My phone uses 0.6W when idle and 1.2-2.5W while I’m using it. Peaks are 8W+. No way an internal reactor only can power a phone.
Comment on A tiny radioactive battery could keep your future phone running for 50 years
abhibeckert@lemmy.world 5 months ago1W is enough for a cell phone, if you combined it with a capacitor for brief bursts at higher watts.
Lojcs@lemm.ee 5 months ago
fidodo@lemmy.world 5 months ago
A nuclear battery is not actually a battery, it’s a generator. Trying to run something purely off a generator is stupidly inefficient because you’d need the output potential for the max load at all times even when on average the load is much lower. You absolutely want to pair a generator with a battery. Even power plants have batteries to store excess power.
If you think a little past the name misnomer it’s obvious that this would work by pairing it with a smaller battery to handle spikes in usage. The end result is still the same though, you’d have a phone you’d never have to plug in.
Lojcs@lemm.ee 5 months ago
What makes you think I didn’t think past the name? If my phone had a generator it would have a 8hr sot/day limit, it’d need a not so small 1000mAh+ battery to balance out night/day usage difference and still wouldn’t last an hour while gaming. That’s not an upgrade for me
fuck_u_spez_in_particular@lemmy.world 5 months ago
Now play a game for an hour…
nous@programming.dev 5 months ago
Not all phones need to play games and gaming phones don’t need to use this type of technology. I would love a phone that I don’t need to charge and most people could benefit from one. And for the select few that like to play intensive games on it then they can get ones that would need to be charged.
fuck_u_spez_in_particular@lemmy.world 5 months ago
Yeah especially with just 0.001% of the estimated workload (~10W when gaming, but even when standby 0.5W, 100uW are still just 0.02% of that…). Needs a lot more research…
aBundleOfFerrets@sh.itjust.works 5 months ago
You throttle the cpu with long heavy workloads, just like phones already do due to the significant thermal constraints of the form factor.