A Chinese company has developed a miniature nuclear battery, about the size of a coin, installed on a mobile phone, can be installed on a drone for 50 years without charging, can fly forever, and this kind of battery gunfire needle puncture will not ignite and explode, minus 60 degrees to 120 degrees can work normally, is it too perfect? If it is connected in series and parallel for electric vehicles, isn't it a proper perpetual motion car, permanent endurance, can be used as a family heirloom for a lifetime?
This news does seem to be true, and it is said that it is about to be mass-produced, but this thing always feels a little unbelievable, today we will seriously analyze it to see what it is all about, and whether it is really as perfect as it says.
How powerful is the battery?
The company, called Beijing Betavolt New Energy Technology Co., Ltd., announced on January 8 that it had developed a miniature atomic energy battery, which uses the decay of the nickel-63 isotope to generate electricity, the first product is called the BV100 battery, the power is 100 microwatts, the voltage is 3 volts, and the length, width and height are 15×15×5 millimeters, which is about the same as a coin.
According to the company's website, this battery is not a chemical battery, but a physical battery, with an energy density more than 10 times that of ternary lithium batteries, and 1 gram can store 3,300 milliwatt hours, which can be compared to the fact that lithium-ion batteries are usually 200-350 milliwatt hours per gram nowadays. Then it can generate electricity for 50 years, so there is no concept of lithium battery cycle times, and there is no maintenance, and it is absolutely safe, there is no external radiation, and it can be used for aerospace, AI equipment, medical equipment, microelectromechanical systems, advanced sensors, small drones and microrobots and other applications, marking that China has made disruptive innovation in the two high-tech fields of atomic energy batteries and fourth-generation diamond semiconductors at the same time, "far ahead" of European and American scientific research institutions and enterprises, this sentence is their original words.
Then this battery has now entered the pilot stage, which will be mass-produced and put on the market, and it is planned to launch a battery with a power of 1 watt in 2025, if the policy allows, this atomic battery can allow the phone to never be charged, and the drone will always fly. In addition, the company is also preparing to use isotopes such as strontium-90, promethium-147 and deuterium to develop higher power atomic batteries with a service life of 2 to 30 years. I don't know if this deuterium is written wrongly, it may be tritium, because deuterium is not radioactive.
Thermonuclear batteries
From this we can already see that this battery is indeed a real nuclear battery, using the energy produced by the decay of radioisotopes to generate electricity. There are actually two types of nuclear batteries, one is a heat-conversion type nuclear battery, which uses isotopes such as plutonium-238 and curium-244 to generate electricity through the thermoelectric effect or photoelectric effect, with an energy efficiency of less than 5%. For example, NASA has used this kind of nuclear battery in space activities, using it as a power source on spacecraft such as Mars rover, Voyager, Cassini, New Horizons, etc., and the Soviet Union even used this nuclear battery to build thousands of lighthouses and navigation beacons.
In addition, very small "plutonium batteries" were also used in pacemakers, which were installed in the hearts of 139 Americans around the 1970s, and because plutonium-238 has a half-life of 88 years, these batteries can accompany them for the rest of their lives, and in 2004 there were 90 people in use. But 3 years later, in 2007, there were only 9 people, and they may have all died in the past few years, which is a bit creepy and strange. Unfortunately, it was discontinued in 1972 because if the patient died, the battery could cause radioactive material to leak at the time of cremation, and it was difficult to ensure that such a leak would not happen at all.
Beta nuclear battery
The other is a non-thermal conversion nuclear battery, that is, the Beijing beta one, called the beta radiation volt effect battery, also known as the ray battery, which uses the β particles released during the decay of isotopes, that is, directly uses electrons to generate electricity, and the energy efficiency can reach 6-8%. This kind of battery first appeared in the 1970s, when the promethium-147 isotope was used, and it was also used in pacemakers, but after the rise of lithium batteries, it withdrew from the historical stage, the reason, of course, is too expensive, not cost-effective.
Then there is the nuclear battery made of tritium, the isotope of hydrogen, you may be familiar with it, that is, the radioactive material tritium in nuclear wastewater, with a half-life of 12.3 years, and the battery can be used for more than 20 years.
However, the biggest disadvantage of beta batteries is that they are very low-power, in the microwatt range, so they are only suitable for long-life low-power applications, such as implantable medical devices and space devices. Beijing Beta has ambitions to power mobile phones or drones, but can it be done?
How is it produced?
This kind of nuclear battery based on nickel-63 and diamond, made of diamond into a semiconductor to absorb β rays to generate an electric current, is essentially the same as solar photovoltaics, and I saw a breakthrough at the earliest in 2018, when the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology made a breakthrough. Due to the low energy of β rays, if the nickel 63 layer is too thick, it is easy to be absorbed by itself and cannot be released, and if it is too thin, the number of decay is limited, and the researchers found that between the 10 micron thick diamond layer, sandwiching the 2 micron thick nickel 63 layer is the optimal design to achieve the maximum power density.
