A tiny radioactive battery could keep your future phone running for 50 years

L4sBot@lemmy.worldmod to Technology@lemmy.world – 216 points –
A tiny radioactive battery could keep your future phone running for 50 years
techradar.com

A tiny radioactive battery could keep your future phone running for 50 years::A glowing horizon for phones

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Nickel-63 is pretty safe as radioactive elements go. It's proposed as an energy source for pacemakers.

Standford says 0.1mm of plastic will absorb all emissions.

At this moment, 1 gram of radioactive Nickel-63 costs around 4,000 USD. Nickel-63 isotope does not occur in nature, it is obtained by irradiating Nickel-62 inside a nuclear reactor.

The world needs breeder reactors anyways, build out a lot of gen 4 plants and make Nickle-63 to boot.

What happens when the casing get punctured? When you mass produce these devices these things will happen.

Probably the same as with tritium lumes. Only dangerous if you swallow the unshielded nickel.

So literal death sentence, got it.

I mean so is drinking a gallon of bleach. Fortunately, there's a pretty simple preventative measure for both:

Don't do it?

What gave you the idea that swallowing a small amount of mildly radioactive material is fatal?

Man, I figured the joke was obvious but I guess not.

"tiny amount of radioactive material whose radiation stopped by thin plastics is a literal death sentence" is, I thought, pretty clear hyperbole.

A lot of people are really irrationally afraid of anything involving radiation. I mistook you for one of them.

No worries. Glow it up, let's get some extreme energy density up in this bitch. I went for nuke in the old days where I enlisted in the military.

I have a healthy respect for radiation. That's why I leave handling the good stuff to the professionals.

I've actually got some small isotope samples in a lockbox from an old highschool demonstration lab for Geiger counters. No Geiger counter though yet. I haven't even opened it since I got it to check the contents were intact.

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Surely the battery itself would have sufficient protection on top of the devices chassis offering protection.

I can't say a Lithium Ion battery leaking in the body would bode very either.

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