This diamond battery lasts thousands of years and could revolutionize everything from space travel to patients with heart problems

If we want to banish fossil fuels forever, which are doing so much damage to the planet, we not only have to produce electricity with renewable energies. You also have to store it. A new diamond battery has a life cycle of thousands of years, and it also generates electricity.

Current lithium batteries are cheap to produce, and offer a reasonable recharge cycle. But They only last 20 years. For a mobile phone or a laptop it is more than enough, but it falls short if we talk about batteries that are used in the human body, space, or power plants.

Scientists and engineers from the University of Bristol and the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority (UKAEA), have manufactured the first diamond battery, based on Carbon 14. It can self-generate energy for thousands of years.

This is how the diamond battery works that lasts almost 6,000 years

The radioactive isotope Carbon-14 It is well known, because it is used to date objects and fossils in archaeology.

All organic materials have Carbon-14, an isotope that has the peculiarity that it disintegrates at the same rate for 5,700 years, releasing beta radiation. By measuring the level of Carbon-14 decay in a fossil or any organic material, its age can be calculated with great precision.

The beta radiation generated by Carbon-14 when it disintegrates causes the electrons to move at high speed.

These scientists have achieved transform electrons from beta radiation into electricity, using a diamond, in the same way that a solar panel converts photons of light into electricity.

The great advantage of this diamond battery is that carbon-14 has a life cycle of 5,730 years. So the battery can self-generate electricity for millennia.

When using diamonds, you may think that such a battery will cost a lot of money, but this is not the case. Diamond is artificially made from spent graphite rods from nuclear reactors, so they are quite cheap.

British researchers have already built a working diamond battery prototype with a size of 10 x 10 millimeters and a thickness of 0.5 millimeters. You can see it in the opening photo.

Being so tiny it only generates a small charge of electricity, but since it can self-generate it for thousands of years, It has countless applications in medical devices that are introduced into the human body, such as ocular implants, hearing aids and pacemakers, avoiding the need for replacements.

It can also be very useful in satellites, spacecraft, underwater sensors, and other devices that, once active, are unreachable to change the battery.

The first diamond battery is now a reality. It self-generates electricity for thousands of years, and is completely safe. Now researchers are working on increasing its size, to produce a greater charge.

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Tags: Health, Batteries, Industry