I bet they will make the whole phone disposable too. Battery dead? That will be $10,000 inflation adjusted please, we haven’t sold a charger in 40 years.
Of course not. They need to keep a way to sell new phones. Battery was a good physical limit. OS deprecation and fake hardware limitations will be the next one.
Side note - if they can't sell as many phones anymore, I bet that we'll see some Android+ or iOS+ appear at some point, for the low low cost of 39.99 per month. I'm quite surprised it's not there yet
90% of the people I know keep their near their head, near the genitals or near their heart when not actively using it. I read the part about them asserting that it's safe, but if they want this to actually sell without a major stigma, especially in the era of social media, they will need to go out of their way to prove it.
My understanding is that phone near your genitals is not recommended at least for men because the increase in heat affects your testicular production, like any increased heat source would (between the heat of battery usage and the non ionizing radiation from the radio). I remember my science teacher talking about it in high school, and that was pre smartphone era (~2003 or so). I also remember it saying that guys liked wearing boxer and jeans and the increased friction was pushing more heat there anyway.
Now every 6 months we have a study about low and lowering sperm count in males, and between that and food changes and microplastics overabundance and ... It feels like that's a lost cause.
But MRI does not use radioactivity. It's just a huge magnet that swing your hydrogens nuclei and a detector for the tiny light produced by them.
If you want to be scared, CT is beter. They send you a lot of x-rays. The x-ray can produce cancer, so the total dose should be low to be safe, so you can't take a CT everyday.
But PET is better to be scared. They inject you wit a radioctive liquid that produce positrons. Positrons colide with your electrons and produce two gamma photons. The photons are detected and after a lot of calculatons you get an image. Don't take one eveey day.
There are a few more. They have a small risk, but used correctly the benefit outweight the risk. Ask your medical doctor and don't take they just for fun.
I was about to reply "That depends where you live."
Well, DUH! Obviously if you live in the 'Land of the Midnight Sun', you have to be also living in 'The Land of the Midday Darkness'. I suppose it would pay me to engage my brain before putting my mouth(keyboard) in motion.
I'm not saying they're unsafe (I don't know that, but I do trust my national agency if they certify it). I'm saying convincing people who need a peacemaker to not die about a magic device that keep their heart beating is much easier than convincing any random person to have a radioactive phone.
Ni-63 is a pure low energy beta emitter - what that means is your skin is enough to block it penetrating if it were outside the phone. While used as intended it would be safe but it’s a horrible idea for consumer electronics for disposal issues.
Overall it sounds like a terrible idea though due to what happens when the phone reaches end of life or is smashed. Phone can’t be shredded and materials reclaimed without manually removing the battery. Phone releases free radioactive material into the environment if smashed. Terrible terrible idea for consumer electronic.
Nickel 63 decays to stable copper 63 under beta radiation with 66.9 keV energy. Some centimetres are already enough to stop that, with aluminum a millimeter should probably already be enough.
The real safety issues is if people pry it open and ingest or inhale the radionuclides.
It is coming (again) thanks to one of the largest single market on the planet making replacable batteries in portable electronics a requirement by 2027 (in 3 years time) [0].
I find it highly unlikely that there will be double production of devices for the EU market on one hand and the rest of the world on the other (and the biggest producers are not going to be pulling out of the market for obvious reasons).
Nickel 63 decays to stable copper 63 under beta radiation with 66.9 keV energy. Some centimetres are already enough to stop that, with aluminum a millimeter should probably already be enough.
As long as you don't ingest the battery you will be fine.
Why phones? I want nuclear powered electric vehicles. If you could even get an EV with the performance of a Prius that never needed gas or a charge for 250,000 miles, that would be a major accomplishment.
> Nuclear submarines and aircraft carriers are powered by onboard nuclear reactors. Atoms in the nuclear reactor split, which releases energy as heat. This heat is used to create high-pressured steam. The steam turns propulsion turbines that provide the power to turn the propeller. Additional turbines also make electricity for the ship. As the steam cools and condenses back into water, the water is directed back through the system, and the process starts again.
It is a fucking shame politics, ideologies and greed for power makes the world so fucked up. It would be great if instead of nuclear powered air carriers we had nuclear powered cargo ships.
A modern smartphone, no, not currently. Feature phones maybe, if made specifically with low-power parts.
Personally I'm interested in putting this in a watchy [0], that can get around on tens of microwatts average consumption because of deep sleep states and an e-paper screen.
If they manage to produce more wattage, then it can work, ink device or something with low power usage could benefit from this. Get a texting device like blackberry that will always work, that would be epic.
I get that they are confident they can produce more power, but usually these diamond/nuclear batteries produce really small amount of power.
