The Oil Drum

WOW, if true that is AMAZING? If it works I can't see any reason why you couldn't stack them in a electric car?

Fuhgeddaboudit.

People have been fantasizing about beta-ray batteries of various sorts for decades, with minimal practical effect. I would even speculate that there might be a 1950s or 1960s Popular Science article on the subject. Tritium is used in small lights for remote airfields and for gunsights, but that's about it. It is, however, theoretically possible to make a tritium battery, which is more than can be said for the various perpetual motion scams.

But no jurisdiction is going to allow any ordinary consumer to own enough tritium to power a laptop for 30 years irrespective of how it's packaged. Even tiny lights containing a minute speck are illegal in many localities, as 'frivolous use' of radioactive material. In addition, you have to consider the destructive effect of even low energy beta radiation on semiconductor junctions, and the woeful inefficiency of a semiconductor junction in harvesting the collisional energy. In addition to that, you have to consider that there are no tritium mines - the stuff is in short supply and made using neutrons from nuclear reactors.

So there may be limited military uses, but anybody who thinks this will be in laptops on store shelves in two or three years is full of baloney. Indeed, as the notion of finite fossil fuel supplies takes wider hold throughout this wicked world, we shall suffocate under ever larger piles of baloney. One way of sorting this out, oftentimes, is to go through the motions of trying to buy engineering samples. For example, A123 will happily sell sample nanophosphate lithium batteries. They're real. But you can't order sample beta batteries, Steorn devices, or zero point energy sources. There's a reason for that.

Oh, and did I ever mention that too many reporters went into their field because it can be one of the most effortless ways to slide through college? So whenever you see a report of pie in the sky, take it with a grain of salt - or, better yet, the whole salt shaker. It might conceivably be true, but what are the odds? Especially when it's an anonymous web report with no one taking responsibility in a byline.

The battery has been known for over ten years. patent - http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1994sprt.nasa..373S

It provides micro/milliwatts of power.

A far cry from even a silver BB.

Light, nothing, it's got some BS in the details:

"Although betavoltaic batteries sound Nuclear they’re not, they’re neither use fission/fusion or chemical processes to produce energy and so (do not produce any radioactive or hazardous waste)."

First, the poor copyediting/writing to capitalize "Nuclear" and using "they're neither use" instead of "they neither use" show this isn't a top-shelf story or close to it.

Second, beta decay is one of the three main types of radioactive decay, so the author isn't quite correct. As for whether the process produces radioactive decay or not, I have no idea what radioactive waste it may or may not produce without knowing what parent radioactive element is being used to produce the beta particles.

Without having a lot more, a lot more, information, I would NOT use such a battery in a device such as a laptop computer that is in close contact with me.