No, this topic is not about energy density. It's about POWER DENSITY. You can actually easily calculate the theoretical maximum power for a particular isotope. For example, Carbon 14 has an isotopic POWER DENSITY (due to the natural radioactive decay) of 0.001305 Watts per gram. If you want to produce 1 Watt with this isotope and you can capture 20% of the radioactive power into electricity, your battery will have a weight of 1/(20%x0.001305) = approx. 4kg of carbon 14. But you need additional material to capture the beta radiation into electricity, so the weight is factors more and you will need to hire someone to carry your mobile phone battery hahaha. Unfortunately for this entire idea you need to use a highly radioactive isotope to get better power density. For example, the Voyager battery is using Plutonium 238 (power density of 0.57 Watts per gram) but you end up with an extremely expensive battery costing millions of Dollars and also being extremely dangerous. The Voyager battery MHW-RTG outputs 160 Watts of electricity out of 2400 Watts of PU238 generated heat with a weight of approx. 60kg. 160 Watts is same as 160/746=0.2 Horse Power. So for millions of Dollars and 60kg of weight, you get 0.2 Horse Power. So how many do you need of these to power an EV? You could consider using it for charging a standard EV battery of 100kWh. In such case you will need 100,000/160 = 625 hours (26 days) to charge the battery. And the car would be a total nightmare of nuclear radiation risks besides costing millions of Dollars in radioactive isotopes. I'll keep my Tesla 🙂

"AI is the wank-word of the decade" - Dave, you seriously made my day! I want that printed on a shirt! 🤣🤣🤣

"Don't believe it unless you can buy it on Digikey or Mouser" - words to live by at 14:00

Microwatts and powering a drone forever😂 With spinning blades with the speed of a clock 😊

A 50-year battery... for ants.

I hear "Mr Fusion" makes a portable reactor that makes in excess of 1.21 gigawatts. It's enough to easily drive a flux capacitor.

I just saw you get a shout out from The China Show! Several live commentators gave this channel good support.

I loved it when thay said "it's betavoltin time" and betavolted all over the place. Truly an energy moment of all time.

I was waiting for your video on this, more just to hear you rip on all journalists pushing out articles without any thought, I am not disappointed

For anyone wondering, the City Labs batteries START at $4-5,000 USD/battery. For a 12y tritium battery. Now, lets boost that by 10,000 times for a useful amount of consumer energy. Yeah. This tech has a ways to go, if they can even develop something that comes near a useful consumer product. The best thing I could see for this kind of technology, would be for medical devices. If the interference didn't reek havoc with a pacemaker (or the surrounding tissue) I can see the use for a 50-year batter. The technology is cool, but like Dave said, it ain't consumer grade and has a long way to go to get there (if it ever can).

There were nuclear batteries used to power pacemakers in the 70s (AFAIK they were not beta cells they were thermoelectric), including using Plutonium 238, this Plutonium is not fissile so can't be used in a reactor or bomb (for real more than 6 USA companies produced those devices). A few companies though produced pacemakers powered by Promethium 147 using beta cells. But they were a logistic nightmare: people dies the battery needed to be removed from the body, if family remembered to warn for this need in a moment of pain. The risk of a person being cremated without removing one of those was particularly fearsome. After the 80s Lithium batteries mostly put those out of use, but there are still people with those working in their chests. Those old materials were much more radioactive then Tritium and Nickel 63.

This attitude of 'fake it until you make it' is getting beyond a joke, now!

haha I just saw an ad for this on Insta tonight and thought to myself "humm.. wonder if there is a video on these on EEVblog" , couple of hours later, here is a video ! This is like VOD service ! Excellent timing ;D

I have one cell and a miniature 15V battery in my AVO MK8. The 15V battery is the original battery. It is over 50 years old. Seriously it still can be dialled to zero ohms and works perfectly. (Edit: Admittedly, I hardly use it, I just love looking at the thing..Said the vicar to the nun or vice versa).

Nickel-63 has a half-life of 100 years. So their 50 year lifetime is likely a mix of radiation fall off, and radiation damage to the semiconductor. Which kicks in first would be interesting to know. Power from RTGs in space probes is limited by damage more than the half life of the plutonium used.

