nuclear battery

Beta batteries are nothing new, but they find only few applications. If you have a device that needs very little power but needs to run for many years untended, it may be a good option.

The Ni63 that powers it probably doesn't come cheap, so you need a really good reason to use one.

Jeroen Belleman

It is largely clueless marketing hype. Whilst the thing can generate a miniscule current for an incredibly long time it is a toy - and nothing more. Zamboni piles do much the same thing without any radioactivity.

There has been one ringing a bell in Oxford for nearly 200 years.

Thank both of you. I suspected it was bs, but coming from Tomshardware, I wasn't sure.

The diamond nuclear battery has been popping up a lot recently, maybe it's like solar roadways where companies take an old idea, spin it so it sounds amazing, and use this to get huge amounts of funding for research while, one presumes, knowing full well that they will fail to develop anything useful.

I gather the usual way to convert betas into usable voltage and current is to let them pass through a stack of large bandgap photo diodes. Still, you are correct that a lithium primary cell is easier.

Jeroen Belleman