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p.1 #5 · Paper on small nuclear battery... | |
If you read the paper and subsequent coverage you'd catch the bit about how it would take 40-million of those batteries to power a cell phone (though it would stay powered for 5,000 years). A little digging shows that nuclear batteries were used in pacemakers in the 1970s, and all of the batteries outlived those they were implanted in (one is still running the pacemaker 34 years later). These pacemakers were designed to withstand a bullet shot-- and cremation once the patient died. But they were phased out for lithium-ion batteries for a number of reasons.
In any case, we're a long way from nuclear powered cameras. The military uses nuclear powered mobile batteries for certain applications (like radios), but they are bulky.
Fuel cells seem promising (as they have seemed for the last 15 years), but I'd place my bet on lithium polymer and incremental increases in more current technologies covering us for the next 5 years.
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