The CityLabs one actually has more power: 2.4V at 52uA is 125 uW compared to Betavolts claimed 100uW... (which is only 33uA at the claimed 3V)

My HP-15C is due for its second set of batteries. I got it in 1989 I believe. It really does run on the sniff of an oily rag.

It's bad enough people are disposing of LiPo batteries in regular trash thanks to disposable vapes.. i dont even want to imagine the possibility of them disposing of nuclear ones!

Remember that size scales in all three dimensions. So, 10,000 times bigger than 15 mm is actually only about 300 mm. We are, of course assuming that everything else scales linearly, which is probably not the case.

I have a 43 year old Casio, but it's due a new set of batteries. The Casio solar one is maybe 35 years... and that still works.

Nice renderings. Nice renderings everywhere!

a timely reminder about the 176 year old battery that continues to ring a bell at oxford university.

Small isotope-batteries were used for pacemakers in the 1970 and 80s.

If it sounds too good to be true, it pretty much certainly is. Especially if it's from China.

Company has a half life, brilliant 👏. They are sizing these on new build houses in city's. Thanks Dave.

Please don't break open a smoke alarm and extract the radioactive source. It's possible but dangerous

When I saw this cropping up in the news I started hearing the headlines in your voice. :P

The marketing people have done a great job!

Love your videos. Gotta say though, as an entrepreneur your surgical dissections keep me up at night - in a good way, making our product and mission better - so thanks!

yeah one battery at this size is almost useless, but if you couple more of them you could theoretically power a backup system for 50 years. I think this would be valuable in hospitals and powerplants that need backup power and could have like a 10 ton battery in their basement and not care about it being portable. Or even on big trucks to deliver the power where needed in emergency situations.

It is a compelling idea. However, 50 years is hard to do because the radiation will degrade the diodes much more quickly.

I couldn't last quiet a minute, new viewer and last time viewer, I just got up your so pumped up like you have snorted some dope I can't really relax listening to this channel.

@11:00 If you're trying to think of potential use cases for devices over the span of decades, these technologies (though not Betavolt specifically) have great potential in healthcare. A pacemaker battery for example can consume less than 100uW per year. Battery life (and associated risks) are huge factors for implantable cardiac devices and other medical implants.

Wow this is amazing! With just 30,000 of these you could power a smartphone!

This will change everything. This time for sure.

I'm glad you covered this. I was about to watch a video but I canceled it because it was voiceover and I searched for someone known to me who covers it.

The main thing a lot of people seem to miss with these are that they aren’t very efficient and are always on, regardless of how much power you need from it, all extra will be converted into heat. So if it is only ~10 % efficient then a 1W battery will produce ~9 W of heat constantly and if you don’t use the 1 W output then that will be converted into heat too. If we take the example of powering something that uses 5 W at idle and 10 W at full load (like a small mobile device), if you don’t have a way to store the energy then it needs to be capable of outputting 10 W, given 10 % efficiency that means 90 W of heat at load and 95 W when idle just from the battery. Even just providing enough for idle with the ability to store energy for bursts means you need over 5 W output which means over 50 W heat generation and then you are limited in how much you can use it because you have to wait for it to be charged enough. Even given 100 % efficiency, unless your device uses a constant amount of power then it will still waste a lot as heat when the device doesn’t need the full power. If you take a smartphone as an example, with the screen off it uses very little power, with the screen on and when the phone is in use it uses significantly more which means these constant power output batteries are not a good option really as without energy storage (like a secondary lithium battery) the battery would need to be capable of providing enough power for the screen on full brightness, the speakers at full power, the phone at high load and the RF components at max power too but then when the phone is at idle, screen off, speakers off, etc, then all that power provided by the battery just gets converted into heat. Similarly with drones if the battery could provide enough power to fly then where does that power go when it has landed? Even with 50 % efficiency then the battery could easily be dissipating a few kilowatts of heat when flying and double that when landed for even a relatively small drone. The only real applications I see for this are where the generated heat isn’t an issue, like with very low power 100 uW device since 1 mW of heat isn’t hard to dissipate on a 15x15x5 mm metal case.

Chinese "nuclear battery" - Why do I expect what you'd actually get is a NiCad battery inside a box with "nuclear" stickers on the outside?

