Material that is always incandescent

This material shown in the photograph does not need to be heated; It is always hot, even if it rests in a room at room temperature or even when it is aboard a spacecraft very far from the Sun. The piece shown is red hot without anyone having put it in an oven or applied a blowtorch to it. , or heated in any other way.

This is plutonium, specifically plutonium-238, an isotope.

Plutonium is radioactive and therefore generates heat by its own means.

If it weren’t for how dangerous and rare it is, it would be ideal as a core for permanent stoves for homes and workplaces where heating is always needed.

Yes, it has been used to heat devices that cannot operate at too low temperatures in unmanned space vehicles that must move far away from the Sun and therefore cannot use solar energy. Likewise, this heat source allows generating electrical energy for on-board systems.

Two of the spacecraft in which plutonium-238 has been used for this purpose are NASA’s Voyager 1 and 2, which left Earth in 1977 and are currently outside our solar system, sailing through interstellar space.

This type of use of plutonium-238 continues to have applications today and gives rise to new research, such as a recent one, by a team led by Qing-Quan Pan, from the School of Nuclear Science and Engineering at the University Jiao Tong from Shanghai, China.

(Photo: Qing-Quan Pan. CC BY-NC)

This team has devised a series of improvements in plutonium production that increase the efficiency of the process and reduce its economic cost. The study is titled “High-resolution neutronics model for 238Pu production in high-flux reactors”. And it has been published in the academic journal Nuclear Science and Techniques. (Fountain: NCYT by Amazings)