Gizmodo and Boing Boing both covered the launch of a potentially quite exciting advance in battery science coming out of the engineering department at Missouri University: nuclear batteries “thinner than the thickness of human hair.”

Despite sounding dangerous, researcher Jae Kwon says “[N]uclear power sources have already been safely powering a variety of devices, such as pace-makers, space satellites and underwater systems.”

Purely in the research and development phase, this idea truly captures the imagination of folks like me who can clearly see the product roadmap for augmented reality far beyond the confines of the iPhone, where it resides today.

One of the major stumbling blocks to practical wearable computing, aside from lagging tech in wearable display technology, is power supply.

Most interesting was some of the explanation and back and forth I found in the comments over at Boing Boing, as they theorized the as of yet unspecified nuclear material used to power the batteries:

I’ll bet this one uses Nickel-63. It is available from spent nuclear fuel (currently garbage…so it is cheap as far as radioactive stuff goes), has no chemical toxicity in the body (not a heavy metal), has a nice 92 year half life (not too long, not too short on a human timescale), and is a pure beta emitter (when it decays, you get an electron…convenient for generating electricity!), and it decays directly into Copper-63 which is stable (no messy leftovers).

It’s likely to be some time before this is fully tested and brought out of a laboratory environment, but given the attention it’s received thus far (and is likely to receive in the coming weeks and days), I wouldn’t be surprised if Kwon found himself the recipient of extra funding to push the project further along.