Nuclear Battery Practicality

Discussions focus on the feasibility, power output, energy harvesting potential, and applications of nuclear or betavoltaic batteries for low-power devices like IoT, with skepticism about scalability for meaningful energy production.

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Keywords

IT www.mit wikipedia.org blogspot.com BTC LOW thread.html ycombinator.com DOZENS MIC energy power electricity kwh low power nuclear battery wireless device solar

Sample Comments

mentalgear Mar 30, 2025 View on HN

how practical is this, eg how big would a device have to be to produce any meaningful energy?

hannob Jun 17, 2021 View on HN

The important sentence: "It won't generate power".It's all fine to do this as a research project. But this is not a technology that is going to solve our energy problems any time soon - and it certainly shouldn't distract from deploying the solutions that exist today, aka mostly wind+solar.

leptoniscool Dec 28, 2021 View on HN

I wonder why this isn't used to store power in a battery that's used for IoT devices?

candiddevmike Jun 29, 2023 View on HN

Can you harvest energy from this somehow?

basicplus2 Oct 24, 2019 View on HN

I wonder if this could be used for energy storage...

pfortuny Feb 10, 2021 View on HN

Which could be used for... heating? Lighting? Cooking? Cars? Something useful?

tzm Aug 13, 2013 View on HN

This is effectively a lightbulb that uses wireless energy.

fit2rule Jun 22, 2016 View on HN

Wait, isn't this all free energy, waiting to be harvested?

BurningFrog Oct 15, 2022 View on HN

What is this trivial energy storage tech I've never heard of?

gnabgib Jun 18, 2024 View on HN

Related competitor (mentioned):Nuclear battery produces power for 50 years without needing to charge (80 points, 5 months ago, 61 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38989690