The company plans to launch a more powerful single-watt version this year
If it’s a small battery intended to be used a long time, pretty much a guarantee these are going to end up in the general landfill waste stream.
I wonder how much contamination one of these will cause if it goes through a waste incinerator. If they have 50 Curies of activity, that’s more than a million times what’s in a smoke detector.
They’re probably going to be used in medical devices like pacemakers. So they’ll be in the land but not necessarily a landfill
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Yeah, but it’s radioactive nickel-63 for many decades until it all decays.
There’s radioactive and then there’s radioactive. It beta decays with particles that would only penetrate 5 cm of air or .01 cm of tissue.
You could get a thousand of these batteries, grind them up into a powder, explode them in a crowded place as an improvised dirty bomb…and you would still cause less harm than if you did the same with countless chemicals you can buy at the hardware store.
There are many forms of radiation. Something like this going into a landfill is perfectly safe.
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Which is why your suggestion of simply recycling copper won’t work. You don’t have copper, you have a radioactive alloy.
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A half life of 100 years means that after 100 years half of it is copper while the other half is still nickel 63. It does NOT mean that after half that time all of it will be copper
That’s not how radioactive half lives work.
Learn about radioactive decay and what half life means.
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And that nickel-63 can be recycled to make new batteries.
There’s a lot of radioactive thorium to be found in coal ash leftover from power plants. I am not worried about this.
Eh, it’s likely not an issue. There’s radioactive material in water runoff and all kinds of places. A small amount is not noticeable. Even in the worst case, these aren’t an issue. If they can be near your body 24/7 without causing problems, them getting spread out into even smaller pieces can only be less significant than that.
People are too scared by radiation. It usually isn’t an issue and you’re constantly interacting with it. It’s only in very rare circumstances where you need to worry.
For comparison, the Betacel boasted 25 microwatts per cubic centimeter, and this Betavolt battery appears to have 88 microwatts per cubic centimeter. This will also have a longer lifetime also.
The Betacel was successfully used to power pacemakers. I suspect there will be more applications for power sources in this range today.
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I’m confused - they don’t seem to be talking about using the 100 uW version in a drone, they explicitly mention a 1 W version. What’s laughable about that?
I guess that the 1W battery might be proportionally heavier, if it’s using the same material?
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Yeah but the drone might still work. What if a second drone (armed with the same battery) follows around the first drone and supports the battery through use of a tether? Then the weight isn’t relevant.
Four elephant-shaped drones. Which can in turn be supported by a Turtle drone.
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This just sounds like fly by wire with extra steps.
Casio G-Shock / Fallout Collab?
Casio F-91W☢️
I had to go trough way too many communities to find the first Fallout reference.
I wonder what it tastes like…
coin sized
Perfect. You know how hard it is to find replacements for those? Now I can just have my watch be nuclear powered and not have to worry about that. Only thing I have to worry about is having my arm mutate into getting time control powers.
I want this in a four function calculator
Why not Solar? I have fairly recent Casio (FX-260 Solar II) and it works in dimmer lighting conditions than I’m comfortable working under anyway. Under normal lighting (for being able to see while doing math with pencil and paper) it’s rock solid!