Robin: Atomic batteries to power. Turbines to speed. Batman: Roger. Ready to move out.

At least the idea is not bad and it might be useful in the future

Danke Dave!

I'd rather stick to the good old plutonium based RTGs…

As soon as I saw click-bait links showing up online recently, I knew you'd be covering it.

100 uWh is enough to register on a Cat-M or NB-IoT and exchange 5 or 6 TCP packets. So not useless. But regular batteries do the job too.

A one watt battery would be about 11,250 cubic centimeters. Not very portable...

This week I saw an advertisement on KZfaq for 'Seven Minute Abs'

My father passed away recently. Sorting through his possessions i found an old Fuji 35mm carmera that had an inbuilt NON user replaceable battery, i think it was supposed to last hundreds of rolls of film. I was shocked to discover it is still functional some 35ish YEARS later, drives the autowind motor no problem.

As I remember, these types of diodes suffer from radiation damage eventually. You can make them radiation hardened but that increases their size and cost.

I guess one minor point: You need 10,000 as much inside active stuff to make a 1Wh battery, but you don't need 10,000 as much shielding. You will need a bit more. But yes, a 1Wh nuclear battery is still going to be very big.

haha, love the vid. Thanks Dave.

you should change the channel name to EEVdejavu! :P

"Call me, when that actually happens" That's been my opinion on all the battery tech news that I keep seeing. The only major advance that I've read about in the last decade, that can actually be found in the market is the new design and form factor that Tesla came up with. Even then, I'm not sure if they implemented their design changes that supposedly improved thermal management.

Why yes, that's a hi-level beta source in my pocket, why do you ask?

The volume of the 100microwatt battery is 1.125 cm^3 Judging from their schematic a lot of this is the packaging, so we'll say 1cm^3 for the actual device. 10000cm^3=10l would be 1W. So power density of 0.1W/l EV battery capacity is about 45kWh, and their size is about 250l. So putting a second battery onto your EV made of betavolt stuff and letting it charge you the entire day will give you 240l*0.1W/l*24h=0.576kWh per day. Assuming you would empty and charge your EV daily this is about a 100 fold mismatch. Which is a significant mismatch, but not completely out of the ballpark of surmountableness.

I don't know, I gave them an A+ in new tech Startup BS-101. It felt like they were leading the reader, or potential investor into thinking that their new technology would have the ability to easily be scale-up or down to match & be compatible with a wide assortment of different consumer grade devices currently using older technology, but widely available battery types. Would be a miracle if that were true.

Even the lowly 9-volt battery fills a bigger niche. I have a BK Precision pocket multimeter that I've owned since the year 2000, and its only on its second battery.

The main application I can see for this is maybe if you can combine this with a super capacitor to power some very low power electronics that only needs to run for a few seconds a day, but everyday for several decades. But that super capacitor would need to retain power very well, so I'm not sure how well that's going to work (I'm not an electronics major)

it's always a joy to listen and watch your videos Dave! so informative, and entertaining 😊you are funny when you mock those "tech journalists" which seem to get excited by anything like a kid in a candy store and they seem not to feel the smell of... yuck... BS! 😛

Check out the nuclear generators that Russia used for it's lighthouses. Absolutely crazy. I don't remember the exact specs but they were around 4 cubic feet and generated something like 100 watts of electricity.

An isotope battery, portrayed as a terrifying technological threat from China.

peace be upon you sir

If we assume they can halve the space needed, their 1w battery would only take up 15 x 15 x 25 cm. Not really prohibitively massive. In fact, despite the size increase, it would be more useful than something that can't really power anything at all.

I have a small calculator from the 80s still working on orig batteries. Little credit card sized one. I have to warm it up in my hands now, if it is cold in the shop, before the "0" fades in.

I don't know how many times I tried to scroll down the pages you were showing. I was even tempted to click on some of the tabs.

Dave please get an ad blocker for your computer

15x15x5 mm for 100 uW, means 11.25 liter per watt, some space could be saved by having much less surface area for the volume. So, say, maybe roughly 5 liter per watt, or 0.2 watts per liter would be possible, with largely the same fundamental technique, if they were really big. Yeah, still niche use, and add the cost, and well, that's one reason we don't have 5-10 liter, 10-20 kg or so, 1 watt nuclear batteries already, even if just 1 watt for 50 years could be somewhat useful in more applications, even if the battery is huge.

