These will be great in cell-phones. Everyone is always forgetting to keep their's charged. And instead of getting radiation tharapy to treat the tumor in your brain caused by cell phone RF, the radiation from the cell phone battery will take care of that. A win-win.

Zactly! Extra batteries require extra money and most people don't need them 95-99% of the time, so all they do is increase costs w/o providing much. A 100-mile EV w/ a normal used car, or even a rental budget, would probably be more cost effective for most people.

This is what you do. If EESTOR batteries are as cheap as they claim, then you constantly top off a battery bank at home. When your car comes back, then you can do a quick dump charge from pack to pack. Since we're talking about caps here, the only limitation is imposed by the cabling/charge electronics, not the batteries.

Meh, I'd be happy if they could put one in my laptop and make *that* last for years. Though there could be slight logistical problems if these things set off alarms at the airport, with all the business travellers having a heck of a time explaining themselves.

The energy density of nuclear batteries is great, perhaps 1000 times that of chemical batteries, but what about the power density? If you want to put them in a 100-horsepower car, you’ll need 74,600 watts of batteries. I couldn’t find any recent numbers after some searching, but I’ve seen numbers between 1 and 5 watts/pound of battery from NASA missions using Pu238. At those rates, you’d need an 8 to 40 ton battery to power a car. Assuming the battery designs have gotten 1000% more weight efficient in recent years, you’re still looking at adding a almost a ton of weight to a car design for the batteries.

Just to be picky. Are these really batteries or more probably, generators?

Batteries are merely an energy store, but these seem to be producing energy from an isotope decay. I suppose one could argue that the energy was charged eons ago and is now only being used. Conventions become topsy turvy when nuclear physics is involved.

On the other hand, does it really matter what they are called providing they do the job?

Anything beyond 220/240V is beyond consumer range, it's not really the size it's the voltage.

There are issues with exchanging the batteries too. For safety/hazard reasons hybrid/electric batteries are usually not put in easily-accessible locations, instead they are hidden behind the rear seats (Civic Hybrid), chassis/floorboards (Chevrolet Volt), or boot (Toyota Prius). It's not a click-remove-slide-back-in affair like with laptop batteries.

For illustration, Chevrolet Volt chassis showing battery pack location :

Toyota Prius showing original battery pack location in the boot :



Toyota Prius plug-in upgrade covering boot area :

And for good measure, the Civic Hybrid (2001-2005 model is shown, 2006-current model in similar location) :





It's going to be harder than it sounds to do swappable batteries for hybrid/plug-in/electric cars. They could always do it laptop-style and pop it off *under* the bottom, but a few scrapes from humps or whatnot and and it could turn into a short-circuit/fire hazard.

As unnecessary as pack swapping is in BEV's it's completely pointless in a hybrid. Project Better Place has already built and demonstrated a swappable pack that can be changed in about 2 minutes by a special machine, but I still don't think the added cost and complexity are worth it. A swappable EV would require extra batteries, plus complex swapping machines, which would raise the cost of that EV, making it even less practical.

"RTGs can be considered as a type of battery"

---from Mos's link.

.....and RTG's are not the only kind of nuclear battery technology. My personal favorite, under development now at Los Alamos, uses the same concept as solid state solar cells that convert solar radiation into electricity....but they would use new nano-tech to create solid state materials that will convert nuclear radiation directly into electricity......and also have a usable life span of many years.

Tiny ones could power cell phones or laptops for decades without a recharge, bigger ones or combinations of smaller ones could run cars, and even larger ones could power factories or universities.

Swappable EV does not require extra batteries. An EV with fixed batteries, will require sufficient range wherever you go. In a city with limited parking space 1 car will have to fulfill all your needs. e.g. 500 mile on a single charge. If I can swap battery packs I can make do with 2-300 mi. The replacement pack can be shared with other EVs. A car with 300 mi range can be lighter than a 500 mi version.

Yes it will require extra batteries. Since no one can predict how many vehicles will need to swap a pack at any given time every swap station would have to carry many extra packs. This means for every EV on the road a number of extra batteries would have to be built and stored at different locations "just in case" they were needed. This makes little sense since most of the time people would simply never need them. If occasional long range is an issue a rentable genset trailer, or renting an ICE, is a much more practical solution. Or pulling into a fast charge station. A 5-10 minute recharge after driving 200 miles would be a welcome break for most and technically feasible.