Atomic batteries for consumer electronics?

Nuclear batteries would be perfect if it weren't for these issues

Shephard advises there are some minor disadvantages. "Due to government regulations, use of a laptop powered by XCell-N is prohibited in airports, government offices, schools, hospitals, public transport, hotels, residential areas or within 12 miles of food preparation areas.". XCell-N also weighs substantially more than a regular laptop battery, coming in at 7 kilograms (15.4 lbs).

While Shephard says they are committed to safety, he does not recommend close exposure to an XCell-N powered laptop for more than 20 minutes a day.

Fix all these and we'd be golden! ;)
 
I think you'd have better luck if you started with vehicle power rather than laptop batteries. Weight and radiation safety would be less of a deal-breaker. I read a proposal for a radiopolonium-powered plane from the late 40s - it was an attempt to get the advantages of a nuclear-powered airplane without the disadvantage of heavy shielding. (Radiopolonium is a mostly pure alpha emitter, so shielding it is a lot easier than a nuclear reactor.) Maybe you could even have the infamous Ford Nucleon, with an RTG instead of a reactor.

However, getting enough radioisotopes would be a serious issue. For the radiopolonium plane, they estimated you'd need one medium-sized nuclear reactor doing nuclear transmutation per aircraft. The ratio of radioisotope power to reactor thermal power was about 1:100. Possibly you could find a better isotope or cheaper neutron source, I don't know, but that struck me as kind of a problem.
 

Perkeo

Banned
All the said issues are solved if we use a radioisotope with low-energy alpha or beta decay and little or no gamma radiation, like e.g. tritium or 145Pm and no gamma-radiating impurities, so AFAIK it is more a question of cost than of feasability.
 
I think you'd have better luck if you started with vehicle power rather than laptop batteries. Weight and radiation safety would be less of a deal-breaker.
...
Maybe you could even have the infamous Ford Nucleon, with an RTG instead of a reactor.

Rather than cars, let's start with heavier vehicles - trains, if we want to stay on land, but merchant shipping is probably a better bet and if I recall correctly there was at least one nuclear-powered merchant ship in the 1960s. That'll give room/weight for less efficient designs, and give us somewhere to start development. Exactly why we want nuclear-powered trains in the first place is left as an exercise for the reader...
 
The idea of nuclear batteries, betavoltaics and nuclear thermo-electric generator is a nice one but I think that a lot more research is needed on the subject before we can think about it for sure. Very little research has been done on these potential applications of nuclear waste to date. It took nearly half a century to semi-cheap solar cells to become available, it would take at least as long for nuclear batteries. Especially in the light of the fact that we don't have photosynthesis to inspire us.

I would also take the first link given about this XCell-N with a pinch of salt since very little information is available on it in the Internet, especially on mainstream scientific publications.
 
The modern societal phobia against anything with 'radiation' or 'radioactive' in the title means you need a PoD in the first half of this century.

In short, you need a culture that is informed enough about radiation that it realizes that the TSA is giving them a higher risk of cancer than the combined effects of every nuclear power plant in the country.

Sadly, I have no idea how one might achieve that with a plausible PoD.
 
Nuclear batteries were once used for pacemakers, but no longer.

They actually have some disadvantages:

Power output is constant, even when there is no load on the battery at all. Since the battery has to be big enough to meet its peak demand, a lot of the stored energy will be wasted. Also, the batteries have no real shelf life as such - they start draining as soon as they are made.

Power output drops over time. The battery has to be designed to meet peak load throughout its service life, so its initial output will be much higher than is usable. When the battery is no longer capable of meeting peak demand, it still has a lot of energy left in it.

Because of these factors, only a small fraction of the stored energy can usually be employed.

Converting radiation into usable energy entails more bulk and weight, components that can fail, and a loss of energy in the conversion.

Nuclear batteries cannot easily be recharged.

At the end of its service life, the battery must be disposed of or recycled. In many (not all) cases it is possible to recover the balance of the radioisotope and use it in a fresh battery. This isn't something you can do in your garage, however.

Not just anyone can be trusted to have a nuke battery, especially a large one. A strontium-90 battery will still put out a significant fraction of its original radiation a century after it is made. Such devices need to be tracked for a long time.

A large nuclear battery (or many small ones) can be very dangerous if it falls into ignorant, let alone malicious, hands.

Shielding is not usually an issue. There are isotopes available which require negligible shielding. However, they must be adequately packaged to resist damage. You don't want one of these things cracking when you drop it.

Nuke batteries generally have quite poor power-to-weight ratio, because power conversion is inefficient and packaging is heavy.

The main advantage of nuclear batteries is that they can serve for a long time without recharging (or any kind of maintenance). They are mostly used for providing power in remote places like spacecraft, weather stations or lighthouses.
 
Top