The unlikely revival of nuclear batteries (spectrum.ieee.org)

This is a fascinating topic if anyone is interested from a historical perspective.

The soviets had Beta-M powering more than two dozen lighthouses across the union at some point. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beta-M

And here I was hoping they finally got that hafnium isomer to work.

It is my understanding that small nuclear batteries output very little energy, so little in fact that they are virtually useless for most applications where a classical battery would be used. The upside is that they can produce power for decades without ever ‘charging’ or in this case, replacing the isotopes. In other words, the use cases aren’t as exciting as one would expect.

One thing to note about the modern 'betavoltaic' batteries is that they don't actually have more energy density than a standard 18650 lithium ion battery, but instead give off a much smaller amount of power for a decade or two, while an 18650 would probably have lost all it's chemical abilities.

It feels like LLM blogspam. The only "revival" I could find in the text was the mention of Beijing Betavolt.

Nuclear pacemaker is astonishingly bad ass

I read 'Nuclear Batteries' and the first thing I think about is the "Lia Radological accident", where three men were exposed and one died.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lia_radiological_accident

This incident happened in the country of Georgia, which was part of the Sovjet Union. Which probably already hints towards the root-cause of this incident (they lost track of the devices).

Also: Just because you can, doesn't mean you should.

I'm missing the part where they solve for the collection problem. The article mentions the boy who gathered dangerous amounts of Americium from smoke detectors but doesn't provide any kind of mechanism to counteract that risk. It seems like any mass production of nuclear battery material risks an interested human or organizational collector amassing significant quantities of that material and that risk doesn't seem to have gone down.

Who else remembers "Shipstones" from Robert Heinlein's writings? This kind of has that "feel".

https://www.google.com/search?q=robert+heinlein+shipstone

Patrolling the Mojave almost makes you wish for a nuclear winter!