea the article and this specific tech is presented in an overhyped fashion, no doubt.
Well the other thing is that this company didn’t even do anything new. This battery type/concept has been used for decades. They’ve had pacemakers with em since the 1970’s.
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.
Ya know we keep these things in our pants right?
No offense but it’s a “I wasn’t paying attention in high school physics” comment. It being beta decay with a half-life of 100 years should already indicate it’s relatively safe. In fact someone else in this thread already already added the references showing how safe it is. If it’s safe enough to power a pacemaker it’s safe enough to sit in your phone that sits your pocket.
Personally I think that battery would have much bigger issues than safety, such as power requirements which are much harder to control with nuclear decay. Also obviously the device itself deprecating before the battery because tech will definitely advance a lot in 50 years, I imagine after a decade the phone will be useless. And finally the pricing considering Ni-63 doesn’t occur in nature which means you need a specific process to create the materials necessary for the batter.
I imagine after a decade the phone will be useless.
I’ll concede, useless was a bit harsh. Let’s say “no longer fit for the average user” considering the average lifespan of a mobile phone is 2-4 years and a company doing software and security updates for a decade is very rare.
You are very much the exception here.
That’s a silly comparison. You’re not dropping your pacemaker down escalators or throwing it the trash when the screen breaks, and middle schoolers aren’t dissambling them with butter knives. You’re not throwing them out every few years. Please teach me more about high school physics though you smug sob.
Most current phones use lithium ion batteries that can combust or explode in your pocket if tampered or damaged, but you don’t seem to be worried about that. You only seem to be worried about the battery in the article because the only thing you remember about radiation from your high school physics is “radiation bad”. Had you paid more attention in school you wouldn’t need my smug ass correcting you.
You are just moving goalposts here. None of these scenarios are particularly relevant anyway. Even if the phone shell cracked, the battery casing would be enough to shield from the radiation. And what does throwing the phone in the trash have to do with keeping it in your pocket.
You’re just not trying hard enough.
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.
Some of the people here don’t realize that our smoke detectors have radioactive elements inside it
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.
Depends, in my country ionization detectors have been banned over 20 years ago, you’ll mostly find optical / photoelectric detectors here.
I wonder if its because of a valid reason, or just a precaution
It’s probably safe until someone decides to go look what’s inside their smoke detector
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.
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.
Remember when folks wore watches with radioactive paint on them? Good times.
It would’ve been great if they used reasonable safety precautions in making them.
Yeah, unfortunately most of the danger fell on the (usually female) factory workers who painted the radium on. Fun fact, we do absolutely still use radioactive shit to make watches glow today, it’s just much less dangerous and sealed in tiny vials. Also it’s a gas that won’t eventually flake and turn into super fine particulate, like the radium paints of yore.
It was more a problem of licking the little brushes than wearing the teeny bit on the wrist.
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)
The batteries are already connected to a “heatsink” in the phones we use now. Fast charging can be as lossy as 86% for lithium ion batteries qt very high charge rates, so the 60w fast charging will dissipate more than 6w of heat already.
And yes, the radiation battery either has to constantly use the power or it will be just pumping the voltage up until something starts to conduct
Not last I saw. They produce way too little power at that scale.
Flight safe, or nah?
What if it gets caught or crushed in the seat or luggage?
Yeah. Sure.
Can it be safely recycled or disposed of when finished? Or is it more landfill waste?
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