MOSCOW (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 26th October, 2020) Specialists from A. A. Bochvar High-Technology Scientific Research Institute for Inorganic Materials (VNIINM), an arm of the Russian state nuclear agency Rosatom's TVEL fuel company, have developed prototypes of import-substituting power supply sources for space and aviation based on radioactive tritium isotope, Alexander Anikin, the head of the VNIINM's research department, said on Monday.
"The VNIINM has created tritium-based beta radiation sources. The productivity of most stages of the technological process makes it possible to manufacture them on a semi-industrial scale. An experimental batch, which passed all tests, has been released," Anikin said, as cited by Strana Rosatom, the agency's main newspaper.
The specialist pointed out that there were no analogues of the newly-developed power source in the Russian market, noting however that the best known foreign competitor is CityLabs, a US company that produces tritium-based power supply sources.
In 2017, Russia's state space corporation Roscosmos held a tender for the development of a compact uninterrupted power supply source based on tritium isotope for regular power supply of autonomous microelectromechanical and microelectronic systems of spacecraft in a bid to replace imported power sources with Russian ones. The Aviation Electronics and Communication Systems company won the bid and include the Bochvar research institute in a range of organizations involved in the power source's development.
