Researchers are fine-tuning a recipe at Zeno Power’s office-lab complex in Seattle’s South Lake Union district — but it’s not the kind of recipe you can taste-test. Instead, this recipe specifies the ingredients for a new kind of nuclear battery, and Zeno is hoping it’ll get a glowing review.
“Our vision for Zeno is to be building dozens, and eventually hundreds of these power systems every year,” Zeno CEO and co-founder Tyler Bernstein told me during a recent tour of the 15,000-square-foot facility. “So, we want to make sure that from the early days, as we’re developing the process for how we build these heat sources, we’re doing it in a way that we can scale very quickly to meet the demand that we’re seeing from government and commercial customers.”
Zeno Power plans to demonstrate its first full-scale radioisotope power system in 2026, and deliver its first commercially built nuclear batteries by 2027. The potential applications range from powering infrastructure on the bottom of the ocean, to keeping machines operational in the Arctic, to charging up rovers on the moon.
