A tiny nuclear battery can reportedly run a device for decades on nickel-63

A class of power cell that draws its energy from radioactive decay rather than a chemical reaction has moved from laboratory curiosity toward commercial release, with at least one manufacturer claiming a service life measured in decades rather than years. The devices are built around nickel-63, a radioactive isotope whose slow, predictable decay lets a sealed cell trickle out a minuscule but steady current without ever being recharged.

These are known as betavoltaic batteries, and they are not designed to start a car or run a laptop. Their appeal lies in a very different place: applications where a device must operate untouched for a human lifetime, in locations where swapping a battery would be difficult, dangerous, or impossible.

How a nickel-63 betavoltaic cell produces current

A betavoltaic battery works by converting the flow of electrons released during radioactive decay directly into electricity, using a semiconductor much like the one inside a solar panel. Instead of absorbing photons of light, the semiconductor absorbs beta particles, the high-energy electrons thrown off as an unstable isotope decays. As those particles strike the semiconductor, they knock loose charge carriers that can be collected as a small electric current. According to Nuclear Engineering International, the concept has drawn particular interest for spacecraft and other autonomous systems where sunlight or refueling cannot be relied upon.

Nickel-63 is a favored fuel for this design because it emits only beta radiation, which is comparatively easy to contain. The particles it releases can be stopped by a thin layer of metal or plastic, so a properly sealed cell does not require the heavy shielding associated with more penetrating forms of radiation. That containment is central to the safety claims made for the technology.

What the manufacturer’s numbers actually describe

The company behind the recent announcement, a New York firm, has described a solid-state cell it says is engineered for continuous, maintenance-free operation across a span that could exceed a century, as reported by World Nuclear News. The output figures underline how modest the power really is: the cell is rated in the range of a few nanowatts up to roughly 500 nanowatts, with voltages from about one volt to twenty volts, all packed into a module a couple of centimeters across.

A nanowatt is a billionth of a watt. Numbers that small rule out any consumer gadget that needs meaningful energy, but they are well matched to ultra-low-power microelectronics, memory-backup circuits, and sensors that must stay awake for years while drawing almost nothing.

Why the century-long claim rests on the isotope’s half-life

The headline durability figure is tied to a physical constant rather than to engineering optimism. Nickel-63 has a half-life of about 100 years, meaning half of its atoms will have decayed after roughly a century. Because a betavoltaic cell’s output scales with the rate of decay, the current it delivers falls only gradually over that span, which is why makers describe usable operation across 50 to 100 years.

That framing comes with an important caveat: a half-life describes how the fuel behaves, not how the semiconductor, packaging, and electrical connections will hold up under decades of continuous bombardment and thermal cycling. Independent, long-duration testing of a complete commercial cell is what would confirm the marketing figures, and prototypes of the general design have existed since the mid-2010s without such power cells becoming common.

Where decades-long micro-power would matter

The natural markets for a battery like this are places where maintenance is the real cost. Implanted medical devices such as pacemakers, remote environmental sensors, spacecraft instruments, and industrial monitoring nodes buried inside sealed equipment all share a common problem: the power source may need to outlive easy access to it. A cell that never needs charging and degrades on a hundred-year clock changes the calculus for those uses.

Cost remains a constraint. Radioactive nickel-63 is expensive to produce, with recent estimates placing the price of the isotope in the thousands of dollars per gram, which helps explain why the technology has stayed confined to niche, high-value applications rather than spreading into everyday electronics.

How to read claims about “nuclear batteries”

The term nuclear battery invites comparisons to reactors, but the physics is closer to a solar cell fed by radioactive decay than to fission. No chain reaction takes place, no steam is produced, and the total energy involved is tiny. The genuine breakthrough, if the durability figures hold up under independent scrutiny, is not raw power but endurance: a sealed source of trickle current that can plausibly outlast the device it powers, which is precisely the quality that separates a betavoltaic cell from the rechargeable batteries that dominate modern electronics.

Betavoltaics versus the batteries in everyday use

It helps to place the technology on the spectrum of power sources. A lithium-ion cell stores a large amount of energy and releases it quickly, which is why it can run a phone for a day but is exhausted within a few years of charge cycles. A betavoltaic cell does the opposite: it holds very little energy at any instant but keeps delivering that trickle for generations, immune to the charge-cycle wear that degrades chemical batteries. The two are not competitors so much as answers to different questions, one built for bursts of power and the other for endurance. That framing is the most useful way to read announcements about nickel-63 cells, which promise not more energy but a far longer, steadier supply of a very small amount.

This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Morning Overview editors prior to publication.

More from Morning Overview