Nuclear Diamond Batteries, Inc. (OTCID: NDBI) has released a technical white paper titled The Perpetual Sensor: Nuclear Diamond Batteries for LoRaWAN and the Next Generation of Long-Life IoT, examining how betavoltaic micropower could fuel a new generation of low-maintenance wireless sensors. The timing is deliberate: on September 22, 2026, the LoRa Alliance announced that the number of connected LoRaWAN devices worldwide had reached 150 million, growing at an annual rate of 25%.
NDBI’s stated goal is to enter this ecosystem with an architecture the company calls the “Perpetual Sensor”: a wireless sensing platform built around continuous micropower generation, energy storage, ultra-low-power electronics, and intermittent communications. The word “perpetual” does not imply a device that runs forever, but rather an architecture designed to dramatically extend unattended operational life — reducing or potentially eliminating routine battery replacements over the sensor’s useful lifetime. The distinction matters. NDBI has not yet built, tested, or commercialized any sensor of this kind.
The white paper identifies LoRaWAN Class A devices as the reference architecture, since they spend most of their time in ultra-low-power sleep states between sensing events and transmissions. This consumption profile pairs well with a continuous but extremely low-intensity power source, such as that produced by radioisotope decay. The document covers 19 potential application sectors, including utilities, infrastructure, defense, agriculture, industrial monitoring, and remote environments — contexts where physically replacing batteries is expensive, hazardous, or simply not feasible.
The NDBI subsidiary responsible for technology development is AtomiQ, which is working on nuclear diamond batteries designed to convert energy from radioisotope decay into long-duration electricity. The initial development milestones outlined in the white paper include characterization of continuous source output, energy storage efficiency, sensor power consumption, transmission energy requirements, and achievable reporting intervals. Only after laboratory validation would the company move on to integrated prototype development and field testing. Additional patents covering technologies and materials are still being filed.
The LoRaWAN market NDBI is aiming for is already substantial and well-defined. Data cited from the LoRa Alliance illustrates the scale already in operation: ZENNER Connect manages over 11.6 million sensors, Netmore has 11.2 million active devices, The Things Industries around 6 million, and Veolia more than 4 million active smart meters in France alone. Global Market Insights values the global LoRaWAN market at $3.7 billion in 2024, with projections reaching $75.8 billion by 2034, at a compound annual growth rate of 41.1%.
If laboratory validation confirms the feasibility of the theoretical energy budget — how much power is generated, how efficiently it is stored, and how much a transmission consumes — NDBI would have the foundation to develop a real prototype. The road ahead is long, and the company openly acknowledges it is still in the conceptual stage. Yet the convergence of a mature LoRaWAN ecosystem and research into near-zero-maintenance energy sources opens up an application space that no other technology has yet stably occupied.
