from Hacker News

Tiny nuclear battery be commercialised?

by rakkhi on 1/10/24, 9:06 PM with 58 comments

• by Animats on 1/10/24, 9:45 PM

  Nickel-63. Not too bad. It's a beta emitter. The risks are low, unless you eat the thing.[1]

  "By placing a 2 micrometer-thick nickel-63 thin film between two diamond semiconductor converters, the decay energy of the radioactive source can be converted into electrical current, creating an independent modular unit." Nice. Packaged that way, it's not likely to become airborne pollution. Even in a fire.

  As is usual for battery articles, the claims of applications are excessive. This could be useful for many small items that need battery replacement, but is unlikely to be enough for drones, etc. Watch-sized wearables, maybe.

  A similar concept was announced in Russia in 2018.[2] The one from China seems further along.

  [1] https://ehs.princeton.edu/laboratory-research/radiation-safe...

  [2] https://phys.org/news/2018-06-prototype-nuclear-battery-powe...

• by mint2 on 1/10/24, 9:36 PM

  Ah ni-63.

  It’s a pure low energy beta emitter. Can’t detect with a Geiger counter, best detected with liquid scintillation swabs. Makes it annoying to detect.

  As long as it’s outside the body it’s harmless. Ingesting or inhaling is not recommended, will harm you once inside.

  Also as a side note, battery is a bit of a misnomer for nuclear batteries, they’re more of a constant current source. Use it or lose it.

• by colinng on 1/10/24, 10:06 PM

  How is this the “world’s first micro-atomic energy battery”?

  Didn’t the USA do this in 1966?

  https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plutonium-238#Nuclear_powere...

• by shadowpho on 1/10/24, 9:42 PM

  100 uW is not a lot. You'd have to collect it and burst to run anything more then a couple of gates.

• by LASR on 1/10/24, 10:29 PM

  Sorry to be critical/cynical, but isn't this just a resurfacing of the widely-discredited nuclear diamond battery? [1]

  This looks identical. 100µW, diamond etc.

  How they plan to go from 100µW to 1W is dubious at best. They'll stack 10k of these? Ok. Maybe.

  Then how they go from that to powering drones? Come on. ~100W minimum for a small consumer drone with a camera. So stack 1 million?

  [1] EEVBlog: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5M5MF6KE-jY

• by ComputerGuru on 1/10/24, 9:57 PM

  I wonder how prohibitively expensive (or not) this will be. The other comments talking about lack of applications they're able to think of on the spot are rather besides the point, the only questions are whether this will be produced at scale and at what cost.

• by chrisweekly on 1/10/24, 9:45 PM

  Title grammar nit: maybe change "battery be" to "battery to be"?

• by cm2187 on 1/10/24, 9:51 PM

  From the article it seems to have only advantages. Is there any downside? Why shouldn't it be used in every portable electronics?

• by pi-e-sigma on 1/10/24, 9:24 PM

  We can safely assume that anything containing radioactive material that is not tightly controlled will not be commercialized.

• by chankstein38 on 1/10/24, 10:26 PM

  Aren't batteries going bad the main reason people replace devices right now? Sealed in so that it's difficult to replace them or get them replaced?

  I feel like that's why we wouldn't see this. It's like a cure for a disease that people are making a ton of money treating instead of curing.

• by MCUmaster on 1/10/24, 9:23 PM

  How many 5 volt amps hours is 8.64 joules per day?

• by debarshri on 1/10/24, 10:19 PM

  What happens when the battery explodes?