The nuclear process can most likely not be controlled, and will just provide energy the whole day long. A small sidecar battery may hold charge for peak usage, but still the nuclear battery have to churn atoms all the time to provide the mean power. And the conversion process usually is not very efficient either (but I don't see numbers for this particular device).
Dimension it for just a little more than the average consumption and use a super capacitor or battery to soak up the excess when the phone is idle. I imagine one would need the battery anyway to cope with short term high demand such as photography.
Once you fill your storage you cup runs over. Now you need to radiate something. Heat, radio, light, whatever. You could always run a crypto mine when battery is full and phone is idle, but yeah youre heating your pocket regardless.
That'll probably be useful for niche applications but not general public smartphones because phones last for a few years at most, this would carry disposal costs, and risk of pollution would probably be too high (Nickel-63 has a half-life of 100 years so while it does decay into copper it takes time...).
There's another news article by a different author that makes the same bizarre mistake:
- "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."
Given the amount of shielding a radioactive power source in device you use close to your head would require, if your bricked your phone it would give a whole new meaning to the term paper-weight.
"The compact battery uses 63 nuclear isotopes to generate 100 microwatts and a voltage of 3V of electricity through the process of radioactive decay"
So the battery produce 0.1 mW or 0.0001 W: what "phone or drone" works with this microscopic power ? It isn't sufficient to power a sigle LED.
IMHO this article is a sum of: clickbait + incompetence and, if the translation from Chinese is accurate, scam. The phrase "uses 63 nuclear isotopes" also make me ROFL.
It's more helpful to think of it as a power generator that produces that level of power. Then you use it or store it.
Having an onboard power source coupled with storage is an amazing win. And these power generators (not batteries really) are very small.
So, when phone is "off" it pulls some mW from each of the many such power cells onboard to charge battery, then when phone is "on" it works like normal.
No really, no. It's the same to declare that you have a box of matches and burning them it gives you a substantial help to warm up your house in the middle of winter.
"which measure less than a coin at 15 x 15 x 5mm" , if you stack a large amount of that component still the power generated is ridicule, in fact they tell us: "Betavolt is planning to boost its tech to produce a 1-watt battery by 2025", aka, 3V 0.33A and you are using volume employed by the lithium battery, reducing further the phone operability. This pretended to be innovation will go nowhere, like all "miracle battery" seen before, solar panel covered street, e-cat, etc, etc, etc. Nowadays , the high demand of clean energy makes flourish nonsense startups, scam, pseudoscience, etc. That is very sad.
P.s. More critical thinking is required before reposting this kind of article, those are, anyway, all very similar: computer generated mock, no test, no prototype, no scientific documentation, no peer reviews. Only a before-unknown company that declare a miraculous breaking ground tech. I'm sure that if I declare can produce an anti-matter base battery capable to give power to your phone and also your CAR, the "news" will propagated everywhere, in article identical to technical review.
It's fair to be skeptical of the article, and also fair to simultaneously look at the wattage output by a single cell and to do some math to determine it's possible to generate power.
It is maybe too bulky. It is maybe too lower power. But my comment was not incorrect, just as your skepticism is not incorrect.
It's not matter of skepticism, it can't work and it's matter of science, it doesn't work both as generator to "recharge" the battery (at microwatt scale it needs years ) and as generator to directly power "phones or drones", thing they declare, to do that you should employ very "hot" isotopes and if we don't count other factors that discourage that solution, the shielding, we are talking about centimeters of solid lead, make the same solution impractical. I don't think people want a 2kg phone large as a toaster. Isotope based batteries are only good for space satellites and probes and there is no way to "miniaturize" them at a scale you can use in a phone, principal reason is radiation: to produce significant energy to power "phones or drones" or to recharge the battery you needs high radiations that means thick shielding.
You're equating difficulties with impossibilities. The analogy of a small power generator holds even if it's the power that's small not the generator.
Looking back at your original post, I was simply saying that "you can't even run an LED on this" does not mean it's useless, and you may be able to scale it up. So I think we violently agree about the difficulty. I do see how my comment may have made someone think I meant that this could actually be used in phones as is. I mistakenly used phones as an analogous device.