They then made a prototype of a 5×5×3.5mm multilayer beta cell, which obtained a maximum output power of 0.93 microwatts at 0.92 volts, equivalent to 10 microwatts per cubic centimeter and a specific energy of 3300 mWh/g.
The design of Beijing Beta is also a 10 micron diamond layer and a 2 micron nickel 63 layer, with a length, width and height of 15×15×5 mm, the output power is 100 microwatts, the specific energy is also 3300mWh/g, the volume is increased by 10 times, the power is also increased by 10 times, and the output power is still almost 10 microwatts/cubic centimeter, which should be the specific application of this research.
Can I use my phone?
Generally, the power of a pacemaker is about 10 microwatts, so this battery is enough, and this kind of battery can also be used in series and parallel due to its small modular low cost, so if it can really be mass-produced, there should be better application prospects in the future. However, I have always been a little puzzled that the power of this battery is still very low, even if hundreds of them are connected in parallel, it is only a few tens of milliwatts, and the standby power of current smartphones is hundreds of milliwatts, and it will reach several watts or even higher when used. Another algorithm is that according to the company, each nuclear battery generates 3153 joules per year, which is less than 0.001 kWh, even if 1000 are connected in parallel, only one kilowatt-hour of electricity a year, obviously it can't be used on mobile phones, and electric cars are even more impossible, so there is no need to fantasize.
Can the power be broken?
In fact, what Beijing Beta said is that they plan to launch a 1-watt nuclear battery in 2025, which can make mobile phones never charge and drones fly all the time if the policy allows. According to the research of Russian scientists, this design is already the best design, so to increase the unit power of the battery, it may take a bigger breakthrough to do it, so can it be achieved?
I really can't judge, nickel-63 seems unlikely, maybe other radioactive materials can, so they said that they want to study the use of isotopes such as strontium-90, promethium-147 and tritium to develop higher power atomic batteries with a service life of 2-30 years. I think this kind of research should be encouraged, and nothing should be impossible.
For example, Musk's Starlink satellite went into the sky, communication experts said that this is impossible, that is impossible, but slowly everything is realized, and later said that it is impossible to talk directly to the satellite with the mobile phone, and now people have used the mobile phone to directly connect to the satellite to send text messages, and the call will be realized in about 2025. Now I can't compare it with submarine fiber optic cables, I see that I am studying ground laser satellites, and the bandwidth of lasers is much larger, and the deployment is more convenient and the cost is lower. There are always more solutions than problems, as long as you know how to think of a way, many problems can be solved, and human civilization is advancing in solving problems.
How safe is it?
Then there is the safety of this battery, and many people feel unsafe when they talk about nuclear radiation. Nickel 63 is β decay, releasing high-energy electrons, which can penetrate about 1 meter of air or 5 mm of acrylic, and it is difficult to penetrate even clothing, so through design, it should be able to eliminate the harm to the human body, and the decay product is our common copper, so Beta believes that it is absolutely safe and suitable for devices such as artificial hearts and cochlea. The heart can be used, and what could be safer than that?
How big is the yield?
In fact, there is also a big problem, that is, the source of nickel-63, the half-life is only 101 years, it is obvious that it is difficult to exist naturally on the earth, in fact, it is mainly found in the cooling water of nuclear power plants. Nickel-63 is a product of nickel-62 decay, and global production is likely to be extremely limited each year, and I saw a report that it could be less than $1 million in 2022 and $4 million by 2030. But I can't see exactly how many kilograms or how many grams, because this report costs more than 4,000 dollars to buy, and it is impossible for me to buy this report in order to make this video.
But I still found a clue, in 2003, someone wanted to use nickel-63 plus silicon P-N junction to make a nuclear battery, and spent $25 to buy 1 millicurie nickel-63 for experiments, I calculated that 1 millicurie nickel-63 is about 16.8 micrograms, which is equivalent to 1.5 million US dollars per gram, which means that by 2022, the nickel-63 that can be bought in the world will be less than 1 gram. But the algorithm is too complicated, and I suspect I may have miscalculated, or this guy is too expensive, because I later saw an article on the website of Oak Ridge National Laboratory in the United States in 2011 that said that they may be the only nickel-63 producer in North America and the whole planet, and only Russia may be a competitor.
Oak Ridge's method is to produce nickel-63 by bombarding nickel-62 with neutrons in a high-throughput isotope reactor, each target has 25 grams of nickel-62, which can produce about 375 curies of nickel-63, that is, about 6.3 grams, and the production cycle is as high as more than 3 years.
But in any case, the production of nickel-63 may be extremely limited, after all, it is a strictly controlled radioactive substance, so it is used to make batteries, and to mass production, whether the raw materials can keep up is still a big problem.