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

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.

Unfortunately, the current process for getting usable power out of ancient magical glowing danger rocks like uranium creates a tonne of depleted uranium waste. In Japan’s case it’s actually closer to 16,000 tonnes, and in the United States it’s something more like 750,000 tonnes. Globally it’s believed there’s a total 1.2 million metric tonnes of depleted uranium stored.

Thanks to its density and relatively low dangerous glowiness, we’ve found uses for the waste like high calibre rounds and radiation shielding. Still, supply is far outweighing demand and most is simply stored. If we can get safe stable batteries from the waste instead of needing to mine and refine other sources like lithium, it could be a huge win. Especially with the added help of AI.

The JAEA says they’ve managed to achieve this, at least on a small scale. In tests the batteries successfully powered an LED, and were able to deplete, charge, and recharge to do it all again with little change in capacity. Plus the battery solution would change between green and purple to indicate charge state, which is a cool feature all batteries should have.

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.