Scientists Just Built a Battery That Never Needs Charging

[erronis]

https://scitechdaily.com/scientists-just-built-a-battery-that-never-needs-charging/

Imagine never charging your phone again or having a pacemaker that lasts a lifetime. Scientists are developing tiny nuclear batteries powered by radiocarbon, a safe and abundant by-product of nuclear plants.

Unlike lithium-ion batteries, which degrade over time and harm the environment, these new designs use beta radiation to trigger an electron avalanche and generate electricity. The team’s latest prototype vastly improved efficiency, and though challenges remain, the technology could one day make nuclear power as accessible as your pocket device.
The Problem with Current Batteries

Cell phones that die unexpectedly and electric vehicles that can’t make it to their destination highlight a common problem: battery limitations. Most rechargeable lithium-ion (Li-ion) batteries, found in everything from phones to cars, last only hours or days between charges. Over time, their performance declines, requiring more frequent charging.

To address this issue, researchers are exploring a new approach: nuclear batteries powered by radiocarbon. These small, affordable batteries could provide safe, long-lasting energy for decades without needing to be recharged.



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[Phoenix61]

1. Science rocks! That is very, very cool. nt

[Wounded Bear]

2. Good stuff! Thanks for the link! nt

[usonian]

3. Atomic batteries to power, turbines to speed

[OldBaldy1701E]

7. Ready to move out! (n/t)

[Dr. T]

10. Batman and his sweet ride!

[NNadir]

4. These types of devices have operated for decades.

Last edited Thu Mar 27, 2025, 10:25 AM - Edit history (1)

Perhaps one of the most famous is the RTGs on the two Voyager spacecrafts launched in the late 1970s and still going.

The Soviets powered lighthouses on the Arctic ocean with beta RTGs ⁹⁰Sr in the 1950s.

I often muse to myself if the used fuel rods at Fukushima has been stored in a thermoelectric device rather than a cooling pool, those reactors would have probably survived the tsunami.

Such an approach suggests itself for the use of ²⁴⁴Cm that will inevitably be available in a continuous actinide recycling program of the world is to be saved. This alpha emitting isotope has a thermal output of just shy of 3 watts per gram.

The problem with this is that nuclear energy has a very high energy to mass ratio which accounts for its superior environmental advantages which no other energy source can match. There is, at any power level, a maximum amount that can accumulate before reaching secular equibrium at which it is decaying as fast as it forms which is reached asymmtotically. This is governed by the Bateman equation, a differential equation the governs the composition of nuclear fuels.

[erronis]

6. Thank you for your as always erudite post. I had hoped you would lend your knowledge to this discussion.

[Old Crank]

12. Sounds like they would be ideal for a continuous drain application.

Certainly a pacemaker relies on a continuous drain. Even if with the size constraints if a battery only lasts 1% of the c14 half life it would be good for 50 plus years.

[NNadir]

20. There are still people walking around today who had pacemakers...

...implanted that were powered by ²³⁸Pu, plutonium 238, in the 1970s. It's the same isotope that powered the Voyager (and many other) space missions.

[AmericaUnderSiege]

5. LOL, no.

Here's the clue-in that this is bullshit:

a safe and abundant by-product of nuclear plants.

In other words, you have to continue using nuclear plants to have this "safe and abundant" product.

Hiding environmental costs upstream is an old game of Old Energy.

[OldBaldy1701E]

9. Don't worry.

The various multi-million dollar industries that support (and are supported by) the battery industry would never allow this. They will conspire to buy it out and shelf it somewhere 'Raiders of the Lost Ark' style.

It may catch on though... who knows?

[AmericaUnderSiege]

11. Chemical batteries are just one form of energy storage.

If you don't want to use them, there are very simple mechanical storage methods. Taking subsidies from nuclear power plants would be environmentally self-defeating.

[Bernardo de La Paz]

17. You made an illogical leap

Because X is an abundant product of Y does not mean that Y is the only source.

[AmericaUnderSiege]

19. Yeah, but the way it's written makes it sound like the major source.

Even if there are others, the main selling point would be low costs made possible by the operation of nuclear plants. And that's deceptive, because in an environmental perspective the real cost would have to include those nuclear plants, the refineries, security, and the extreme long-term storage of unusable waste.

