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A tiny radioactive battery could keep your future phone running for 50 years
(www.techradar.com)
this post was submitted on 13 Jan 2024
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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.
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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.
The obvious hand-wave is to charge a capacitor and power the phone from that.
Even if it'd have to be a glorified Game Boy to fit that average power budget. You could do it. There's Cortex M0s that'll go on standby down to the nanoamps. At that point you're running on the idea of electricity. You could power that circuit with an intense stare. They're still up in the low mA for doing anything, but what they'll do there is plenty for Snake.
Yes, but we're talking about mobile phones. The lowest power consumption GSM modules I know of still require ~10mW on the lowest power setting. And that's just for calls and sms, forget background tasks like messaging apps or social media.