I think you are trolling, but, in case I'm wrong, I explain the concept in other words: modern phones need a charger able to provide current to the phone battery in order of Amperes (A) the one is on my desk now is 5A and can charge the phone, let say, in 1h, to simplify, let say that we need less 1A for 1h. 1 microAmpere is 1A divided by 1'000'000 so, to fully recharge my phone with a microampere, I need 1'000'000h or 114 years, with 100 mA, only 1,14 years, 10% 1 month. And these are optimistic values. So what should be the use case of that bullshit ? Emergency ? I don't think so, better a solar panel. To prolong the daily life of the battery of 1 millisecond ? But reducing drastically the space for the real battery so you have a phone even with less autonomy. Is it laughable ? Again, applying the science and not magic or sci-fi you simply can not do a nuclear powered cellphone for day-by-day use, at least one with the same volume and weight of a modern smartphone. Maybe something 1m^3 x 200kg. Problem here is that Ark reactor and Unobtanium you see in movies are not possible and there is a magical undiscovered and ultralight material to shield high level of radiation. This kind of nuclear batteries are useful for niche application, to save the state of small memory amounts, etc and are not suitable to power cellphones or drones, this will never happen. What happen is there are lot of people confusing Marvel movies with reality and want to give real money to companies that simple produce scam. This could not be the case because I did not translate the Chinese webpage of the company, I suspect here the problem is the english article, but, if the translation is correct , no doubts , if they declare they can power the phone with nuclear batteries is a scam.
I'm not trolling. I'll summarize in three points and stop replying because I think we're talking past each other and it's a waste of our time.
1. The use in phones is a silly illustration. You can ignore phones. No one in this thread specified a form factor or power output requirement except you to bring up counter examples for an argument I'm not even proposing.
2. The math you did makes sense, but doesn't disqualify this conceptually as a generator. Even if it's of laughably small power that's literally all I said was it's just a small generator.
3. The use of the terminology of battery is misleading, these are small power generators. It's not a scam until someone says it's useful for X, where X is someone it's not useful for. We agree on all the X so far.
1. absolutely no, the article talk explicitly of "phones and drones";
2. No, it's related to "phones and drones", I've explicitly written that this device make sense in niche application, microvolt application like "preserve the state of small amount of RAM";
3. I don't think the name matter, can be battery, generator, whatever: microamperes remain;
Moreover isotope based battery isn't a new technology, you can buy these kind of battery from electronic industrial shops. EEVBlog on Youtube also did tests and debunking.
The idea of this making it into any consumer product is science fiction, and articles like this can be safely ignored.
Some back of the envelope math to illustrate why:
- The decay energy of Ni-63 is 66 keV, but since the energy is split with an irrecoverable neutrino, the average recoverable energy per decay is more like 17 keV.
- The typical power consumption of an iPhone is about 10 watts, give or take.
- Converting (1eV = 1.6e-19 J, 1W = 1J/s), we get 2.72e-15 Watts per decay.
- Assuming 10 Watts for your phone, we get 3.68e15 decays/second, 3.68e15 Bq, or *99364 CURIES* of activity
- The US NRC exempt quantity for Ni-63 is currently 1e-5 Curies (10 micro-Curies) (10CFR30.71, Sched. B)
For reference, the activity of the Am-241 in a typical smoke detector is on the order of 0.1 MICRO Curies. A betavoltaic battery for a smartphone would need a full 20 orders of more activity per unit, 18 orders of magnitude higher than the current regulatory limits, and we're talking about a product that nearly every person in the country owns. The item would be physically warm to the touch, could never be turned off, and would need piles of paperwork to track the origin, transfer of custody, and proper disposal.
Maybe this makes sense for remotely-deployed military equipment and other niche applications where the user would go thorough the necessary licensing steps, but for consumer products, forget it. Absolute fiction.
The fact is that beta batteries have been around since the 1960's, and for the reasons you've described they're not really useful for commercialization. I'd add that even if they were somehow absolutely foolproof, you'd still need strict regulatory oversight of disposal/recycling.
The cost would be immense, the benefits would be slim at best.
Your numbers are ahem a bit off. An iPhone 15 has a 3367 mAh battery. Around 12 watts. It lasts longer than 1 hours 12m. Probably even running full tilt.
I think your post indicates a narrow "can this power the whole phone" thinking that is over-applied when considering this power source. The power here is faint, but the energy is vast, & we should assess that merit too. The previous post called this is a 100mW battery. That's not enough power for active use for a phone, but it's probably enough to idle a phone ok, and if designed well leave some extra capacity for very slow charging a conventional battery, depending on the phone. That might be enough for some light phone use and being net neutral on any given day!
It might be enough to run some flip phones during calls, possibly.
Anyways, you've over hyped the requirements by 100x what's on offer here. I think even 2 or 3x what's available here is probably enough to make a phone than many people might never have to recharge, if supplemented by a higher power store (conventional chemical cell) to bank some of the output energy. The idea still sounds risky & scary to me, but I at least want us to be looking at vaguely the right order of magnitudes when we assess.