That doesn't even come close to being competitive with lithium ion. Not economically or environmentally.

[NNadir]

21. Without nuclear power, the world dies, period

[AmericaUnderSiege]

23. Not so. Not by a wide consensus.

Solar and clean storage is the overwhelming answer. Wind is an answer that will be part of the process. Miscellaneous other things like geo, tide, and so on can provide specific solutions. But nuclear is outside the frame of the solution if you include its full costs.

The whole nuclear industry is a scam. They are profoundly subsidized, and have been for generations. You can remove vastly more carbon from the atmosphere with direct investments in renewables instead of that crap.

[NNadir]

28. This insipid chanting is not supported by any data has left the planet in flsmes.

The selective attention of antinukes has done nothing but squander trillions of dollars of valuable resources, destroyed vast stretches of pristine wilderness for no other reason than to entrench the use of fossil fuels.

I track the destruction of the planetary atmosphere, even if antinukes can't be bothered.

[AmericaUnderSiege]

29. If nuclear were any solution at all, fossil fuels would already be extinct.

It's been touted since the 1940s as a way to get rid of oil and coal. But it not only didn't, they grew even faster because the same fucking people are about all of it: Military-industrial.

They're about it because it's a source of political power, not an economical or environmentally friendly source of electrical power. It's non-renewable, meaning they can profit heavily from it. It involves potentially very dangerous materials, so they can demand taxpayer money to handle and guard it. It's labor-intensive, so they can pretend they're doing society a favor when they have to hire so many people to manage it, even though they're just giving back a fraction of people's own tax money. And even though it's not weaponizable itself, it supports the infrastructure for weapons.

And it's not even a good idea strategically, since it's a net economic drain.

The same money invested in renewables over that time would probably have taken fossil fuels off the market by now. But most of the people advocating it don't even want renewables. Their saint, Ronald Reagan, infamously ripped out Jimmy Carter's solar panels from the White House just to put a point on that.

[NNadir]

30. The amount of money squandered on solar and wind energy since 2015...

...now approaches close to 5 trillion dollars, more than the GDP of all but two countries on the planet. Notably it is more than the GDP of India, a nation with well over a billion human beings living it, not that antinukes give a rat's ass about poverty any more than they do about fossil fuels.

I note that the people offering up this tripe couldn't care less about the real and observable death toll associated with fossil fuels. Air pollution kills about 19,000 people per day while antinukes sit on their asses picking lint out of their navels.

Anyone who was interested in the environment could look up the cost of so called "renewable energy on, for example the website of the International Energy Agency rather than repeating tiresome slogans that stopped being true in the 20th century.

So called "renewable energy" is merely lipstick on the fossil fuel pig on which it depends. The fucking Germans are burning coal and killing people because they shut their nuclear plants.

[AmericaUnderSiege]

31. SMH. The laws of thermodynamics are not a matter of opinion.

The economic and environmental difference between a fuel that you have to create at massive expense (which becomes waste you have to store at massive expense forever) and a passive gathering technology you can deploy at ever-escalating scale and ever-decreasing cost (and can recycle) is huge.

Factoid-salad and weird accusations will not make 2 and 2 become 5.

[NNadir]

32. Oh, I'm getting a lecture on the laws of thermodynamics, am I? From people advocating no less batteries and...

Last edited Thu Mar 27, 2025, 07:33 AM - Edit history (1)

...worse, hydrogen because the wind doesn't blow and the sun doesn't always shine?

Really?

One thing about antinukes is that they are a never ending source of comedy, or would be if the fucking planet wasn't burning and the rise of the dangerous fossil fuel waste, which is accelerating at the highest rate ever/b] observed wasn't accelerating:

New Weekly CO2 Concentration Record Set at the Mauna Loa Observatory, 428.38 ppm

But the planet is burning, and the rise of the concentration of the dangerous fossil fuel waste carbon dioxide is accelerating.

Question: From the definition of entropy using a line integral, which produces less entropy, heat exchange at a high temperature, like say, the temperatures in a nuclear fuel, or heat exchange at low temperatures like say, a battery?

Never mind, I really don't want to hear it on a planet burning because people don't understand the basic laws of science.

How about we just do some simple graphs that a 9th grader should be able to do?

Costs:



IEA overview, Energy Investments.

