Plain language
What we make, in plain words
This page says the same things as the main page, but in shorter sentences and without the technical words.
The thing
A battery you never charge
We make a very small battery. You never plug it in. You never change it.
It makes only a tiny amount of power. About as much as a digital watch uses. It cannot run a phone or a light.
What it can do is keep going. After 5,730 years it will still make half as much power as it does today.
The problem
Some machines are hard to reach
A heart pacemaker sits inside a person. When its battery runs down, a surgeon has to open the person up and put a new one in.
A sensor on the sea floor is the same problem. To change its battery, someone has to send out a ship.
Normal batteries last five to ten years in a sealed machine. Ours removes that deadline.
How
How we make it
Some nuclear power stations use large blocks of carbon inside them. After years of use, those blocks become slightly radioactive. Right now they are stored as waste. Nobody has a use for them.
We take that waste and turn it into batteries. There are four steps.
- We heat the carbon blocks. This releases a gas.
- We feed the gas into a hot chamber. Over a few weeks it grows into a diamond. The radioactive part is now built into the diamond itself.
- As the radioactive part breaks down, it gives off tiny particles. The diamond turns those particles into electricity.
- We grow a second diamond layer over the top. This one is not radioactive. It seals the first one in.
Safety
Is it safe?
The particles it gives off are weak. They stop after travelling less than a millimetre through solid carbon. They cannot get out through the diamond.
The radioactive part is not a powder and not a liquid. It is locked into the structure of the diamond. There is nothing that can leak or spill.
We have not been given a licence to sell these yet. We have started the process with the safety regulators. Until that is finished, we cannot sell you one.
Want to talk to us?
Tell us what your machine does and how much power it needs. We will tell you honestly if our battery is wrong for it. Most of the time it is.