This one I've seen on the web recently, I thought, can it be they finally did it? And then I came here and here you go

The 100 microwatt battery from city labs is $5,250 per battery. According to their site.

A 1 watt version even at a thousand times bigger could be great for things like remote sensors and things you embed in stuff. An application i can think of for these is tamper detection circuits in secure devices.

We know that the Chinese have ripped off someone else's IP to create this "new" battery....

Can it last 50 years? Depends on the half-life. What we need to consider is that nuclear decay is continuous so the initial rating at manufacture may be 100uW but after 50 years the output will be only a percentage of rated output and therefore may no longer ouput usable amounts of power.

I was waiting for this 😀

Hopped over from The China Show. Looks like just another version of the "Perpetual Motion Machine".

"My Density has brought me to you".. I mean, My Destiny.. LOL

I was looking forward to your video shattering my faithg on a nuclear future..It was already doubtful due to the insignificant power output.. so not much was lost. Thanks.

Hah, awesome. I think the NDB battery fueled by nuclear waste was the first one of your videos I saw. And as soon as I heard this & my co-worker was gushing over it, I remembered your video.

0:50 - and there it is folks, the real reason why this battery was developed.

The Hans Kammler battery!

If these things were cheaper, you could include them along side li-ion to trickle charge continuously. Lots of devices are only used rarely and self discharge is a major headache. I hope everybody everybody makes them. Even those tritium vials are hard to get in most of the world. But I'm mad, I think all houses should come with an rtg installed.

I have a Fluke meter that's been running on the same batteries for 25 years.

I heard about you from Winston and Matt at the China Show

Recently got an article about a lithium metal anode battery breakthrough that was supposedly able to have a much higher capacity with faster charging and longer cycle life (6000 cycles I think). If what I understood was correct, the design they had would make the batteries much safer than other LMA batteries and better for EVs as well as just general use. The tests were using a "stamp sized pouch cell version" of the battery and it retained 80% its capacity after 6000 charging cycles. They're currently working on a smartphone sized one. Hope it doesn't end up like the Galaxy Note 7.

Sounds like an advanced electret

I've been waiting for this

Here in germany, every "tech" magazine is reporting about this "disruptive new tech", too... It's exhausting, really...

That background image on their website of the little guy with the chip held by a crane, I'm pretty sure I've seen that image around 10 years ago, I'm surprised they didn't make their own image with AI lol.

I love how the titles of the articles were escalating with each passing title. If they had written like 10 more articles, they would be talking about time travel revolution thanks to the battery.

My rought estimate is a 1 watt version of this would have to be at least a cubic foot. I also wonder how long the diamond semiconductor will remain good enough for this purpose under exposure to the 87 keV eta rays the source material is emitting.

At 02:00 I see the DuraLeak™ bunny running for the dunny .. 😆

By the same token I can make a 2M^2 antenna to "harvest" the radio waves and get about 1-2mW of power from thin air, then sell it as the a breakthrough invention. Go free energy!

50 year battery, for when you really need to provide energy to a device that's broken.

One could derive more power by harnessing all that hot air

Don't break apart smoke alarms, kids.🙄

City labs sent me a pricing PDF sheet. The lowest powered model is 5,250 USD and the hightest 11,790 USD

Ni 63 that this battery uses has a half life of about 100 years, so the drop off during a 50 time period shouldn't be too bad, maybe 25%.

I see these as trickle charge secondary batteries, that charge primary batteries for low power and emergency devices. As for mass, any usable amount would need to be much bigger... I just want an RTG attached to a powerwall, that can passively charge tools and devices.

Now we just need to Go Old School, and work on a ELV Cpu.. 8088, 6502, Maybe Z-80...At least maybe a 4004..Well..??..

I even disagree they are new in 2016, the semiconductor and doping got better, but the first ones were in the 70s, some pacemakers used them back then.

a 1.35 v mercury battery replacement for old cameras would be nice.

The battery in my nintendo game kept my save info for 40 years, thats not too shabby