A Chinese startup has unveiled a new battery that it claims can generate electricity for 50 years with the need for charging or maintenance.
Beijing-based Betavolt said its nuclear battery is the first in the world to realise the miniaturisation of atomic energy, placing 63 nuclear isotopes into a module smaller than a coin.
The company said the next-generation battery had already entered the pilot testing stage and will eventually be mass produced for commercial applications like phones and drones.
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3.00These already exist and are available from other suppliers, but they're very low power to the point of being nearly useless. So it's simple to release a battery but difficult to release a useful one. They claimed a few things, including a 1W battery coming. Your criteria don't specify if they manage to pull off 1W though (which is difficult) or just a useless little battery like the others out there (which is easy).
@AntonBogun I bet it will be used in many industrial applications - like drones, probes, satellites etc, and then in time when reliability and safety stats will prove its safety, it will go to consumer market. Beta radiation is very short range, typically few mm in materials
@PavelZhivulin This isn't something you can actually make safe unfortunately, unless you can guarantee that the battery will never get destroyed. And so as long as there is a chance, you essentially have a chance to create radioactive waste or even fallout in the area depending on how big and bad the destruction was. Surely no sane country would deem this acceptable except in the most safe of applications (nuclear reactor levels of safety).
@AntonBogun Well hospitals, universities and others already have relatively dangerous sources lying around. Maybe for specialty uses it’s justified.