It’ll possibly be commercialised in ~2025, but they announced this week the first model : the BV100.
It gives 3V(, only 100μW but it’s very small and can be used in series and parallel, they’re aiming for 1W as soon as next year). 1gr. can store 3.3kWh(, ten thousand times more than lithium batteries, and 100 times more than hydrocarbons) !
It doesn’t need to be charged for 50 years, which means a truly zero-cost car for instance, even more reliably than by using solar panels ; or a phone/drone/… with infinite battery.
Furthermore, it doesn’t even produce radioactive waste since the nickel-63 turns into stable copper, so it’s even more easily recyclable than current lithium&chemical batteries, as well as more stable, being able to withstand temperatures between -60°C and 120°C.
It very likely intends to be affordable if it’s intended for commercial use, but we’ll see if they will be able to.
There must be a catch somewhere though, we’ll see in the future.

to read more : https://www.laitimes.com/en/article/6d8um_6tl5g.html

just to ‘talk about’/perceive something else than wars(, waged because of our ‘hegemonic desire’/‘opposition to peace/coexistence’,) in the future.

  • ComradeSalad
    3·
    6 months ago

    I’m a bit confused. Where does the radiation go? They talk about a conductor absorbing heat and transferring it into energy, but radioactive heat comes directly from radiation.

    Unless this thing comes with a briefcase carry case made of lead, isn’t this a downright horrible idea? Especially for consumer products?

    Further, when a lithium battery fails, it catches fire or explodes. What happens when one of these batteries fail? It won’t be a nuclear fireball, but wouldn’t that cause very massive issues? No technology has ever had a 100% reliability rate.

    • soumerd_retardataireOP
      2·
      6 months ago

      Since it’s already in use for decades with pacemakers i don’t think that the radiation is that hard to stop, no need for inches of lead.

      And i could have said that it’s not a completely novel technology, i used “commercial” in the sense that it’s apparently destined for the general public instead of specialised fields, the wiki article says that :

      We’ll have to see the price before finding such batteries in the supermarket though.

      As for reliability, the articles say that another advantage is that it doesn’t ignite nor explode, but i suppose that something could happen if you drill through it.

      • ComradeSalad
        4·
        6 months ago

        See, pacemakers, spaceships, and research installations are fairly understandable though, no one is going to be taking out their own pace maker, and science endeavors are extremely regulated. However, you just know some idiot is going to build a dirty bomb with these if given the chance.

        Also, using the computer programming standard. Never underestimate the end user. Some idiot will try to drill through it or “stress test” a battery like this.

        Plus those batteries cost tens of thousands if not millions of dollars depending on size. We have to definitely wait to see the cost.

        • soumerd_retardataireOP
          1·
          6 months ago

          Oh yeah, i wouldn’t advise anyone to take this breakthrough as a promise for the future(, as someone who used to read futurism.com i’m well aware of that).

          But i could counter your objections if you’re interested :

          • it can already be done currently : David Hahn built a nuclear reactor with the radioactive material extracted from clock hands. The nickel-63 is already present elsewhere(, armour plating, boat propeller shafts, …), as well as many other radioactive materials ;
          • but it’s probably not feasible : A stronger argument is that the radioactive material is composed of a layer only 2µm thick, in between two layers of diamond, i don’t know enough about the subject to confirm or deny that such extraction would be too difficult/expensive ;
          • and even if it were other materials would be a better choice : Finally, at first sight and in my ignorant opinion, i don’t think it’d add much to a bomb, it seems like it’d only infect people in the vicinity, and is only described in the first scenario here(, see the article titled “Terrorism: Nuclear and Biological Terrorism”), which considers it more useful for polluting water reserves for instance, contrary to ^137 Ce, ^131 I, ^32 P, or ^67 Ga. It’d be cheaper/easier and possibly more effective to steal such materials from hospitals rather than extracting it from batteries.

          You’d probably have to drill through more than a few of them to have enough radioactivity leaking, at this point the number of people dying because of their stress testing would probably be equivalent to those dying because of chemical batteries explosion. It’d be up to the authorities to estimate the risks correctly and, as you said, we’ll see how much a battery made to last 50 years will cost.