>Will we ever get to "nuclear-powered" weed-whackers?
I wanted to say "probably not", but I looked some stuff up and now I'm unsure. Essentially all small scale "nuclear power" uses a Radioisotope Thermal Generator. You essentially have a radioactive rock that generates heat and the heat difference is used to generate electricity through the Seebeck effect. The fuel that's typically used for this is Plutonium-238, because it almost exclusively decays as alpha particles (helium-4 nuclei), it has a half life of 87 years while being the most (of the long half life ones) energy dense at around 0.57 W/g. This is what's used in space flight missions and has actually been used to power pacemakers in the past with essentially no ill effect on the patient.
Pu-238 is still too heavy for the amount of power it generates for a weed-whacker. What changed my mind though is that apparently Polonium-210 also almost exclusively decays as alpha particles, but it has an incredible 140 W/g power density. The problem is that it has a half life that's only about a third of the year. It still could technically be used for a weed whacker though.
From a practical standpoint though, small scale "nuclear power", through RTGs, is way too inefficient for it to be used by regular people. Even if you eliminated all the risk of contamination, it would still only make sense for things that need to be running 24/7 that you couldn't swap out the battery on. Fission and fusion, so far, require a far larger plant to generate power.
I wanted to say "probably not", but I looked some stuff up and now I'm unsure. Essentially all small scale "nuclear power" uses a Radioisotope Thermal Generator. You essentially have a radioactive rock that generates heat and the heat difference is used to generate electricity through the Seebeck effect. The fuel that's typically used for this is Plutonium-238, because it almost exclusively decays as alpha particles (helium-4 nuclei), it has a half life of 87 years while being the most (of the long half life ones) energy dense at around 0.57 W/g. This is what's used in space flight missions and has actually been used to power pacemakers in the past with essentially no ill effect on the patient.
Pu-238 is still too heavy for the amount of power it generates for a weed-whacker. What changed my mind though is that apparently Polonium-210 also almost exclusively decays as alpha particles, but it has an incredible 140 W/g power density. The problem is that it has a half life that's only about a third of the year. It still could technically be used for a weed whacker though.
From a practical standpoint though, small scale "nuclear power", through RTGs, is way too inefficient for it to be used by regular people. Even if you eliminated all the risk of contamination, it would still only make sense for things that need to be running 24/7 that you couldn't swap out the battery on. Fission and fusion, so far, require a far larger plant to generate power.