Curium

Curium is a transuranium element produced artificially by irradiating plutonium or americium in reactors; it does not occur in nature, and world production amounts to only a few milligrams per year. Curium-244 and curium-242, with their relatively high decay heat and convenient half-lives, were once fabricated into small radioisotope power sources used for auxiliary power and instrument heating on some early U.S. deep-space probes, serving as early experimental RTG materials; modern deep-space power supplies have almost entirely switched to plutonium-238. Apart from this, curium is used only in nuclear chemistry and superheavy-element synthesis research and has no consumer or industrial product.

Curium compounds such as curium dioxide (CmO2) and curium trichloride (CmCl3) are prepared only in microgram-to-milligram quantities in radiochemical laboratories, where they are used in separation flowsheets and spectroscopic studies; they have never entered consumer products.