> Nuclear batteries removing the need for electrical wiring seems very pie in the sky to me but perhaps I'm just ignorant of the practical application of it. t

> Nuclear batteries removing the need for electrical wiring seems very pie in the sky to me but perhaps I'm just ignorant of the practical application of it. tl;dr very feasible sans NIMBYs The DoE investigated this exact thing. I happened across the papers while browsing microfiche. It makes the most sense to serve a neighborhood off small house/shed sized generating facility. As you scale up you can switch to normal turbine operation, as you scale down you move back to thermoelectric operation. Single houses could be powered from thermoelectric piles but this would probably have been reserved for expensive, remote vacation homes. Closer to battery sized, you can layer radioactive material against quantum dots that turn alpha particles into photons and emit those photons directly onto a PV cell.