thoughts:
- 100 microwatts is a tiny amount of power but it's within an order of magnitude of the power consumption of e.g. those little item-tracking BLE tags; they're also working on a 1W version that they hope to release next year, and that's Actual power density.
- if you integrate the rated power over its entire lifespan, it works out to 43 watt-hours in what looks like about a 20x20x5mm box. that's a huge amount of energy, the only downside is that you can only take it out at about 0.0000007C.
- moving from secondary batteries to primary batteries is ordinarily not the kind of thing I would be thrilled about, but "50-year battery life" has a way of tempering my displeasure.
- the use of radiovoltaics turns power management on its head in a weird way -- nuclear physics mandates that that energy is dissipated either way, and you get the choice of whether to extract useful work from it or not. are we going to start having portable devices that contribute to public grid computing in the background because it's better than generating waste heat?
- hoping this doesn't create a billion tiny Goiânia accidents. using beta decay reduces the risk a lot but it's still definitely not zero.
The thing about a battery with such a long duration and such low power output is that there's kind of three applications I can see:
- Medical devices, specifically implants, where they are extremely costly and must not fail and also getting in to swap a battery is challenging
- IoT devices that are either...
- very remote, like you really don't want to have to send someone to swap the battery with any regularity
- very disposable, such that things like 'a charging port' become an untenable cost
That last category is one where things get SUPER fun. Having thousands and thousands of cheap ubiquitous little RF tags and sensors with radiovoltaic batteries hanging around inside them? TONS of fun. More fun than we can handle.
(in reality I'm very skeptical of this type of cell for small IoT applications because I can't imagine you can make them cheap enough; harvesting energy from the environment is almost certainly a better way. if you only need a sub-watt amount of power you can probably just drink from the ambient RF or sip kinetic energy like a self-winding watch...)
