Most of the batteries in your life run on a clock you can see. Your phone wants a nightly top-up, your key fob picks the worst possible moment in a parking lot to die, and the smoke detector waits until 3am to start chirping. You charge them, you swap them, or you curse them. A nuclear materials company in upstate New York is pitching the exact opposite idea: a power cell you install once and never touch again, because it runs on the slow radioactive decay of an isotope with a hundred-year clock.<\/p>\n
On April 10, NRD, LLC, a Grand Island, New York firm that has spent decades making advanced nuclear materials, announced a solid-state battery<\/a> it calls the NBV series, built around nickel-63. The company says it can deliver continuous, maintenance-free power for more than a century with no recharging and no servicing. No wires, no swap-outs, no chirping. There is a catch, and it is a significant one. The amount of power involved is so small that calling this a “battery” in the way you normally mean the word is almost misleading. The physics behind the claim, though, is real, and it happens to be some of the most predictable physics in the entire field.<\/p>\n A normal battery stores energy in a chemical reaction. You drain it, you recharge it or throw it out, and eventually the chemistry wears down. The NBV does none of that. It is a betavoltaic device, which means it works a lot more like a solar cell than a Duracell. Instead of photons hitting a semiconductor junction and knocking electrons loose, you have beta particles, which are just electrons, flying off a decaying isotope and getting captured by a semiconductor to produce a current. There is no reaction to use up. The fuel simply decays at its own fixed pace, and the cell harvests a trickle of electricity the whole time.<\/p>\n The fuel here is nickel-63, a radioactive form of nickel that emits low-energy beta particles and decays into ordinary, stable copper. Those beta particles carry so little energy that they cannot punch through skin or even a thin metal casing, which is the whole reason researchers like the isotope for sealed power sources. It essentially shields itself. NRD’s cell is sealed in a solid-state package with no moving parts, which is exactly what you want in a device that is supposed to sit untouched for decades.<\/p>\n The specs are where the reality check starts. According to NRD’s own numbers, the NBV puts out between 5 and 500 nanowatts, at an open-circuit voltage of 1.0 to 20.0 volts and a nominal current of 7.5 to 33 nanoamps. The whole thing fits in a package measuring 20 by 20 by 12 millimeters. That is roughly the footprint of a quarter, if a good deal chunkier, and NRD says the performance and packaging can be configured depending on what you are bolting it into.<\/p>\n The century-long lifespan sounds like the kind of round number a press release invents, but it is not. It falls almost directly out of nickel-63’s half-life of roughly 101 years<\/a>. Half-life is the time it takes for half the radioactive atoms to decay, and because that rate is one of the best-characterized constants in nuclear physics, you can model the power output decades into the future with real confidence. If you know exactly how fast the fuel depletes, you know exactly how the battery fades.<\/p>\n Here is the part worth getting right. The NBV does not run for 100 years and then drop dead. After a century, roughly half the nickel-63 is still there, so the cell is putting out something close to half of what it started with, and it keeps trickling along after that. The “100 years” figure is really a statement about how much output decline you are willing to tolerate before you stop calling it useful. That is also why NRD can claim a century while China’s Betavolt, using the same isotope, advertised only 50 years for its cell. Same fuel, same clock, different threshold for “still good enough.” The number depends on where you draw the line, not on the nickel suddenly giving up.<\/p>\n This is the part that deflates most of the breathless coverage. Five hundred nanowatts is half of one millionth of a watt. To put that in terms an automotive audience will feel in their bones: a single EV battery pack stores tens of thousands of watt-hours, a phone charger pushes several watts, and even a dim indicator LED on your dashboard wants somewhere in the tens of milliwatts, which is already tens of thousands of times more than this cell’s peak. The NBV cannot run an LED continuously, let alone a motor. When a University of Florida materials scientist looked at Betavolt’s similar cell, he told Live Science<\/a> it produced about 0.01% of what a smartphone needs.<\/p>\n The confusing thing is that nickel-63 is not low on energy. Gram for gram, an optimized betavoltaic actually packs more total energy than a typical chemical cell. The catch is that it releases that energy on the isotope’s schedule, which is glacial. Think of it less like a battery and more like a faucet stuck on the slowest possible drip. There is a lot of water in the tank, but you are getting it one drop at a time for a hundred years. That is useless for anything that needs a gulp of power, and perfect for anything that needs a whisper of it, forever.