A fascinating article over at livescience.com reveals a new battery technology that takes advantage of everyday, normal nuclear decay.

Personal Nuclear Power: New Battery Lasts 12 Years

A new type of battery based on the radioactive decay of nuclear material is 10 times more powerful than similar prototypes and should last a decade or more without a charge, scientists announced this week.

Can you just imagine the potential? With the technological breakthroughs we hav been reading about on an almost daily basis, tomorrow's computer might not look anything like it does today. Solid state disk space that holds terabytes? Nuclear batteries that work for years?

The technology is called betavoltaics. It uses a silicon wafer to capture electrons emitted by a radioactive gas, such as tritium. It is similar to the mechanics of converting sunlight into electricity in a solar panel.

Until now, betavoltaics has been unable to match solar-cell efficiency. The reason is simple: When the gas decays, its electrons shoot out in all directions. Many of them are lost.

Fauchet's team took the flat silicon surface, where the electrons are captured and converted to a current, and turned it into a three-dimensional surface by adding deep pits.

Great that the ideas are on the drawing boards now, some of the things we have heard about will take decades to inplement. But these batteries? Expect them sooner than later.

The manufacturing process is standard to the semiconductor industry, so no other technology breakthroughs are needed to bring the batteries to market. Still, don't expect anything on the store shelves for at least two years, Fauchet said. His team is now working to improve the manufacturing process, aiming for batteries many times more efficient than those announced today.

"If we are as successful as we think we may be, it will take less than five years before this technology is adopted," he said.

I look forward to seeing them on the market.

I wonder how much they'll cost?

Posted by Michael at May 15, 2005 12:30 AM