Tag Archives: nuclear batteries

Chinese Billionaires Helping U.S. Billionaires

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The United States has spent the past few years ghosting Robin Zeng, China’s fourth-richest man. To the U.S. government, Chinese battery maker CATL is a geopolitical threat to be warded off with tariffs and national-security curbs. Yet CATL has grown to become the world’s largest electric-vehicle battery manufacturer thanks to its technology and low costs. It posted record profit of more than $10 billion in 2025, and an estimated one in three EVs sold around the world carries its batteries. Ford recently ditched South Korea’s SK Group as its joint-venture partner for battery projects, focusing instead on its plan to build CATL-designed batteries at a $3 billion factory in Michigan. Ford is paying to license the Chinese company’s intellectual property, a workaround the U.S. allows while it puts up legal and political barriers to prevent CATL from building its own plants. General Motors is set to import China-made batteries from CATL and put them in its new Chevrolet Bolt—also legal, albeit only by swallowing a 60% tariff. And Tesla is using CATL technology for a battery plant in Nevada producing energy-storage systems, a business that is growing strongly while Tesla’s core EV business has stalled.

Critics of China argue that embedding a Chinese battery maker in the U.S. supply chain would make the U.S. even more vulnerable to Beijing’s economic coercion and undercut the chances of American battery companies catching up. CALT was placed in 2025 on a Pentagon list of companies working with China’s military.

Founded just 15 years ago, CATL benefited from a Beijing policy in the second half of the 2010s that gave Chinese EV makers subsidies if they used batteries from approved supplies such as CATL. It also received government money directly—more than $500 million in the first half of 2024 alone, according to CATL filings. Only state-owned petrochemical company Sinopec got more among mainland-China-listed companied. The iron-based battery chemistry, called lithium ferrophosphate, or LFP, costs up to 30% less a kilowatt-hour compared with nickel-manganese-cobalt batteries, the type South Korean and Japanese companies usually produce, industry experts say. In 2025, CATL developed an LFP battery with 500 miles of driving range that can be powered for up to 320 miles in just five minutes.

CATL’s technology is the reason Ford chose it for the Michigan factory tie-up, said Lisa Drake, a Ford executive on the project. “It probably would’ve taken us a decade to catch up and have LFP technology on our own,” Drake said in 2025.  She lamented that LFP batteries were invented in the U.S., but Chinese firms such as CATL figured out how to make them viable in cars. “We just didn’t commercialize that technology,” she said.

Excerpt from Yoko Kubota, The Chinese Billionaire Who Says America’s EV Market Is Doomed Without Him, WSJ, Mar. 23, 2026

Nuclear Waste Helps Reach Dark Places of Universe

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European scientists are developing a breed of battery for space missions that is powered by nuclear waste. The European Space Agency (ESA) hopes that the technology will, by the end of the decade…Ministers at ESA’s ministerial council meeting in Paris on 22 and 23 November, 2022 agreed to fund a €29-million (US$30-million) program called European Devices Using Radioisotope Energy (ENDURE). This aims to develop long-lasting heat and electricity units powered by the radioactive element americium-241, in time for a series of ESA Moon missions in the early 2030s.

Americium, a by-product of plutonium decay, has never been used as a fuel. For missions in which solar power would not suffice — either because of shade or because of distance from the Sun — ESA has relied on US or Russian partners, which have used plutonium-238 batteries to power missions since the space race. 

The lack of a power source has long restricted the solo missions that European scientists propose, and limited others. The agency felt its lack of radioisotope power keenly in 2014, when its comet-landing Philae probe was operational for less than three days because it ended up in a shaded spot where its solar panels were useless. “For years, European scientists have been saying that if you want to go far, or to dark and cold places, there is no other way,” says Coustenis.

Americium’s big advantage over plutonium is that it is cheaper and more abundant, repurposing waste that would otherwise be useless…Americium has a longer half-life than plutonium-238, which means it lasts longer but packs less power per gram. But because americium is more readily available, producing one watt of power costs about one-fifth as much as it does using plutonium…

Excerpts from Elizabeth Gibney, How Nuclear Waste Will Help Spacecraft Explore the Moon and Beyond, Nature, Dec. 6, 2022

Nuclear Power Invades Space

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The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is testing a technology known as “nuclear thermal propulsion”… DARPA spacecraft will carry a small nuclear reactor. Inside, uranium atoms will be split to generate tremendous heat…to produce thrust. Such a spacecraft could climb to a geostationary orbit above the Earth, nearly 36,000km up, in mere hours. Satellites that burn normal rocket fuel need several days for the same trip. Nuclear-powered satellites with abundant power would also be hard to destroy—their trajectories could be changed often enough to become unpredictable. DARPA  wants to test its spacecraft, dubbed DRACO  (Demonstration Rocket for Agile Cislunar Operations), in orbit in 2025.

Other proposals are for radioisotope thermoelectric generators (RTGs). These kinds of “nuclear batteries” have long been used to power probes sent into deep space, where solar power is especially feeble. Instead of building a nuclear reactor, an RTG uses devices called thermocouples to produce a modest wattage from heat released by the decay of radioactive isotopes. Plutonium-238, which is a by-product of weapons development, has been used by NASA to power both the Voyager probes, launched in the 1970s and still functioning, as well as the Curiosity rover currently trundling around Mars. Plutonium-238, however, is heavily regulated and in short suppl..Cobalt-60, with a half-life of 5.3 years, is a promising alternative and available commercially.

DARPA Draco Image https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h3ubR9F55nk

How safe is it, however, to send nuclear devices, especially reactors, into space?…A danger is accidental atmospheric re-entry. The Soviet Union flew at least 33 spy satellites with nuclear reactors for onboard power (but not propulsion). In one accident, the reactor in a satellite named Kosmos 954 failed to ascend into a high-enough “disposal orbit” at the end of its mission. In 1978 it ended up spraying radioactive debris over a swathe of Canada’s Northwest Territories…The fuel for the Soviet Kosmos 954…was 90% uranium-235, similar to the material used in the atom bomb detonated over Hiroshima in 1945…

America is not alone in its nuclear quest. China and Russia are also developing nuclear power for space. China’s wish list includes a fleet of nuclear-powered space shuttles. Russia is designing an electric-propulsion cargo spacecraft called Zeus, which will be powered by a nuclear reactor. Roscosmos, Russia’s space agency, hopes to launch it in 2030. The prospect of more capable satellites will, no doubt, raise suspicions among spacefaring nations. Nuclear spacecraft with abundant electrical energy could be used to jam satellite communications…..

And not all of the interest in nuclear power comes from the armed forces. NASA…wants a nuclear plant to power a base on the Moon. 

Excerpt from Faster, higher, stronger: Why space is about to enter its nuclear age, Economist, Feb. 5, 2022