So much for the 30 year laptop battery

Here's a story that's doing the rounds on the blogs - Scientists Invent 30 Year Continuous Power Laptop Battery.

The story is written in peculiarly convoluted prose, but appears to be saying that a breakthrough in nuclear energy technology means that we'll all be running around with magic batteries in mobile and laptop, in "two to three years". They'll be perfectly safe, will save the world, and will probably last longer than you will.

Sadly, no. As with the best techno-rubbish, there is a story in there, but you'll be pootling around the skies in jetpacks before you're powering your Dell from neutron decay.

That story is betavoltaics. This is a way of generating electricity much as solar cells generate power from photons, only by using high energy electrons generated from the beta decay of certain radio-isotopes. If you pick your isotope well -- the examples given use tritium, a radioactive form of hydrogen - the other decay products are inert, and in theory you can generate useful amounts of power for a reasonable length of time. As with every radioactive system, it has a half-life depending on the isotope; tritium's half-life is around twelve years, so every decade or so your battery will halve in power - but that won't change, no matter how little or much power you take out in the duration.

Beats Duracell, right?

Again, sadly, no. There are a few small problems.

Continue story here.