Are we ready?

Batteries powered by radioactive materials have been around for more than a century, but what they promise in power they usually lose in bulk.

Not so with a new kind of power source, which combines a novel structure with a nickel isotope to pack ten times more power than an electrochemical cell of the same size. The only question is, are we ready to go nuclear?

A team of Russian researchers have put a new spin on technology that uses the beta decay of a radioactive element to create differences in voltage.