atomic battery

Nanotritium batteries powering circuit board (left) and a Michigan Micro Mote (right), displayed at SpaceCom 2024. An atomic battery, nuclear battery, radioisotope battery, or radioisotope generator uses energy from the decay of a radioactive isotope to generate electric power. Like a nuclear reactor, it generates electricity from nuclear energy, but it differs by not using a chain reaction. Although commonly called batteries, atomic batteries are technically not electrochemical and cannot be charged or recharged. Although they are very costly, they have extremely long lives and high energy density, so they are typically used as power sources for equipment that must operate unattended for long periods, such as spacecraft, pacemakers, medical devices, underwater systems, and automated scientific stations in remote parts of the world.

Nuclear batteries began in 1913, when Henry Moseley first demonstrated a current generated by charged-particle radiation. Since RCA's initial nuclear research and development in the early 1950s, many types and methods have been designed to extract electrical energy from nuclear sources.