This Tiny Nuclear Battery Could Unlock the Next Era of Space Exploration

**Peter Cabauy** (0:00)
When we watched that Falcon 9 go up, it was a big accomplishment. We could have righteously claimed that we were the first commercial nuclear satellite.

**Molly Glick** (0:07)
And I know in the energy industry, the biggest challenge right now is having the most capacity with the least weight.

**Peter Cabauy** (0:13)
That's the promise of this nuclear-mired power. Make things very, very small, size of a grain of rice, not a lot of power, but then it can work for decades and you can have many, many sensors.

**Molly Glick** (0:22)
Why are your beta-voltaic systems unique?

**Peter Cabauy** (0:24)
It takes several years to make the semiconductor to grow it. It's very simple to explain, hard to do.

**Molly Glick** (0:31)
What is your mission statement and why does it matter?

**Peter Cabauy** (0:33)
We want to make nuclear-micro-power available to everyone. We love the idea that we can take tritium and find thousands of uses for it.

**Molly Glick** (0:46)
Today we're going to be talking all about a pretty unique company that's tackling challenges straight out of a sci-fi movie. They want to provide continuous power to deep sea and deep space missions, including to Mars. To reach places that people haven't, this company is betting on a pretty tiny piece of technology with a lot of potential. I'm talking about City Labs, a Miami-based company that develops many long-lasting nuclear power sources that can provide electricity for years straight. These compact power systems work where conventional batteries and solar just won't do. They generate electricity from the decay of tritium. It's a naturally occurring radioactive isotope of hydrogen, and it's nothing like the lithium ion batteries powering your laptops and phones. Last month, City Labs made headlines for launching the world's first commercial nuclear-powered satellite to space. It hitched a ride on SpaceX's Transporter 17 mission. Think of it as a ride share for several companies' satellites that are heading to the cosmos at the same time. To discuss Transporter 17 and so much more, I'm Molly Glick, I'm the editor at Energy Central, and I'm joined by Peter Cabauy, City Labs CEO.
Peter, you've got a really unique background. I read that you studied quantum information physics at Argonne National Lab, and you worked with Dr. Paul Benioff, who is a quantum computing pioneer.
So tell us a bit about your research there.

**Peter Cabauy** (2:03)
It was a great time to be able to just try out new ideas. Dr. Roy Clark, the director, who ultimately became my official advisor at University of Michigan, was always allowed students to try out new ideas. I had funding from another agency, and I was able to choose my path, what I wanted to study. For a little while there, I looked at the stars, astrophysics. I worked in a lab there. Then I worked at laser cooling. But something about quantum computing, quantum information just fascinated me, especially just the idea that a computation could just evolve off the laws of quantum mechanics, a shortage equation, time evolution of the shortage equation could all be just one computation. That was fascinating to me. But that's far removed from what I'm doing now.
The one connection that I could tell you is that while I was at University of Michigan, I attended a business class in entrepreneurship and I thought, this is amazing. I get to solve any problem that I want to make a business around it.
That's great. With my physics background, there is a sense of like, I can work on chemistry, I can work on electrical engineering, I can work on just about anything because physics allows you to do that. The reality is a little different. When you start working on things, you realize there are limitations to what you can do. But there was one idea in quantum information and quantum computing that struck me.
It was this idea by the 1960s and 1970s, when these Rolf Landau and later Charles Bennett, they looked at what is the fundamental limit, the energy limit for computation. Because of the idea of these big computers and generating lots of heat, I mean, that sounds familiar to what's going on with AI today. They need to cool off these big AI centers, but what is the fundamental limit? If you're just looking from a purely theoretical physics standpoint, and it's KT natural log 2, so it bolts by constant temperature times natural log 2 per bit erased. That number is extremely small. I think it's on the order of 10 to negative 21 joules for every bit erased.
I thought, gee, that means a computation can be done for practically no power. That's where the connection of nuclear micropower started coming around. I thought about ants when they're walking around, they're sensing, they're foraging for food, they're computing, they're moving, and they do it for nanowatts to microwatts. I thought, well, what if there was a nuclear powered ant?