Its called RTG and has been around since the 50s
this post was submitted on 11 Jan 2024
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This is multiple degrees of magnitude smaller than conventional RTGs
But nothing actually new, just downscaled. This was possible before, but not done because we don't want to give people the ability to get radioactive material, even in small quantities.
It is new. Traditional RTGs rely on heat differentials. This converts the energetic particles directly to electricity without the intermediate step. That's a very significant technical difference. Assuming what the article attests is true, of course
Ok, if that's true thats actually new. However i doubt until it's proven independently.
Yes, let's put a piece of radioactive waste into every pocket. What could go wrong?
I'd sure want to be very careful with health-risk assessments. But nickel-63 is pretty low-energy. According to this fact sheet absorbed radiation from exposure to skin is negligible without shielding. And that level of radiation is easy to shield so the battery casing presumably blocks all of it. (Tbf I believe fact sheets like that assume that your dead layer of surface skin cells has a small shielding effect, so the calculation is different if it gets in your body.)
The article also mentioned a possible variation with strontium-90 which is stronger stuff. It's emissions are 8 times more energetic than Ni-63, and instead of decaying to stable copper, strontium-90 decays to yttrium-90 which emits radiation several times again more energetic than strontium-90. Here's another fact sheet. (Sorry about using two different sources for fact sheets. I had a hard time finding one source with facts on both isotopes.)
The term "radioactive waste" suggests products from uranium fission, and the isotopes they decay to which can have extremely high-energy emissions, and decay through chains of several radioactive isotopes before finally decaying to stable elements which means extremely long half-lives overall. IMO the comparison is misleading. It's kinda like comparing one "moderate" air quality day to many days inside a smoke stack.
With the exception of the listed medical devices, all the other use cases point to military, and it would make sense to have such a battery in that environment.
Medical devices definitely make me ask your question.
They do mention smart phones as an application they're targeting though, which is where I get the 'every pocket' image from
Yeah, very stupid, unless it’s for military applications where there’s no guarantee of power to recharge a phone everyday. I doubt this would be used for the everyday person. But if it is, I’m real curious to see the impact, especially for the people who store their phone in a pocket.