Whether it's 1 Watt, 1000 Watts or 0.0001 Watts is utterly irrelevant. It's the activity that matters. Even at the power quoted in the article of 100 microwatts, you're still talking activities on the order of a full Curie, assuming 100% efficiency (betavoltaics are down in the 10s and 20s, realistically).
Curie-quantities of activity in a package the size of coin is real activity, not the nanobananas of tritium in the pacific the media likes to segfault over. No nuclear regulator in their right mind, in any country on Earth, would generally license, let alone exempt, a Curie-level quantity of any isotope for widespread consumer usage.
The title of the article was "A tiny radioactive battery could keep your future phone running for 50 years." I can assure you this will not be going in anybody's personal electronics. At best, it will power some board-level electronics operating in the Arctic or at the bottom of the ocean, maybe a cubesat or keep-alive circuit on a space probe. Militaries, government agencies and companies with the motivation and resources to deal with the licensing could definitely have a use case here. Your average Joe will remain stuck with smoke detectors, tritium keychains, polonium static brushes, and uranium rocks as the hottest isotopes they can (legally) get their hands on.
85 comments
[ 3.7 ms ] story [ 79.4 ms ] threadPhone OS developers: Challenge accepted.
Side note - if they can't sell as many phones anymore, I bet that we'll see some Android+ or iOS+ appear at some point, for the low low cost of 39.99 per month. I'm quite surprised it's not there yet
iPhones straddling your genitalia is considered "safe"' today. Can't wait to hear from science towards the end of the century.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mad_as_a_hatter
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radium_Girls
Now every 6 months we have a study about low and lowering sperm count in males, and between that and food changes and microplastics overabundance and ... It feels like that's a lost cause.
Someone really helped when they renamed Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Imaging to MRI
If you want to be scared, CT is beter. They send you a lot of x-rays. The x-ray can produce cancer, so the total dose should be low to be safe, so you can't take a CT everyday.
But PET is better to be scared. They inject you wit a radioctive liquid that produce positrons. Positrons colide with your electrons and produce two gamma photons. The photons are detected and after a lot of calculatons you get an image. Don't take one eveey day.
There are a few more. They have a small risk, but used correctly the benefit outweight the risk. Ask your medical doctor and don't take they just for fun.
Well, DUH! Obviously if you live in the 'Land of the Midnight Sun', you have to be also living in 'The Land of the Midday Darkness'. I suppose it would pay me to engage my brain before putting my mouth(keyboard) in motion.
Overall it sounds like a terrible idea though due to what happens when the phone reaches end of life or is smashed. Phone can’t be shredded and materials reclaimed without manually removing the battery. Phone releases free radioactive material into the environment if smashed. Terrible terrible idea for consumer electronic.
The real safety issues is if people pry it open and ingest or inhale the radionuclides.
Well, what happens when you throw the non-decayed thing in a firepit or run it through a wood chipper?
I find it highly unlikely that there will be double production of devices for the EU market on one hand and the rest of the world on the other (and the biggest producers are not going to be pulling out of the market for obvious reasons).
[0] https://www.europarl.europa.eu/news/en/press-room/20230609IP...
[0] https://www.macrumors.com/2024/01/15/app-store-to-be-split-i...
As long as you don't ingest the battery you will be fine.
Edit: commenter seems to be editing without noting their edits. This comment was written against a their comment in a different revision.
> Nuclear submarines and aircraft carriers are powered by onboard nuclear reactors. Atoms in the nuclear reactor split, which releases energy as heat. This heat is used to create high-pressured steam. The steam turns propulsion turbines that provide the power to turn the propeller. Additional turbines also make electricity for the ship. As the steam cools and condenses back into water, the water is directed back through the system, and the process starts again.
https://www.epa.gov/radtown/nuclear-submarines-and-aircraft-....
I'm thinking we could treat those as emergent behaviors of flawed human nature.
> less than a coin at 15 x 15 x 5mm
Slightly smaller than a stack of four US dimes.
Edit oh microwatts not milliwatts
Personally I'm interested in putting this in a watchy [0], that can get around on tens of microwatts average consumption because of deep sleep states and an e-paper screen.
[0] https://watchy.sqfmi.com
I get that they are confident they can produce more power, but usually these diamond/nuclear batteries produce really small amount of power.
The nuclear process can most likely not be controlled, and will just provide energy the whole day long. A small sidecar battery may hold charge for peak usage, but still the nuclear battery have to churn atoms all the time to provide the mean power. And the conversion process usually is not very efficient either (but I don't see numbers for this particular device).
Dimension it for just a little more than the average consumption and use a super capacitor or battery to soak up the excess when the phone is idle. I imagine one would need the battery anyway to cope with short term high demand such as photography.
