Don’t be fooled by the headlines. The battery from China that’s supposed to last 50 years is just a PR product. It doesn’t exist on the market. Moreover, the technology is ancient.
Several international and Swedish media outlets recently published long articles about a new battery from China, under the designation BV100.
However, the battery isn’t for sale on the market; it only exists in press photos and is described on websites and brochures. A company claims they will start manufacturing the product. But the headline sounds so good that mainstream journalists ignore that. They’re happy to give away some free editorial advertising, as long as the headline attracts readers.
The technology with radioactive batteries has been used for decades, especially in space exploration, and is therefore not anything new.
And there is no new battery from China. It’s just made up. A made-up picture.
So, when you read Swedish journalists breathlessly waxing over the idea of a 50-year battery, you can only conclude that they are either ignorant, or they’re in on it with the Chinese. They agree it makes a great headline and ignore the fact that the thing doesn’t actually exist, and isn’t news. Most people have no idea about this type of battery technology, so the headline can be very enticing.
Many different companies around the world have manufactured radioactive batteries for a long time, but they haven’t come up with the idea of packaging the concept as an image of an imagined small mini-battery, to tickle tech and news editors worldwide.
Update: Many newspapers recently published “news from China” about inventing an artificial womb. That news was just as fake.
How stupid are our newspaper editors? “Oh, new technology from China, we believe it right away, without fact-checking. In China, you can invent anything.”
It’s sad that our news editors are often no better than confused AI when it comes to fact-checking. Here is a Swedish example.