Imagine a battery that lasts for millennia.

No replacements, no recharging – just a steady supply of power fueled by radioactive decay. This is the promise of nuclear-diamond batteries, a breakthrough technology already exciting engineers across industries.

From deep-space probes to pacemakers, these batteries are poised to solve some of the world’s most challenging energy needs. This article explores how they work, why they matter, and what the future holds for this cutting-edge innovation.

The science behind continuous energy

Electrons are the vehicles that carry electricity, and batteries are basically just parking lots for those vehicles. When the parking lot is empty, your battery is dead; after you recharge it, each of those parking spaces will be occupied by an electron until it is used.

All batteries die over time — because their electrons are either all used up, or they drift away due to entropy. This problem can be circumvented through the use of sustainable energy sources, such as solar, wind, and hydro energy, which are able to keep a battery perpetually charged because the energy sources themselves never disappear for long periods of time.

But what if we want to use a battery in places where none of these energy sources are available? What if we don’t require a lot of voltage, but just need a little bit stretched out over a very long period of time? That’s when ‘forever’ batteries become the best choice, with a little help from other areas of science.

The natural phenomenon of radioactive decay has already proven useful as a scientific tool. Archaeologists routinely use carbon dating, for example, to determine the age of organic material that they have discovered. The process involves analyzing a given organic specimen for carbon-14, an isotope of carbon which is essentially only found in living things and within the core of nuclear power plants. Over time, carbon-14 undergoes radioactive decay at a regular rate. The more carbon-14 is found, therefore, the more recent the organism must have lived.

‘Forever’ batteries use the decay of carbon-14 in a different way. Each of these batteries contains a solid block of graphite which has already been suffused with carbon-14 as a result of its previous placement within the core of a nuclear power plant. We already have countless blocks of this type that we don’t know what to do with, so their ability to have a second life as a battery component is convenient indeed.

Each time a carbon-14 atom within the graphite block decays, one of its neutrons breaks apart into a proton, an electron, and an antineutrino. (Incidentally, the decay of the neutron turns the atom into nitrogen-14.) The electron, now sprung loose, is channeled into the battery, where it finds a parking space; the other newly minted elementary particles go unused.

To avoid radioactive escape, the battery is surrounded by a diamond which serves as a hard boundary, ensuring that the loose electron has nowhere else to go but inside its parking lot. As the half-life of carbon-14 is 5,730 years, the atoms that make up the graphite block will slowly decay over countless millennia, each one adding a new electron to the battery. These are captured and converted into electricity, with the diamond barrier preventing all harmful particles from escaping into the environment.

The natural abundance of carbon allows these nuclear-diamond batteries to be produced in a safe and sustainable way. And while the technology is still in its early days, working prototypes are in use and there is no clear barrier to mass production.

The value of longevity

So that’s the how, but what about the why? Here are some use cases:

• Satellites, probes, and other space equipment need power sources that can last for decades or longer without maintenance or replacement. Solar panels may seem like a natural choice here, but space debris can poke holes in their surfaces, and deep space probes will be voyaging too far from the sun to harvest any useful energy from it.
• Medical devices that need to operate for a long time but require low power like pacemakers could benefit from ‘forever’ batteries, eliminating the need for surgical interventions to replace current batteries every few years.
• In extreme conditions such as those involving seabed oil and gas operations, where replacing batteries is impractical or dangerous, nuclear-diamond batteries offer a reliable, long-lasting power solution.

Traditional batteries (lithium-ion, for example) have a limited lifespan, and often require frequent replacements, which can lead to environmental waste and resource depletion.

But as the saying goes, diamonds are forever. And so are half-lives, at least for our purposes. Furthermore, since these nuclear-diamond batteries have the added benefit of turning radioactive materials into useful energy sources for industries like space exploration, medical devices, and remote sensors, why not put them to good use? Our descendants, many millennia from now, still receiving valuable data from deep space probes launched during our lifetimes, may thank us.