Just sounds like using something with a longer half life.
Also 50 Ci is an awful lot of activity to produce 100 µW. Being anywhere near a hypothetical 1W version would be quite scary.
What the company is apparently saying:
"To create the radioactive battery, Betavolt's scientist used nickel-63, which is a radiactive element, as the energy source... "
The author describing this in his own words:
"The compact battery uses 63 nuclear isotopes to generate..." "
- "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."
https://www.independent.co.uk/tech/nuclear-battery-betavolt-...
Are they both copying this text from some other source?
So the battery produce 0.1 mW or 0.0001 W: what "phone or drone" works with this microscopic power ? It isn't sufficient to power a sigle LED.
IMHO this article is a sum of: clickbait + incompetence and, if the translation from Chinese is accurate, scam. The phrase "uses 63 nuclear isotopes" also make me ROFL.
Having an onboard power source coupled with storage is an amazing win. And these power generators (not batteries really) are very small.
So, when phone is "off" it pulls some mW from each of the many such power cells onboard to charge battery, then when phone is "on" it works like normal.
It is maybe too bulky. It is maybe too lower power. But my comment was not incorrect, just as your skepticism is not incorrect.
Looking back at your original post, I was simply saying that "you can't even run an LED on this" does not mean it's useless, and you may be able to scale it up. So I think we violently agree about the difficulty. I do see how my comment may have made someone think I meant that this could actually be used in phones as is. I mistakenly used phones as an analogous device.
1. The use in phones is a silly illustration. You can ignore phones. No one in this thread specified a form factor or power output requirement except you to bring up counter examples for an argument I'm not even proposing.
2. The math you did makes sense, but doesn't disqualify this conceptually as a generator. Even if it's of laughably small power that's literally all I said was it's just a small generator.
3. The use of the terminology of battery is misleading, these are small power generators. It's not a scam until someone says it's useful for X, where X is someone it's not useful for. We agree on all the X so far.
That's it. Cheers.
2. No, it's related to "phones and drones", I've explicitly written that this device make sense in niche application, microvolt application like "preserve the state of small amount of RAM";
3. I don't think the name matter, can be battery, generator, whatever: microamperes remain; Moreover isotope based battery isn't a new technology, you can buy these kind of battery from electronic industrial shops. EEVBlog on Youtube also did tests and debunking.
And somehow the radiation doesn't travel beyond the thickness of the battery and phone.
Some back of the envelope math to illustrate why:
- The decay energy of Ni-63 is 66 keV, but since the energy is split with an irrecoverable neutrino, the average recoverable energy per decay is more like 17 keV.
- The typical power consumption of an iPhone is about 10 watts, give or take.
- Converting (1eV = 1.6e-19 J, 1W = 1J/s), we get 2.72e-15 Watts per decay.
- Assuming 10 Watts for your phone, we get 3.68e15 decays/second, 3.68e15 Bq, or *99364 CURIES* of activity
- The US NRC exempt quantity for Ni-63 is currently 1e-5 Curies (10 micro-Curies) (10CFR30.71, Sched. B)
For reference, the activity of the Am-241 in a typical smoke detector is on the order of 0.1 MICRO Curies. A betavoltaic battery for a smartphone would need a full 20 orders of more activity per unit, 18 orders of magnitude higher than the current regulatory limits, and we're talking about a product that nearly every person in the country owns. The item would be physically warm to the touch, could never be turned off, and would need piles of paperwork to track the origin, transfer of custody, and proper disposal.
Maybe this makes sense for remotely-deployed military equipment and other niche applications where the user would go thorough the necessary licensing steps, but for consumer products, forget it. Absolute fiction.
The cost would be immense, the benefits would be slim at best.
That would be a cool exercise to make it comsume the tiniest amount of power as possible.
Not as cool obviously!
I think your post indicates a narrow "can this power the whole phone" thinking that is over-applied when considering this power source. The power here is faint, but the energy is vast, & we should assess that merit too. The previous post called this is a 100mW battery. That's not enough power for active use for a phone, but it's probably enough to idle a phone ok, and if designed well leave some extra capacity for very slow charging a conventional battery, depending on the phone. That might be enough for some light phone use and being net neutral on any given day!
It might be enough to run some flip phones during calls, possibly.
Anyways, you've over hyped the requirements by 100x what's on offer here. I think even 2 or 3x what's available here is probably enough to make a phone than many people might never have to recharge, if supplemented by a higher power store (conventional chemical cell) to bank some of the output energy. The idea still sounds risky & scary to me, but I at least want us to be looking at vaguely the right order of magnitudes when we assess.