<\/p>\n If “a nuclear battery the size of a coin” rings a bell, that is because the headline already happened. In January 2024, the Beijing startup Betavolt unveiled its BV100, a nickel-63 cell sandwiched between diamond semiconductors that measured 15 by 15 by 5 millimeters<\/a> and pumped out 100 microwatts at 3 volts. That cell really is smaller than a coin, and it set off a wave of “charge your phone once a century” stories. NRD’s NBV is a different animal: it tops out at 500 nanowatts, roughly 200 times less peak power than the BV100, in exchange for that longer claimed life.<\/p>\n Then there is the diamond-battery work built from nuclear waste<\/a>, which sometimes gets lumped in with all of this. Those projects chase carbon-14, an isotope with a half-life of about 5,730 years, embedded in a man-made diamond. That is why those headlines promise power for thousands of years instead of one century. It is a different isotope on a vastly slower clock, aimed at a different problem. The simple way to keep it straight: the lifespan you are promised is basically the half-life of whatever is inside. Nickel-63 buys you about a hundred years. Carbon-14 buys you a few thousand.<\/p>\n Nuclear batteries themselves are ancient by tech standards. The radioisotope generators NASA flies<\/a> on Voyager and the Mars rovers have run on plutonium-238 since the 1970s, and Voyager’s units are still feeding the spacecraft after roughly 48 years in interstellar space. Those are a fundamentally different machine, though, and it is worth not blurring the two. An RTG converts the heat from decay into electricity using thermocouples and puts out hundreds of watts. A betavoltaic skips the heat step and turns the beta particles straight into current at the nanowatt level. Same general family, completely different scale and mechanism. NRD, as it happens, sits squarely in that lineage: the company makes RTG fuels and has produced more than 750 million americium-based smoke detector elements over the years. Its real edge is not inventing betavoltaics, which it did not, but being a licensed outfit that can actually handle the materials at scale. COO Kevin Heffler framed the launch as turning the company’s “decades of regulated nuclear materials expertise” into a product.<\/p>\n Three “nuclear batteries,” three scales: nanowatts to watts, one isotope swap, two completely different conversion methods.<\/p>\n Once you stop expecting it to charge anything you own, the NBV starts to make sense. NRD is aiming it at jobs defined by one common feature: a human physically cannot get to the thing to change a battery, or it would cost a fortune to try. The company’s list runs through industrial condition monitoring, data logging, remote environmental sensors, security systems, long-duration health monitors, and what it calls keep-alive power for AI-driven autonomous and robotic systems, the kind of tiny always-on current that keeps a chip’s memory and clock alive even when everything else is dormant.<\/p>\n The economics are the actual pitch. A sensor sitting on the seabed, inside a sealed industrial machine, or on a remote mountaintop might cost a few hundred dollars, but the mission to send a technician out to swap its battery can cost far more than the sensor itself. If the power source simply never needs swapping, projects that were too expensive or too physically impossible to maintain suddenly pencil out. That same logic is showing up all over the nuclear world right now, from tech firms wiring data centers straight to nuclear reactors<\/a> to feed AI, down to reactors so large they need the world’s biggest crane to assemble<\/a>. The NBV is the opposite end of that spectrum: not a giant heat engine, just a sealed chip quietly running on physics.<\/p>\n For now, the honest answer is that a lot is still unverified. NRD has not published pricing, large-scale deployment timelines, or commercial availability, and as Interesting Engineering<\/a> pointed out, the real-world lifespan depends on efficiency, shielding, and integration details that no independent lab has confirmed yet. A 100-year warranty is also, by definition, a claim nobody alive can fully check. What is not in dispute is the chemistry. Nickel-63 will keep decaying on schedule whether anyone is watching or not, and that steady, boring reliability is the entire product. This was never going to be the thing in your phone. It is the thing in the buoy 3,000 feet down, still sending data long after the boat that dropped it there has been scrapped.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Most of the batteries in your life run on a clock you can see. Your phone wants a nightly top-up, … <\/p>\nThis Cell Runs on Decay, Not Chemistry<\/h2>\n
Why 100 Years Is the Half-Life, Not a Marketing Number<\/h2>\n
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The Coin-Sized Nuclear Battery Isn’t New, and Neither Is the Idea<\/h2>\n
Where a Battery That Outlives the Device Actually Earns Its Keep<\/h2>\n