Found this in my clicking.



Should lead to better ways to test new materials.

Nice find!  Has anyone ever heard reports of top secret batteries
that never lose their charge, but in use only for espionage?

Sounds like a conspiracy theory.

Physics says you can't get something for nothing, a battery that lasts for ever doesn't sound plausible. However I would be happy to be proved wrong 

I may have my question posed incorrectly.  This post reminded me of a documentary I watched a while back about the secrets of espionage revealed.  There was a segment about concealing a self contained power source in the wall which lasts, not forever, but an extraordinarily long time.

I know that the US government (mainly NASA, though there were examples in use in {I think} the Air Force) has "nuclear batteries" that use the slow decay of radioactive isotopes and heat to generate power. All of our deep space probes from Voyager to Dawn use them, and they can generate up to 1KW/Hr of electricity for literally dozens of years. Granted, these aren't the chemical batteries that we're accustomed to, but they ARE "self-contained" power sources, so they fit the technical description of a "battery".

I always thought these batteries where interesting.

That was pretty cool, right up to the sales pitch.

Hmmm, zero point energy. My woo woo alarm bells are going nuts.

Repeat after me, "nothing can break Newton's 2nd law of thermodynamics" 2LOT, it's the law!

There's a good clip from the Simpsons on that. Lisa makes a perpetual motion machine and Homer disapproves.



That's not a good clip, but the best I could find.

Laws are made to be broken Snowcrash just think where we would be if we thought the earth was flat

Dave you might like some of his older posts, and Snowcrash you might also. This guy has a pretty interesting background online. However I know it is online and one must take that with a grain of salt