Program Summary
Radioisotopes have many use cases across the medical, industrial, and power fields. Many of the most useful daughter-product radioisotopes are locked in decay chains of long-lived parent actinide radioisotopes. There are novel daughter-product radioisotopes with greater utility than those currently used, but long decay half-lives make it impractical to naturally create them in sufficient quantities. For example, the power density of thorium radioisotopes is 10 to 100 times higher than that of plutonium for radioisotope power systems and uranium for nuclear reactors. However, the decay half-life of thorium 232 to produce its daughter product thorium 228 for RPS applications is 14 billion years.
Current methods for producing common radioisotopes include forced production in nuclear reactors, cyclotrons, and particle accelerators. These methods are inefficient and cannot produce reasonable yield of alpha-emitting radioisotopes of interest in a timely manner. Recent experiments have shown the potential of artificially accelerating half-life timescales of long-lived radioisotopes “on-demand,” which could decay parents into daughter isotopes by circumventing natural and traditional nuclear reactor-based methods.
Decay on Demand is exploring experimental and theoretical avenues to increase production yield of novel daughter product radioisotopes from parent isotopes with a mass equal to or greater than actinium. One of the primary objectives of Decay on Demand is to find a way to induce the emission of an alpha particle by causing a radioisotope to absorb energy, thereby converting a significant fraction of parent radioisotope feedstock into its daughter products.