Science actually making good batteries

[VCR_CAT]

And not just for storing energy, but for generating electricity.

 

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-3993314/A-diamond-battery-nuclear-waste-5-000-YEARS.html

 

The science is early, but this has the potential to be obscenely revolutionary.

 

So let's break it down: the idea is that it's a battery that generates, not stores, electricity over the course of its lifetime. The "battery" itself is nuclear waste stored inside of a diamond and it generates electricity. Power crystals.

 

"While the actual amount of carbon-14 in each battery has yet to be decided, one battery, containing 1g of carbon-14, would deliver 15 Joules per day, say the researchers. 

 

This is less than a standard alkaline AA battery.

 

These are designed for relatively short-term use with an energy storage rating of 700J/g."

 

"If operated continuously, this would run out in 24 hours. 

Carbon-14 has a half-life - the time it takes for its radioactivity to fade to half its initial potency - of 5,730 years."

 

See, if we can make this a more potent technology, it revolutionizes so much. Imagine a phone you never have to charge; electric cars that can always run and never need to fill up. Maybe we reach a point where nothing in a house needs to be plugged in; who knows.

 

In more practical terms, think of space flight and ion drives. Ion drives don't produce much thrust and rely on solar energy and batteries to operate. Solar energy still isn't terribly fantastic, even in space where the further away from a star you are the worse it becomes, and needing more panels means more batteries which means more mass which means more thrusters which means more batteries and it's just a big mess. Nevermind nuclear power in space considering how much of a nightmare it is trying to vent excess heat into a vacuum and how you're basically signing up to melt your own spaceship from the inside out; this would mean that the ion thrusters have a practically indefinite source of power to work off of. That's pretty neat.