long lasting battery

Oh never mind, a bit of Googling shows that one might be a scam...

Try this one:

I was trying to get more information on Technetium-99 as a chemical process catalyst (it's a really good catalyst!), and in my web wanderings, I came across betavoltaic batteries...

Michael

Sounds fishy to me, where do the neutrons come from?

from the tritium nucleus: 2 neutrons, 1 proton

At the current you will be geting, it won't matter.

Beta batteries have been around since the 1950's. The original ones used a metallic beta emitter that drove betas through vacuum into a metal collector plate, usually a coaxial structure. Output was nA to uA at something like 100KV, so they needed an exotic vacuum-tube inverter to get any useful power.

Tritium is expensive and I doubt you can get much power from a semiconductor whacked (and damaged?) by betas. Enough to power a laptop would be fabulously expensive and dangerous.

The "store shelves in about 2 to 3 years" is absurd.

Tritium exit lights are available commercially.

You can buy cool tritium light sticks in the UK, but they're illegal to import here.

John

Really? I didn't know that.

The ones sold for fishing floats became common in the mid 70's. These days a lot of them are chemically bound into plastic.

I thought I had seen adverts for mens watches with the tritium gas light luminescence technology in Scientific American.

Regards, Martin Brown