Get Ready to Throw Out Your Power Chargers...

MIT’s Technology Review reported the development of an atomic battery .

It's called the Direct Energy Conversion (DEC) Cell, a betavoltaics-based "nuclear" battery that can run for over a decade on the electrons generated by the natural decay of the radioactive isotope tritium. It's developed by researchers at the University of Rochester and a startup, BetaBatt, in a project described in the May 13 issue of Advanced Materials and funded in part by the National Science Foundation.

Because tritium's half-life is 12.3 years (the time in which half of its radioactive energy has been emitted), the DEC Cell could provide a decade's worth of power for many applications. Clearly, that would be an economic boon -- especially for applications in which the replacement of batteries is highly inconvenient, such as in medicine and oil and mining industries, which often place sensors in dangerous or hard-to-reach locations.

Though, currently it is not powerful enough to replace our current cell phone batteries, I would imagine similar long lasting batteries are in the works. If we don’t fix this battery life problem, we won’t be able to throw out our wallets just yet. If we want to have a truly mobile campaign, we need better battery life.