Teen Media Initiative

Are you tired of your phone or laptop dying after only hours of using it? Well, imagine a battery that could last for months without a single charge. Currently, in development is a battery that uses the radioactive decay of radioactive material and is almost 10 times more powerful then batteries used in mobile devices.

You’re probably thinking, radioactive material in my cell phone? No way!  But there are three types of rays emitted by radioactive substances: Alpha, Beta, and Gama. An alpha ray has the longest wavelength of the three, making it hard to penetrate solid objects.  Alpha partials can’t even penetrate a sheet of spiral notebook paper. Beta rays could easily penetrate a sheet of paper, but could not penetrate a 70-page spiral notebook. Gama rays are the most dangerous because they have the lowest wavelength of the three, making it easy to penetrate many things, including the human skin! Too much exposure from Gama particles causes damage at a cellular level, which can rewrite DNA in a cell, which may cause cancer.

So these batteries use Alpha and Beta radiation and converts it to an electrical current that can be used by your mobile device. And since the container is quite dense, the particles are unable to escape. It may be 10 years before they are sold on shelves for mobile devices.  Since they are made for constant power supply, they are more likely to be used in more important things like the spacecrafts or the medically implanted devices before they are used for commercial products like cell phones and watches and laptops and what not.  Even though they would be really helpful for laptops considering how long the battery lasts!  They are most likely going to be sold to the medical field to be used in implanted devices such as pacemakers, or in the Exploration field where it may be used for spacecrafts or deep sea probes, within the next 2 to 5 years. Some think that they may even replace the batteries in electric cars.

These batteries are currently being developed at the University of Missouri and among many names, are known as radioisotope batteries. As of now, the power is unmatched to that of solar technology because when something radioactively decays, the particles are sent in random directions making it a bit difficult to capture power given off by the magnetic field of the radiation. A very early prototype the size of a small car engine was said to give off 50 kilowatts, which could comfortably power a refrigerator for about a week.  Now the batteries have reached the size and thickness of a penny. Jae Kwon, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University said that the radioisotope battery can provide power density that is six orders of magnitude higher than chemical batteries. Which, in other words, provides no less then a million times more power then your average 9-volt battery.

Though the radioisotope battery is already small, Kwon and his team think that they can get it even smaller. To achieve this, Kwon requested the help of professor J. David Robertson, chemistry professor and associate director of the MU Research Reactor. Together, they hope to make improvements to the battery: making it smaller and more energy efficient. Kwon believes that the final product could be thinner then a human hair.