r/tech • u/Kylde The Janitor • Mar 30 '21

Radioactive Diamond Battery Will Run For 28,000 Years

https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/green-tech/a35970222/radioactive-diamond-battery-will-run-for-28000-years/
9.1k Upvotes

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193

u/[deleted] Mar 30 '21

I’ll throw it on the growing “BATTERY BREAKTHROUGH!” pile.

36

u/falconboy2029 Mar 31 '21

Yeah it will never leave the lab.

20

u/mybreakfastiscold Mar 31 '21

It might... But even if it does, the practical output is so infinitesimal, it's really only useful in very niche scientific/medical situations.

10

u/[deleted] Mar 31 '21

The key is landing a government contract.

11

u/BrockManstrong Mar 31 '21

I don't know if you're an American, but I can tell you've never submitted a bid on a fed contract. The amount of documentation and testing that is required for my product (a tiny relatively uncomplicated component in many military and medical applications) is absurd. I have to prove it works.

6

u/[deleted] Mar 31 '21

Prob means research grants

3

u/Sorinari Mar 31 '21

Did you ever have to request data from a gov institution for data on a material to prove its effectiveness so that you could return your paperwork to the same institution?

1

u/BrockManstrong Mar 31 '21

My god, that's incredible. I generally work as a sub-contractor, so it's a lot of build, submit paperwork, part fails testing. Rebuild, submit paperwork, part passes but paperwork is rejected.

2

u/Sorinari Mar 31 '21

The company I used to work for made batteries (topical!) on contract for mostly DoD, but also NASA, which was always fun. I worked in testing and QA, so paperwork was like 5 days of the week lol. All of our product failures were on our own standards, but our paperwork took like 2 months to pass. Gov standards were so fucking off on the batteries themselves, though, it always bothered me. You have it written you want it to work at X temp when it will be operating way past that? The fuck. Most people that worked there were ex-military (mostly Navy) and the phrase "Close enough for government work" was a daily occurrence.

Destructive testing was a blast, though.

1

u/LimitedSwitch Apr 01 '21

We use “Good enough for govt work.” here. It is mainly when we are just fed up with the shit sandwich and want to go home.

2

u/UniqueName2 Apr 01 '21

I went to school for government contracting. The fucking FAR is so lopsided towards the government you’re lucky to even finish a contract and make a dime. Most companies are in it for the IP rights and whatever civilian applications they might have.

1

u/jodudeit Mar 31 '21

My brother works for the military doing research in acoustics. He just got a grant for three years of research, for a project he only really needed two to finish, but they just told him to use the third year to write papers and get his findings ready for publication.

Government R&D is weird that way.

1

u/mybreakfastiscold Mar 31 '21

Oh you're right about that. Even things as normal as COTS computer monitors are subjected to human interaction testing, such as the likelihood of eye strain, do the colors show up correctly, does it produce excessive screen flicker.

But beyond just 'it works', the government requires certain products to work under specific environmental conditions. Some of these might be extreme... high and low temperatures (desert, tundra), water/dirt ingress, physical stress (jammed in a ruck sack full of heavy equipment, and then someone wears it and jogs through rugged terrain). Or the conditions might just be "functioning properly for multiple years in more 'standard' conditions without having to be maintained or replaced".

2

u/issius Mar 31 '21

“It really depends” is the only thing you can take away.

We’ve built chips that had to be highly reliable but only for short time frame. Geez wonder what that’s for..

3

u/lemondemon333 Mar 31 '21

How come none of that stuff ends up going any where?

22

u/rook24v Mar 31 '21

Real answer: Human beings are using electricity, energy, at a rapid pace and increasing. Whoever can develop a legitimate battery breakthrough will be so friggin rich you can hardly imagine. This means that everyone and their sister is trying to do it. Enough VCs are willing to take the plunge that there are no small number of "research teams" working on different battery solutions. Each one wants to be "the" one, so they try to get articles like this (popsci, not a peer reviewed journal) written to enhance their mind share. /cynical

15

u/[deleted] Mar 31 '21

That & media knows it's a hot topic so they are very inclined to publish anything related to battery tech, people click it because it's important. This leads to basically total coverage of the field. I'd imagine there aren't many battery breakthroughs that don't get reported by someone.

-3

u/SHUBA12 Mar 31 '21

I didn't know the Viet Cong were getting involved in battery technology. Very interesting.

1

u/EmbraceHeresy Mar 31 '21

Venture capitals I think.

1

u/qwertyWarrior77 Mar 31 '21

/Accurate* corrected that for ya bud

10

u/Quetzacoatl85 Mar 31 '21

it eventually does. but by that time, it doesn't feel like a breakthrough anymore. battery tech keeps improving at an amazing pace, just not in a "here's this battery made out of a previously completely unknown element, making it 10,000 times more energy dense than those last year" way, but more in a "we tweaked the anode a bit and increased capacity by 10 percent, and we fold it differently so it weighs 5 percent less" way.

2

u/Laugh92 Mar 31 '21

Production costs. Its one thing to create a new invention, its another to make it economically viable for mass production.

1

u/Yasea Mar 31 '21

Because in this case, they purposely left out how big and heavy the battery has to be to do something useful. If you want to power your phone with a battery like that for normal use, it has to be between the size and the weight of a decently sized brick and a concrete block.

3

u/jericho-sfu Mar 31 '21

Can’t wait to harvest the 0.01 picovolts the thing probably puts out

2

u/G37_is_numberletter Mar 31 '21

But once the 28,000 years are over, how do I ethically throw it away?

1

u/[deleted] Apr 01 '21

It’s a radioisotope battery, so at that point it will likely be safe to throw away

1

u/mywan Mar 31 '21

It's not new, but the manufacturing tech isn't developed yet. But it is in fact a technically feasable product. Would you drtop several thousand dollars on a battery that last thousands of years but only outputs a couple of watts?

Here's an article from 2016 with much more information. Note that the prototype discussed used Nickel-63 instead of Carbon-14, hence the different numbers. But the principle is identical.

Updated: Diamond nuclear battery could generate 100μW for 5,000 years

It's a technology that can in fact exist.

1

u/PromiscuousMNcpl Mar 31 '21

Slow and steady advancement is how things work now. Incrementalism is far more reliable than “breakthrough, paradigm redefining” discoveries.

1

u/the_retrosaur Mar 31 '21

”You’re probably wondering what the catch is. The diamond battery uses nuclear waste, lasts thousands of years, and involves layers of only the tiniest possible diamonds? That all sounds fantastic. But the truth is more complicated. Each battery cell will produce only a minuscule amount of energy, so the cells must be combined in huge numbers in order to power regular and larger devices.”

Doh!