What's wrong with the economies of scale of larger nuclear plants? I'm asking curiously, I don't understand the fascination with home energy sources. Radioacti

What's wrong with the economies of scale of larger nuclear plants? I'm asking curiously, I don't understand the fascination with home energy sources. Radioactive decay is a small energy source compared to fission. Look at the binding energies [1]: the energy accessible by fissioning heavy elements is about 200 MeV -- 1 MeV per nucleon. Radioactive decays are two orders of magnitude less, or smaller. Pu-238 is one of the nicest ones because it is "clean" -- emitting only alpha radiation, which is easy to shield. You can transmute on the order of 1 atom of it per 100 fission events [2]. A fission event is 200 MeV; a Pu-238 decay is 5.6 MeV. So at steady state, you can support less than 1/3,000th as much Pu-238 power as you can fission power. If you have a Pu-238 source, you also have a vastly larger nuclear fission power source, so why not just use that? More broadly, it's not a likely idea on physics, even if you accept all radioisotopes (difficult-to-shield gamma emitters) and not just "nice" ones. The high-Z radioactive decay chains end quickly at the element lead [3], so only release a fraction of the energy that is accessible by fission. (Look back to the binding energy curve [1]). And many of these decays are unusably, geologically slow. The naturally-occurring radioisotopes have half lives of >10^8 years (otherwise they wouldn't exist anymore -- they were created in ancient history in supernovae). And trying to transmute them doesn't improve much -- i.e. in a fission reactor, the most common [4] high-Z product is Pu-239 (half life >10^4 years), whose next decay is to U-235 (half life >10^8 years). Others are similar. So I don't see any way forwards. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Binding_energy_curve_-_common_isotopes.svg http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Binding_energy_curve_-_com... [2] Through the several processes which create Np-237 from uranium -- a relatively rare process [4]. Np-237 can be isolated and transmuted to Pu-238 separately through neutron irradiation [3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Radioactive_decay_chains_diagram.svg http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Radioactive_decay_chains_d... [4] Small table here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minor_actinide http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minor_actinide