NRD’s century battery claim

A nuclear battery is a device that turns the steady decay of a radioactive isotope into electricity, and NRD said on April 10 that its new Nickel-63 cell can run ultra-low-power electronics for more than 100 years. (prnewswire.com) NRD, a Grand Island, New York company, said the product is its NBV series, a sealed solid-state betavoltaic cell for places where replacing a battery is difficult or impossible. The company described the target as “ultra-low power electronics” rather than phones, laptops, or electric vehicles. (prnewswire.com) The numbers in NRD’s release show why. The company listed typical output at 5 nanowatts to 500 nanowatts, open-circuit voltage at 1.0 to 20.0 volts, and package size at 20 millimeters by 20 millimeters by 12 millimeters. (prnewswire.com) That puts the device in the category of “keep-alive” power: enough to preserve memory, run a tiny sensor, or support unattended monitoring, but far below the power draw of consumer electronics. NRD named condition monitoring, data logging, environmental sensing, security systems, robotics, and long-duration health monitoring as early uses. (prnewswire.com) The underlying idea is not new. IEEE Spectrum reported in August 2025 that nuclear batteries were used in pacemakers in the 1970s and 1980s, and that newer efforts are aimed at sensors, robots, medical implants, and other devices that need power for decades without maintenance. (spectrum.ieee.org) The same IEEE Spectrum report said the attraction is lifespan, but the business problem is finding markets that can justify radioactive materials, tracking requirements, and end-of-life disposal. It also noted that earlier medical uses faded in part because regulators and manufacturers struggled to keep track of implanted radioactive devices after patients died or devices were removed. (spectrum.ieee.org) NRD said it is a licensed manufacturer with six in-house radiological laboratories and a health physics department, and it pointed to a history of producing more than 750 million americium-based smoke detector components. Those details address handling experience, not independent performance verification of the new battery’s century-long claim. (prnewswire.com) The broader energy story around this announcement is that long-life power is being pursued with very different tools for very different jobs. A January 2025 paper in Energy & Environmental Science, from researchers at Southern University of Science and Technology and collaborators, reported a sodium-ion cathode design that kept 72.6% capacity after 100,000 cycles at 100C in half-cells and delivered 153.4 watt-hours per kilogram in ampere-hour pouch cells. (pubs.rsc.org) That sodium-ion work targets rechargeable storage for repeated charging and discharging, while NRD’s betavoltaic cell targets tiny continuous output over very long periods. The comparison is less about one battery beating another than about matching the power source to the job. (pubs.rsc.org)