Beta Volt successfully developed civil atomic energy batteries
Beta Volt atomic energy batteries have been stable and self-powered for 50 years, without charging and maintenance. They have entered the pilot phase and will be mass-produced and put on the market. Beta Volt atomic energy batteries can meet the power supply of aerospace, AI equipment, medical devices, MEMS systems, advanced sensors, small drones and micro-robots in many scenarios with long battery life. This new energy innovation will help China gain a leading edge in the new round of AI technology revolution.
Beijing Beta Volt Xinneng Technology Co., Ltd. announced on January 8 that it has successfully developed a miniature atomic energy battery. The product combines nickel-63 nuclear isotope decay technology and China's first diamond semiconductor (4th generation semiconductor) module, successfully realizing the miniaturization, modularity and low cost of atomic energy batteries, and starting the process of civilization. This marks that China has achieved disruptive innovations in the two high-tech fields of atomic energy batteries and the fourth-generation diamond semiconductor at the same time, “far ahead” of European and American scientific research institutions and enterprises….moar pic1rel translated with Yandex
This Company Claims Its Nuclear Diamond Battery Will Run for 28,000 Years. Is It True, or Just a Hoax? Imagine: Just one battery could power your insulin pump or pacemaker for your entire life (with loads of time to spare). https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/green-tech/a35970222/radioactive-diamond-battery-will-run-for-28000-years/ BY CAROLINE DELBERTUPDATED: SEP 02, 2021 8:09 AM EST bookmarksSAVE ARTICLE diamond battery in black against a teal background with geometric shapes and a nuclear hazard symbol Photo Illustration by Alyse Markel/Photo Courtesy of NDB In less than two years, you might be able to buy a smartwatch powered with a nuclear diamond battery that will outlive you and your progeny for generations.
The potentially game-changing technology comes from the San Francisco-based startup Nano Diamond Battery (NDB), which lauds its namesake “high-power diamond-based alpha, beta, and neutron voltaic battery” for its ability to give devices “life-long and green energy.” Imagine: Just one battery could power your insulin pump or pacemaker for your entire life (with loads of time to spare). Or it could provide the juice for a space rover, collecting Mars regolith samples for decades without any human assistance.
Those are ambitious goals. So, could NDB’s bold claims actually become reality? Or is it a hoax?
What Is a Nuclear Diamond Battery? To build its Nano Diamond Battery, NDB uses layers of impossibly tiny, paneled nano diamonds (for context, one nanometer is one billionth of a meter). Diamonds have exceptional heat conductance, which makes them ideal for electronic devices. In fact, they are the best-known natural conductor of heat, according to a publication by the University of Houston’s College of Engineering—and are three to four times more effective than copper or silver.
Scientists cultivate these miniature diamonds using chemical vapor deposition, a process in which gases at extremely high temperatures force carbon to crystallize on a substrate material. That process, NDB admits, creates a cost bottleneck; Making the special diamonds is energy-intensive and expensive.
After all, they’re “artificially boron-doped diamonds,” explains Yury Gogotsi, director of the A.J. Drexel Nanomaterials Institute at Drexel University in Philadelphia. (Gogotsi has no affiliation with NDB.) That process produces diamonds with blue color and higher conductivity than the average diamond. True blue diamonds are naturally occurring on Earth, but they’re rarer and even more expensive than artificial blue diamonds.
Why Blue Diamonds? The diamonds in NDB’s battery have a beautiful blue hue, thanks to the trace amounts of boron contained in their carbon structure. These blue diamonds are artificial, but are reminiscent of true blue diamonds, which are some of the rarest gemstones on Earth. According to findings from an August 2018 study in Nature, they’re formed in Earth’s lower mantle, which is about 410 to 1,680 miles below the surface. As such, you can only find blue diamonds in three mines in the entire world, which helps explain their hefty price tag: roughly $15,700 for a 0.3-carat light blue diamond, and $75,000 for a 0.25-carat dark blue diamond.—Courtney Linder
Once NDB has sourced the nano diamonds, the company combines them with radioactive isotopes from nuclear waste. Specifically, they use radioactive isotopes of uranium and plutonium, “which probably come from radioactive power plants’ waste,” Gogotsi says.
From there, single-crystal diamonds—just a few square millimeters in size—move heat away from the radioactively decaying isotopes so quickly that the transaction actually generates electricity. “The decay sources deposit their energy onto the NDB transducer, which converts the kinetic energy of the incident radiation to electrical energy,” says Nima Golsharifi, CEO of NDB.
Are Nuclear Diamond Batteries Too Good To Be True? You’re probably wondering what the catch is. There’s a diamond battery out there that really uses nuclear waste, lasts thousands of years, and involves layers of only the most minuscule diamonds?
It’s slightly more complicated than that. Each battery cell will produce only a small amount of energy, for one thing, so scientists must combine the cells in huge numbers in order to regularly power large devices—raising the cost a great deal, along with increasing the complexity.
Golsharifi touts the tiny size of the Nano Diamond Battery cells as an advantage for scalability, though. “Take the battery for a wristwatch, for instance—it consumes around two microwatts, [so] a much smaller NDB cell would be sufficient,” he explains. “So if we need to power a different application, the number of stacked cells can be increased to meet the demand.”