New 50-Year Battery: Is It Real or Just Hype

The Everlasting Battery: Exploring the Potential of Nuclear Power in Your Pocket

Imagine a world where your smartphone never runs out of juice. That’s the tantalizing promise made by BetaVolt, a company claiming to have created a coin-sized “nuclear battery” with a lifespan of 50 years. While the concept is indeed real, the likelihood of seeing one in your device anytime soon is slim due to the complexities of physics. Let’s dive into the details.

How Batteries Work

At their core, all batteries serve the same purpose: generating an electric current to perform work. However, energy is not free. If that work involves pumping out tunes on your wireless earbuds, there must be a corresponding decrease in energy elsewhere. In a standard AA battery, a chemical reaction produces the current, but it eventually fizzles out, rendering the battery dead.

The Nuclear Option

Nuclear batteries, on the other hand, rely on a piece of radioactive material as their power source. They keep going strong until the source is no longer radioactive, which, while not eternal, is significantly longer than traditional batteries. In fact, nuclear batteries are not a new invention. The voyager/index.html”>Voyager 1 space probe, launched in 1977, is equipped with a nuclear battery. Despite being over 15 billion miles away, it still has some power left—an impressive feat!

How Nuclear Batteries Function

The specific type of nuclear battery on Voyager is called a radioisotope thermoelectric generator. In essence, it’s a chunk of plutonium housed in a box. As the plutonium decays, it converts mass to energy, generating heat. By attaching a solid-state device to it, the temperature difference between the hot and cold metals produces voltage, causing an electric current to flow.

Safety Concerns

While the idea of carrying a radioactive battery in your pocket might sound alarming, the BetaVolt battery likely poses minimal risk. It contains only a small amount of material and probably incorporates shielding. Additionally, beta radiation is less harmful than other types, such as gamma rays. We are constantly exposed to background radiation simply by living on Earth, and even bananas emit a slight amount of radiation.

The Longevity Question

To understand the potential lifespan of the BetaVolt battery, we need to delve into some electrical concepts. An electrical current is the flow of electrons in a circuit, measured in amperes. The power supplied, measured in watts, is calculated by multiplying the electrical current by the voltage. Multiplying power by a period of time gives you the total energy used, typically measured in kilowatt-hours.

The BetaVolt battery boasts a 3-volt output with a stated power of 100 microwatts. By dividing power by volts, we can determine the amount of current flowing per second, which equates to 0.000033 amps. This is an exceptionally small current—three times less than what you can obtain from a potato battery.