This is wild; the battery would outlive the electronics it’s powering in almost all cases.
The output is incredibly tiny, but I wonder if it could be used to trickle-charge a higher-output battery for use in electronics that only need to be used infrequently for short durations.
That was my immediate thought too. Hook it to a super capacitor. The only problem is the self discharge is probably higher than what the nuclear cell can feed.
That’s a good point; it becomes less economical if you need multiple of these cells just to counteract the self-discharge. Even so, it’s really just a demo of the technology; they do mention they expect to have a 1 watt model later this year.
This is wild; the battery would outlive the electronics it’s powering in almost all cases.
The output is incredibly tiny, but I wonder if it could be used to trickle-charge a higher-output battery for use in electronics that only need to be used infrequently for short durations.
It’s becoming quite rare to change the CR2032 on a PC motherboard these days. Even those tend to outlive the hardware.
That was my immediate thought too. Hook it to a super capacitor. The only problem is the self discharge is probably higher than what the nuclear cell can feed.
That’s a good point; it becomes less economical if you need multiple of these cells just to counteract the self-discharge. Even so, it’s really just a demo of the technology; they do mention they expect to have a 1 watt model later this year.