Thousands of years of energy in a "fingernail": Let's talk about this "Zhulong No. 1"
March 9, 2025, Jiangyin, Jiangsu.
This is not an ordinary press conference, my friends, this is a press conference for nuclear batteries!

Made in China, the world's first carbon-14 isotope nuclear battery has a rather impressive name - "Zhulong No. 1".
Thousands of years of battery life, you heard it right, it really is a thousand years!
This is not me exaggerating, this is the official "theoretical lifespan".
Think about the mobile phone batteries we use now, charging once a day is considered good, this thing can be used for a thousand years, it really makes people sigh that the times are changing too fast.

It is the size of a fingernail, but it has such a huge amount of energy. Its energy density is more than 50 times that of the best lithium battery. This technology is quite interesting.
In the past, I always thought that nuclear batteries were high-end gadgets that were far away from our lives.
Now, Chinese scientists have miniaturized it and used carbon-14 extracted from nuclear waste.
This is not only low-cost, but also environmentally friendly, killing two birds with one stone, and it really makes waste utilization to the extreme.

The cost is only one twentieth of that of plutonium-238, which is a great price-performance ratio!
Radiation? You may be worried about the issue of nuclear radiation, and I have thought of that too.
Scientists have used diamond semiconductor technology to create an "atomic cage" to lock up those restless electrons and make them generate electricity obediently.

It is lower than taking ten flights, so it is very safe.
The energy density of this little thing reaches an astonishing 2200 milliwatt-hours per gram.
What does it mean?
A battery as small as a grain of rice can make the IoT sensor work for a hundred years!

Think about it, in the future, we won’t have to worry about changing batteries for sensors in all corners, which saves a lot of trouble!
What’s more amazing is that it can withstand high and low temperatures ranging from -100 to 200 degrees Celsius, so it can be used for Antarctic exploration and Mars exploration.
After 300 years of use, the power has only dropped by 8%. Who dares to disagree with this endurance?
This “Zhulong No. 1” is very useful.