Custom Game Boy Knockoff runs on a small nuclear generator

Although the Sega Game Gear seemed perpetually hungry for fresh batteries, even the Game Boy had a strong appetite for Duracells and Energizers. Modern laptops like the Switch just need a charge overnight, but to make sure it can keep playing Tetris in a post-apocalyptic wasteland, Ian Charnas created a portable nuclear powered this does not need batteries anything.

When you think of nuclear power, what probably comes to your mind is a giant power plant with these distinctly curved cooling towers generating enough power to light up multiple cities. But smaller versions also exist, allowing military vehicles like submarines and aircraft carriers to remain deployed for months without needing to return to port to refuel.. This is not the approach taken by Charnas, however, because while anyone can buy uranium ore, refining it for use in large-scale reactors is highly regulated.

Radioactive decay, where an atom loses energy by emitting electronss, is technically known as nuclear power if you find a way to harness the process to generate electricity, and that’s exactly what Charnas did with this clever hack. Instead of using uranium, however, it takes advantage of an isotope of hydrogen known as tritium. If you like watches, you are the most probably familiar with tritium as it is used to light up a watch face without the need for LEDs or even batteries. The tritium is sealed inside a glass tube covered inside with a phosphorescent material that glows when the electronics emitted from the material hits it, much the same way old CRT televisions worked. These tritium tubes can glow for up to 25 years, so Charnas was able to harness them as a source of energy.

If something seems to be glowing, it means it’s emitting light, and if something is emitting light, a solar cell can harness the lighting to generate usable electricity. Charnas created a kind of nuclear battery by sandwiching a bunch of tritium tubes between two solar cells then seal everything so that all the light emitted by the tubes had no way of escaping and was only exposed to the cells. The result was a whopping 1.5 microwatts of electricity, which isn’t much. For the nuclear battery to power something like a hair dryer, Charnas would need to build 1.2 billion, that’s a lot.

Because the original Game Boy, arguably the most iconic Tetris-all time gaming device, runs on four AA’s, Charnas instead turned to a cheap modern knockoff that requires a lot less power to play block stacking game on segmented LCD display. The nuclear battery was still not powerful enough to power the handheld in real time, but using it to slowly charge a thin film solid state battery (which shows very little power leakage) Charnas discovered he could play Tetris for an impressive 55 minutes before the batteries need to be recharged.

Sadly, 55 minutes of playing time took a full two months to charge, making the nuclear battery less than ideal for the modern convenience of outlets. But if the world ever returns to the Dark Ages where electricity is no longer available, Charnas will have at least one welcome distraction from misery every few months.