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.
