Zeno Power has signed an agreement with French nuclear fuel cycle manager Orano to acquire Americium-241, an isotope the U.S. startup plans to repurpose for powering long-duration and deep-space missions. The company said it will make a \u201cmulti-million-dollar\u201d annual payment to Orano for the supply, which will be sourced from the firm\u2019s recycling site in France.<\/p>\n
Americium-241 offers an alternative to plutonium-238, which has traditionally powered nuclear batteries for space exploration but remains in short supply. The isotope\u2019s characteristics make it well-suited for space applications, according to Harsh Desai, Zeno Power\u2019s chief commercialization officer. \u201cIt has a higher power density, so it won\u2019t require launching lots of mass to space. Astronauts would be able to work and live nearby power sources using it. It has a half-life of ~430 years, so it can last for decades,\u201d Desai told Payload.<\/p>\n
NASA has identified surviving the lunar night \u2014 a two-week period without sunlight and extreme cold \u2014 as a critical technology gap for future missions. Nuclear power is seen as one of the few viable solutions. By tapping Americium-241, which is created as a byproduct of nuclear reactors or through plutonium decay, Zeno Power aims to expand its role in supporting U.S. government, commercial and allied space missions.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis will enable us to scale this up,\u201d Desai said. \u201cTo get multiple kilograms of Americium-241, that allows us to do more than one mission a year. That\u2019s really critical to ensure we meet the burgeoning demand for power in the space domain.\u201d<\/p><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Zeno Power has signed an agreement with French nuclear fuel cycle manager Orano to acquire Americium-241, an isotope the U.S. startup plans to repurpose for powering long-duration and deep-space missions. The company said it will make a \u201cmulti-million-dollar\u201d annual payment to Orano for the supply, which will be sourced from the firm\u2019s recycling site in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":20001,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[242,6033,137,190,489,6034],"class_list":["post-19998","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","tag-france","tag-harsh-desai","tag-lunar","tag-nasa","tag-startup","tag-zeno-power"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19998"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19998"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19998\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/20001"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19998"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19998"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19998"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}