Batteries that last for 6000 years (or more)

Being the sort of chap that spends most of his time a long way behind the current news, I have only recently encountered Diamond Batteries. Annoyingly, I first encountered the topic on Facebook in a post that, surprisingly for Facebook, was only slightly apocryphal.



Electricity is essentially the movement of electrons and batteries are essentially a chemical reaction that encourages electrons to move. It's actually a bit more complicated, but I can tell from the way you're rolling your eyes that I'd best keep moving.

Batteries are a source of electricity. They're actually voltaic cells, but Benjamin Franklin put a bunch of them together and called them a 'battery of voltaic cells'. Eventually the rest of us just called them batteries and powered up the ghetto blaster.

The most common batteries these days are lead-acid batteries that are used to start cars. These batteries are actually pretty inefficient in a general sense, but they are capable of producing a relatively high current that allows you to start your car without turning a crank handle. That means that your chances of breaking your thumb are dramatically decreased and that's probably a good thing.

So diamond batteries are what's called a "Beta Voltaic Device". That means that instead of using a chemical reaction to encourage those pesky electrons to move about, they use radioactive decay. There are three types of radiation, called alpha, beta and gamma radiation. They are called that because it sounds more complicated and scientists can pretend that it's hard.

Beta radiation, the one we're interested in, is radiation that consists of electrons.

Eh? Hello! Electrons are the things we want to get to move about. Beta radiation is electrons already moving about. That's handy.

So why are they called diamond batteries? Well that's because it sounds sexy and scientists have been desperate to sound sexy since Newton called it gravity with the sole intention of making lame jokes about levity. The connection with diamonds is tenuous at best. The power source is Carbon14, a radioactive substance that emits beta particles. There is a particular type of Carbon14 that shares many of the properties of diamonds (I'm sure you already know that diamonds are made from carbon) and so you can imagine a group of scientists sitting around going "If we call this Carbon14 beta-voltaic cells, we're never going to get laid." Hence diamond batteries.

What's so special about diamond batteries? Well I'm glad you asked. The main reason they're cool is that they last a long time. Like a really long time. A Carbon14 battery will lose about half its power after nearly 6000 years. Yep, six thousand.

The downside is that they don't produce a whole lot of electricity and they're stupidly expensive to make right now, but tech prices drop fairly rapidly. For example in 1990 storage of a gigabyte of data cost about $10,000.00 and today it costs about $0.033, I'd say we can reasonably expect the price of diamond batteries to come down.

One of the biggest impediments to battery powered cars right now is 'range anxiety'. The cars tend to take a while to recharge and people therefore worry about travelling too far with them. A battery that lasts 6000 years or more might change that.