This sounds like a fantastic development. Now it's just a question of price and durability.


Note that this is not a problem with the battery, just with the fact that standard household outlets don't provide enough energy to fuel a car. We'll need bigger power outlets if we're going to use improved batteries.

A "standard" home outlet is 120 volts and 15 amps, but most homes have 240 volt 50 amps capability. Besides, how often would someone actually need to do a complete charge from zero on a 500 mile battery? Almost never.

It's more a matter of convenience and charging time, basically how long you want to leave it plugged in until you get fed up of the whole process. Remember that not everyone lives in houses with drive-in garages. Over in Singapore, we are 80% apartment-type public housing where the cars are parked in multi-storey carparks for the most part.

Which is why they're trying to standardize on 440V for outdoor charging outlets. Couple that with improved battery tech and we'll see if they can bring down the timing from "overnight" to a much more reasonable 15-30 minutes, maybe much less if you don't really need a full charge for 150-, 200-, or 500-miles whatever the case may be.

Researchers unveil new kinds of nuclear batteries that last for hundreds of years

Nuclear batteries are a tiny black box with two wires carrying current---plug in and power comes out for hundreds of years

Nuclear radiation is transformed directly into electricity in these batteries.

I was just about to post this.

Indeed it's very impressive and could be the solution for all our battery problems but I'm afraid we don't have enough raw materials to run all cars etc on them. And if we do we'd probably have a peak radioisotopes within no time...

The 440 V is for overnight charging. You need really big charging stations to reduce the time below 1 hr. This is not an option at home. It'd be less expensive to exchange batteries (and those will cost already more than the rest of the car).

They either produce nearly no power at all, or they are detectibly radioactive.

One mustn't confuse power and energy. Power is energy per unit time. Perhaps there is a lot of energy in them, but if it comes out over hundreds of years, their power would be tiny.

Tesla Roadster's 240 mile pack can recharge in 3.5 hrs at 230 volts, why do you think you'd need 440 volts to charge a 500 mile pack overnight? Obviously it can be done at 230 volts in less than 8 hours. And again, with a 500 mile pack how often do you think you'll need a full charge? Fast charging, if necessary, will be done at fast charge stations, most charging will be done at home overnight, or at work. Battery swapping is not practical and not necessary. Fact is no one needs a 500 mile range anyway. Why pay for that much battery and drag it around with you when you need less than 100 mile range every day?

Indeed the article explains that they are for use in micro or nano scale devices, which implies they need only produce milliwatts of power at most.

Personally I always wanted one of those Pu-238 cells they used on the Lunar missions and on deep space probes, hook that up to an electric car and it will be trickle charging the conventional batteries all the time. Trade the car in after 15 years and switch the cell to your new electric car because it is still good for another 30.

Put one of these in your electric car:



I never knew Pu 238 required so little shielding...

I just put in a 230V oven range and had to run 10 gauge wire from the box (30amp)... Nothing to it. Just the wire is very expensive and the fuse was almost 20 bucks because my break box uses smaller type.

Why not link scale up the nuclear batteries a bit and then link hundreds to thousands of the little nuclear batteries together to power an electric car for hundreds of years without any need to recharge, similar to the use of multiple small batteries, i.e. li-ion computer batteries, in the Tesla Roadster?

The use of nuclear batteries could completely solve the battery problem for electric cars. No more issues with recharging or costly battery replacement after a few years......the batteries would last for centuries.

One source of more radioactive material for the batteries would be all the nuclear waste that has been accumulating for decades....wouldn't it be nice to design nuclear batteries that could run on nuclear power plant waste?

And if we need more nuclear waste for nuclear batteries, well, we would just build more nukes for electricity. No CO2 and, as a bonus, nuclear waste that can be used to power nuclear battery cars.

That's one of the things that makes it so dangerous on the black market - it could be carried in someone's pocket in a plastic bag. Unlike say cobalt or americium.

Those are the ones I was talking about above, and as alpha emitters they are only 'slightly' radioactive, the energy you get from them is due to decay heat. They are made of a metallic poison, but so are lead acid and cadmium-nickle batteries. Better yet because they would be here with you changing out the thermocouple when it degrades would be an easy task.

Cobalt is a common enough material and Americium like you find in a smoke detector is not highly radioactive. I wouldn't recommend carrying Pu-238 in your pocket given that it gets very warm, actually hot in larger quantities. Bad for the gonads.