Quick, get in the DeLorean, we've got to go back. A new renewable powered battery made of radioactive waste product just dropped, and someone's gotta tell Doc Brown it's uranium, not plutonium

How Fallout 76 was turned around — (Image credit: Bethesda)

Hold onto your holographic caps because researchers in Japan have managed to turn depleted uranium into futuristic rechargeable batteries. According to IEEE.org, Scientists at the Japan Atomic Energy Agency have been working to turn the depleted uranium waste products of nuclear power generation into batteries designed to be recharged by renewables.

Sadly, this doesn't mean we'll be emptying leftover cans of drink and banana peels into our fuel canisters anytime soon. Instead, the plan is to recharge these batteries using established renewable sources like wind and solar. The hope here is to turn the depleted uranium waste into a useful resource that doesn't create anymore of its kind. This depleted uranium is going to break the generational abuse cycle.

The process hasn't been fully detailed yet, and we're waiting for a paper to release to get the full details on how this works. Or to just make our own battery with some paper and ink. Still, according to what researchers are happy to share for now, the skinny is these are a flow battery, so you have two tanks of different liquids with opposing charges. The key to having this work with depleted uranium was the use of iron at different states of oxidisation as a part of the bath. The bigger the tanks, the more power they can theoretically store.

Scaling up is among the next steps for these researchers and there's already plans in the works for a huge battery. The proposed powerhouse will use 650 tonnes of uranium giving it a capacity of 30,000 kilowatt-hours. That's not some random number, instead it's about the daily requirement to run 3,000 households in Japan. All that uranium plus however much iron is required means these are shaping up to be some of the most heavy metal batteries ever. Brutal.

Hope’s been writing about games for about a decade, starting out way back when on the Australian Nintendo fan site Vooks.net. Since then, she’s talked far too much about games and tech for publications such as Techlife, Byteside, IGN, and GameSpot. Of course there’s also here at PC Gamer, where she gets to indulge her inner hardware nerd with news and reviews. You can usually find Hope fawning over some art, tech, or likely a wonderful combination of them both and where relevant she’ll share them with you here. When she’s not writing about the amazing creations of others, she’s working on what she hopes will one day be her own. You can find her fictional chill out ambient far future sci-fi radio show/album/listening experience podcast right here.

No, she’s not kidding.

You must confirm your public display name before commenting

Please logout and then login again, you will then be prompted to enter your display name.