Earlier this week, Avalanche Energy was awarded a $5.2 million contract from DARPA’s Rads to Watts program to develop new radiovoltaics. The Pentagon research agency is interested in using the materials in a new class of long-lasting nuclear batteries, which use radioactive decay from materials like polonium to generate electricity. These nuclear batteries could power satellites and spacecraft for several years, or be used in more energy-intensive terrestrial military applications for days on end.
Avalanche is focused on engineering micro-fabricated energy cells that turn alpha particles emitted by radioactive material into electricity. The process, the team said, is analogous to solar cells converting photons into electricity.
“The goals are to produce a device that has a long lifetime, and that can produce orders of magnitude more power than current technologies,” said Daniel Velázquez, Avalanche’s physicist and materials science lead. The target is a battery that could continuously power a laptop computer, for example, for many months but weighs roughly 10 pounds.
Avalanche is leading the team tackling DARPA’s nuclear battery challenge, which includes the University of Utah, Caltech, Los Alamos National Laboratory and McQuaide Microsystems.
While Avalanche is ultimately working to develop a compact device that creates energy from fusion — the reactions that power the sun — the DARPA project feeds directly into that longer-term goal, Velázquez said. There are direct parallels to capturing energy from a nuclear battery and from fusion reactions.
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