Nuclear waste-fueled nano diamond batteries could power your iPhone for 9 years

Fed up with your weak smart phone battery that can barely make it through a single day without dying at the most inopportune time? 

Well, a California-based battery firm called NDB has been developing an exotic, emission-free power cell that can run your trusty electronic companion for up to nine years! And if that's not impressive enough, the company also claims to be on track to create a century-lasting auto-battery pack that makes the Energizer bunny's head spin, and a miraculous pacemaker spitting out heart-stimulating juice that lasts 28,000 years.

How might this pure cellphone sorcery be accomplished? The secret to their nano diamond batteries' longevity and their benchmark test lie in the harnessing of used radioactive waste found as a byproduct of nuclear plant facilities around the world, which seems to exist in abundance. So yeah, your phone is kinda radioactive — but isn't the battery life worth it?

Check out this video showing exactly how the self-charging magic happens:

"Think of it in an iPhone," NDB's chief strategy officer Neel Naicker offers. "With the same size battery, it would charge your battery from zero to full, five times an hour. Imagine that. Imagine a world where you wouldn't have to charge your battery at all for the day. Now imagine for the week, for the month… How about for decades? That's what we're able to do with this technology. We've taken something that's really harmful to the environment, a problem, and created energy."

NDB admits that this toxic leftover product, with its Carbon-14 half-life of thousands of years, is extremely dangerous and difficult to dispose of, but offers methods by which it can be safely utilized to produce power in their revolutionary nano diamond batteries.

This apparently is all accomplished by processing used graphite nuclear waste into a distilled form and then transforming it into micro diamonds. When waste materials surrounded by the engineered diamonds start to decay, it engages with the carbon to generate a tiny electric current.

As power drains on the battery differ depending on the device and type of usage, the power unit will never need recharging, and could last a lifetime if NDB's proof-of-concept, which completed two tests last week at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and the Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge University, is fully realized.

Credit: Getty Images

They predict their nano diamond batteries could be employed for basic mobile devices, medical monitors, biological implants, industrial sensors, communication satellites, and might even deliver energy to remote regions for a variety of machines and applainces. 

"Using radioisotopes as a source for energy is not new," explains NDB's chief operating officer Mohammed Irfan. "We have nuclear medicine, where patients are treated with controlled equipment, which has always given effective results. Similarly, we have had nuclear-powered submarines and aircraft carriers. Of course, that's a completely different process, but it's been able to successfully and safely deliver power and energy without safety issues."

Many of NDB's lofty claims have been met with scrutiny and skepticism in the scientific community regarding the invention's true outputs, but that's not deflating their enthusiasm or desires one bit. Undaunted, NDB and its team will endeavor to produce a working prototype as soon as pandemic quarantines and restrictions finally ease and they believe they'll have an operational model demonstrating these predictions within the next two years.

Credit: NDB, INC.

“Our team is bringing together leaders in the nanotechnology, nuclear science and diamond fields with military, academic and research backgrounds, and combining our unique mix of expertise has made it possible for us to crack the code in developing this groundbreaking, life-changing solution,” said Nima Golsharifi, NDB CEO and co-founder. “Moreover, as members of society, we are extremely concerned about the welfare of the planet and are focused on lowering climate change to protect our planet for future generations. With the NDB battery, we have achieved a massive, groundbreaking, proprietary technological breakthrough of a battery that is emission-free, lasts thousands of years and only requires access to natural air in order to power devices.”