The radioactive diamond battery that will run for 28 000 years

MACHINES

- CAROLINE DELBERT

IN LESS THAN TWO YEARS, YOU MIGHT BE ABLE to buy a smartwatch – powered with a radioactive diamond battery – that will outlive you and your progeny for generations.

The potentially game-changing battery comes from the San Francisco-based start-up Nano Diamond Battery (NDB), which lauds its namesake ‘high-power diamond-based alpha, beta, and neutron voltaic battery’ for its ability to give devices ‘life-long and green energy’. Imagine: Just one battery could power your insulin pump or pacemaker for your entire life (with loads of time to spare). Or it could provide the juice for a space rover, collecting Mars regolith samples for decades without any human assistance.

Those are ambitious goals. So, could NDB’s bold claims actually become reality?

First, let’s dissect the specs. To build its Nano Diamond Battery, NDB uses layers of impossibly tiny, panelled nano diamonds (for context, one nanometre is one billionth of a metre). Diamonds have exceptional heat conductance, which makes them ideal for electronic devices. In fact, they are the best-known natural conductor of heat, according to a publication by the University of Houston’s College of Engineering – and are three to four times more effective than copper or silver.

Scientists cultivate these miniature diamonds using chemical vapour deposition, a process in which gases at extremely high temperatures force carbon to crystallise on a substrate material. That process, NDB admits, creates a cost bottleneck; making the special diamonds is energy-intensive and expensive.