A tiny radioactive battery could keep your future phone running for 50 years
A tiny radioactive battery could keep your future phone running for 50 years
A glowing horizon for phones
A tiny radioactive battery could keep your future phone running for 50 years
A glowing horizon for phones
That could is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that headline.
Also, we can barely get OEMs to support phones for 5 years now...
I'd say, 10 years is more than enough, the device is practically unusable after that, even if it's still working.
the device is practically unusable after that, even if it’s still working.
Not if you can change the battery...
I am having to retire my 7 year old S5, which still works perfectly, because 3G networks are being switched off in a couple of months.
If this was an economically scalable proven thing today, phones wouldn't be sold with batteries in 5 years.
It is doable, but it's not practical. Technology moves so fast nowadays, a 10 year old i7 is easilly surpassed by a modern day i3.
Don't get me wrong, I use old tech all the time, but it's becoming increasingly impractical to do so.
Not all phones are smartphones. Theres still plenty of use cases for call/sms only phones.
And they don't support anything higher than 3G, which will go in history in a few years... and then the only thing you can use them for is a paper weight.
Remember when light bulbs used to last decades? A phone battery that lasts that long is incompatible with capitalism.
When they were really dim and far too red like 80 years ago? Or when they switched to LED and actually lasted a decade, like now?
Batteries that last a decade will open up the opportunity for expensive tech like we never imagined.
Or when they switched to LED and actually lasted a decade, like now?
LEDs with Edison screws on them don't last that long. Maybe Siemens or some other brand name manufacturer, but the cheap Chinese ones last only a few months.
It's the heat buildup that's the problem. Disassemble them, slap a CPU heatsink on it and yes, they will last forever.
Here's what I was referring to with the lightbulb thing and capitalism:
The original Edison bulb still works iirc
The battery is not the main point of failure in contemporary phones, especially not one that makes you buy new unit. This new radioactive battery doesn't change much
Sensationalized clickbait.
100 microwatts, aiming for 1W in 2025. That's a big difference and 1W is still not enough for a cell phone. Phone-scale batteries aren't even on the roadmap.
1 Watt is plenty to power a phone on average. While idle a phone uses less than 1 Watt. The thing is, nuclear batteries are a misnomer, they're actual electrical generators. For this to work in a phone, you'd want to pair it with an actual battery, and the generator would charge the battery while the phone is idle and that would provide enough power on average for when you're actively using your phone.
My thoughts exactly. Unless it can output at least double of what the phone's max drain is, there is no other way.
1W is enough for a cell phone, if you combined it with a capacitor for brief bursts at higher watts.
Now play a game for an hour...
My phone uses 0.6W when idle and 1.2-2.5W while I'm using it. Peaks are 8W+. No way an internal reactor only can power a phone.
Edit: 0.3W when screen is off.
You could do it with a parallelized output from a bunch of them.
Or with a diesel generator in a wheelbarrow
Looking forward to a mini reactor being directly next to my balls
"Just getting a little cancer, Stan."
BUFFALO SOLLDYA
It's not that radioactive and Nikel 63 decays to copper, so there is no radioactive waste being produced when the battery is depleted.
Oh, good. So whenever some fool tosses a phone out of a car to get crushed on the roadway, shoots one because TikTok, or otherwise mangles a phone, we now have a potential for radioactive material to be spread around?
No, read the article. It's Nikel 63 and the decay is copper. It's contained in a metal seal.
And Nickel 63 is... radioactive material
It's a variation of the same scam: https://youtu.be/5M5MF6KE-jY?si=7odXF_9q2SkumX7X
https://www.sec.gov/litigation/litreleases/lr-25829
Betavolt seems to be just using those flashy 3D renders of a battery that likely doesn't exist. It wouldn't surprise me if their datasheets mirror what was claimed by NDB.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://piped.video/5M5MF6KE-jY?si=7odXF_9q2SkumX7X
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
It outputs 0.1 milliwatts, can't even power a single LED.
The size is smaller than a coin. Put enough of them in parallel and they'll output enough power.
Yeah 5000 of them to get the 500 mW a smartphone needs in standby mode. 50000 if you want to power up the phone from stabdby (assuming it just uses 5 Watts)
It is the article that mentioned smart phones which is bullshit. This is a (probably expensive) battery specialized for extremely low power devices which need to run for many years. It will never be something that powers your phone.
The tech is really cool and there's applications for such a battery - just not phones.
Some of the first pacemakers used radioactive batteries. We left that concept pretty fast. And that is considering you have to cut your patient open to change a pacemaker battery. This will not happen in commercial cellphones
I think so as well.
But, it would be nice if it could be applied to vehicles.
100 microwatts? What does a phone use, like 1W? So they are 4 orders of magnitude off? So phones need to become 10,000 times more efficient or the battery that much bigger?
Edit: Also what is the language of the article? "63 nuclear isotopes", it sounds like they mean "63 [different/individual atoms of] nuclear isotopes" but do they mean "nickel-63" by this? It is very confusing. Nickel-63 also has a half-life of 100 years, so if the battery is supped to last for 50 years, it has to be producing twice as much energy on day one that is discarded?
Betavolt is planning to boost its tech to produce a 1-watt battery by 2025. And while it still has some way to go, the company seems confident stating development is way ahead of European and American scientific research institutions and enterprises.
RemindMe! 1 year repeat
This is physically implausible. Also self proclaimed advances without 3rd party proof are less than worthless.
Fallout universe timeline, here we come!
Perfect, my phone will outlast me
Depending on how radioactive the battery in your pocket is, that’s not hard.
50 Ci? That's a helluva lot of activity.
And that's for a battery that only produces 100 microwatts. A battery that produces 10000 times more power will be a lot spicier.
This again? It's utter bullcrap I'm afraid.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://piped.video/watch?v=5M5MF6KE-jY
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
Others pointed this out as well. It seems it is a scam, but it might become a viable solution in the not so distant future (10 years or so from now).
So the reinventing of the Nokia is here. Capitalism probably won't allow it unfortunately, the enshittening depends on degradation of everything
True, true.
Stil, it's a nice idea... we can dream.
I just pitty all those artists that envisioned the 21st century with flying cars and stuff like that... we still run almost everything on petrol.
These tech articles on some new advancement are basically the same phenomenon of bullshit as articles ending in a question mark. The answer is always "nah"