Scientists Just Built a Battery That Never Needs Charging

[NNadir]

4. These types of devices have operated for decades.

Last edited Thu Mar 27, 2025, 10:25 AM - Edit history (1)

Perhaps one of the most famous is the RTGs on the two Voyager spacecrafts launched in the late 1970s and still going.

The Soviets powered lighthouses on the Arctic ocean with beta RTGs ⁹⁰Sr in the 1950s.

I often muse to myself if the used fuel rods at Fukushima has been stored in a thermoelectric device rather than a cooling pool, those reactors would have probably survived the tsunami.

Such an approach suggests itself for the use of ²⁴⁴Cm that will inevitably be available in a continuous actinide recycling program of the world is to be saved. This alpha emitting isotope has a thermal output of just shy of 3 watts per gram.

The problem with this is that nuclear energy has a very high energy to mass ratio which accounts for its superior environmental advantages which no other energy source can match. There is, at any power level, a maximum amount that can accumulate before reaching secular equibrium at which it is decaying as fast as it forms which is reached asymmtotically. This is governed by the Bateman equation, a differential equation the governs the composition of nuclear fuels.