What Is The Carbon Diamond Battery And Is It Eternal?

There has been a lot of research surrounding everlasting battery technologies in recent years, something that makes raw material suppliers a particularly important part of the overall supply chain.

Whilst battery capacities and energy density have been the biggest topics of discussion in the battery space due to the rise of electric vehicles in recent years, the idea of a battery that lasts forever has become both increasingly feasible and increasingly desirable.

The idea of a medical device or implant never needing to be recharged could potentially be game-changing for people who have regularly needed to get implanted devices replaced.

However, a team at the UK Atomic Energy Authority working with the University of Bristol might have developed the solution in the form of a radioactive diamond battery, something the UK government proudly touted in a press release.

But how does the diamond battery work, and is it true that diamonds are forever?

They’ll Lustre On

The diamond battery works through a carbon-14 radioactive isotope, more commonly associated with archaeology through the carbon dating method.

Small amounts of the radioactive isotope are stored inside a synthetic diamond, which allows it to generate low levels of power through the capture of electrons within the diamond structure.

This was made possible using a plasma deposition rig, a special tool used to help grow the synthetic diamond around the radioactive isotopes, ensuring they are safely sealed in place.

As it relies on the half-life of the carbon-14 isotope, it has a lifespan of potentially over 10,000 years and can be used in extreme environments as a replacement for conventional batteries, such as in space, deep underwater or in the human body.

The main use case celebrated is in the use of medical devices such as hearing aids, cochlear implants, ocular implants and pacemakers. All of these require low levels of power but often need medical treatments to replace them.

With a battery that will long outlive its user and one where the radiation is safely protected inside the hardest substance on Earth, a diamond battery could open the door for more medical implants that can help transform and save lives in the process.

Whilst the battery does not literally last forever, it will survive for multiple generations, having an effectively eternal lifespan relative to its use in the body.

Alongside this, it can be used to power RF tags, particularly those which would be used in extreme environments, reducing costs and extending the lifespans of industrial low-power electronic devices in the process.

A common use case for this would be to track spacecraft, satellites or deep space missions where RF could be realistically used, extending the life of particular missions, reducing costs through the use of lighter battery packs and avoiding the need to repair or replace batteries nearly as often.

Another side benefit to this is less about the battery itself but what it is made from; nuclear waste is a huge environmental concern, but batteries such as this could potentially provide a safe way to handle it if applied at scale.

Carbon-14 is typically generated in nuclear fission plants, typically stored in blocks of graphite, where it is ripe to be extracted and used further, rather than simply buried in nuclear bunkers.

Alongside this low-level energy solution, the promise of the diamond battery is made even better given that this was a side project of the UKAEA’s research into fusion energy, something that was also subject to a major announcement.

Fusion is an energy generation method that has been proposed and theorised for decades as a form of clean, practically limitless energy using a system similar to how the sun produces vast amounts of power and heat.

The idea behind fusion energy is that by superheating smaller particles, they can be forced together to make a larger nucleus, which produces significant amounts of energy in the process.

There are several approaches to fusion energy, but the UKAEA’s idea is to develop a tokamak, a ring-shaped magnetic machine which holds the superheated plasma together in a way that allows it to be harnessed to produce energy by spinning an electrical dynamo.

At that final stage, a fusion power plant would operate practically identically to an existing power station to generate electricity.

The diamond battery was made in the process of this research, and the astonishing developments in fusion energy, which has gone from effectively theoretical to the cusp of a practical breakthrough in a remarkably short space of time, have helped to develop technologies in connected fields.