The graphic is interactive at the link; one can calculate overall expenditures on what the IEA dubiously calls "clean energy."

Note we wouldn't need all those fucking expensive grids starting fires if we had reliable energy. They are part of the money squandered by antinukes in their indifference to fossil fuels. It's not just the unreliable solar and wind crap.

In California, the Diablo Canyon nuclear plant, with a single power line stretching over the hills, 2 reactors, easily out produces on a 12 acre footprint thousands of square miles of wind turbines, all of which will be landfill in less than 20 years. And all those wires strewn over California to connect all that unreliable soon to rot shit, does it ever occur to antinukes to wonder if all those fires started by sparking wires are really necessary?

Nuclear energy, as reported by one of the world's most prominent climate scientists - and I fully recognize that antinukes couldn't care less about the extreme heating the world is experiencing from fossil fuel waste - saves lives:

Prevented Mortality and Greenhouse Gas Emissions from Historical and Projected Nuclear Power (Pushker A. Kharecha* and James E. Hansen Environ. Sci. Technol., 2013, 47 (9), pp 4889–4895)

It follows that antinuke rhetoric kills people.

Final math question, assuming that this is certainly not the conversation where a knowledge of the laws of thermodynamics applies, since they've already been mangled: What's bigger, 8 EJ (solar) + 8 EJ (wind) = 16 EJ or 30EJ?



IEA World Energy Outlook 2024
Table A.1a: World energy supply Page 296.

If we want to know why the planet is burning, and the use of fossil fuels - about which antinukes couldn't care less - is rising dramatically, faster than wind and solar combined, it would be useful to understand the laws of physics, including of course, the laws of thermodynamics, and the laws, for that matter, or nuclear physics.

That's not going to happen though. I've been here for more than 20 years and still I hear this stuff. It's stuff that kills people. It's disgusting.

Bye. This is why DU has a wonderful ignore list.

[AmericaUnderSiege]

33. I never mentioned hydrogen. And it's not even physically possible to deploy nuclear fast enough to save the planet.

It's very possible to do that with renewables. That simple.

The rest of what you're saying is not relevant. I'm not even bothering to check it.

[IronLionZion]

8. Electric vehicles that don't need charging would be a game changer

same with laptops, phones, etc. Then there's the possibility of cheap power for data centers and other electricity intensive uses.

[usonian]

14. Nuclear power.

Tried in jet engines! De-classified work.

https://planehistoria.com/general-electric-htre-3-nuclear-jet-engine/

J47 engines (funny now)

Electric vehicles that never need charging exist now.



Image may be a slow load.

[IronLionZion]

22. Teslas can be powered by thoughts and prayers

and lots of ketamine

[usonian]

24. Winner!

[mellow]

13. Don't get excited...

Likely not enough power released per unit mass to power your vehicle, regardless what percentage is captured.

[h2ebits]

15. Wow! Thanks for sharing this info.

[Jacson6]

16. Hey my new iPhone glows in the dark!

Let me put it in my pocket to carry it around.

[Bernardo de La Paz]

18. I think you got frightened by the word "radiation" but you didn't look up beta radiation

You never go outside? You'll be struck by alpha, beta and high energy photon radiation, maybe some gamma too.

Oh, wait. There's beta radiation in your home right now!

[Old Crank]

25. Me thinks,

My wife would disagree, that he is joking.

I did a bunch of radiation surveys while at my last job.
Alpha radiation you need a special detector not a regular Geiger counter. Most Alpha contamination was discovered with wipes and then in a scintillation counter. You skin blocks Alpha. Don't get it inside you.

Beta, regular counters work, most people in the labs worked with it behind 1/4 - 1/2 inch plastic shields. Stored in plexiglass boxes.

Alpha. Easily detected. I could use a counter and locate where it was stored in a refrigerator from the outside if not stored in lead.

Fun fact. A couple of the old radioactive EXIT signs had more Alpha radiation than our university's permit allowed for Alpha radiation.

[bif]

26. So cool! Thanks for posting this!

[sop]

27. "The research was funded by the National Research Foundation of Korea,

as well as the Daegu Gyeongbuk Institute of Science & Technology Research & Development Program of the Ministry of Science and Information and Communication Technology of Korea."

Forward-looking Trump is eliminating funding for all kinds of research.