Americium: How a small element could power the next century of space exploration

And Stirling engines run on gases, so the contraption would have to be sealed. Not insurmountable, and I love me some Stirling engine... IANAE but it seems a challenging choice for a device which hopes up run for decades or a century.

Not necessarily. You don't actually need the fluid to be perfectly sealed out, just slowed down a lot. This means that you could run it open but with very close tolerances and there would be almost no leakage. You just need to make the gap small enough for the leakage to be trivial.

As for magnetic alignment, that is all about maintaining smooth operation without losing efficiency to friction. Instead of a guide with friction you could use magnetic attraction to keep things aligned.

Voyager I and II are 48 years old running on thermoelectric generators. that’s amazing. They are winding down because the half life of plutonium means there is much less power than when new.

I can see future probes lasting even longer with americium as a fuel source

But introducing moving parts for a sterling engine? In space? And expect it to last like that? Seems unlikely

Except in regions where there is no access to Pu ... as the article itself pointed out.

Plutonium-238’s half-life is 87.7 years, Americium-241 is 432.6 years. Which… is almost 5 times longer, so… not sure why that’s cringe?

What's cringe is the word "staggering". Natural radioactive isotopes have half-lives on the order of billions of years. All elements heavier than iron are created in supernovae. Billions of years have passed since the novae that created that heavy elements now on earth. Anything with shorter half-lives is no longer around. (More correctly, one should talk decay chains.)

What's staggering is that these isotopes are available at all. They are artificially created in nuclear reactors. Mass production of Pl-238 began only during WW2 for bombs. That's almost a half-life ago. The shorter half-life makes the availability of Pl-238 much more impressive.

I believe they’re referring to the fact that it’s not an element of major topic. This is the first time I’ve ever heard of it.

There are over 100 named elements. I don't think I could name half of them. Americium is relatively prominent because of it's use in smoke detectors. And while I'm at it: Americium is the element. Americium-241 is a specific isotope; a specific variant, chemically identical to other variants but with slightly different physical properties.

There are a number of isotopes suitable for RTGs. It's a matter of trade-offs. There's half-life, which is basically how fast the properties of the material change. There's also energy density and how bad the radiation is for the device. And always, there's cost. Fun fact, in Chernobyl they did try robots, but the electronics could not withstand the radiation. People don't withstand it either, but there's a lot of them.

"Small" meaning "author of article seldom thought of it before."