Joking aside, I think small nuclear power sources tend to use much, much more problematic stuff than enriched uranium. Stuff that’s producing enough thermal energy through natural decay, rather than criticality in a reactor. You know, the Mars rover‘s pictures are censored in some areas… that’s where the radioisotope batteries are located.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_battery

Proper reactors are impractical scaled down, as far as I know. Inside a large submarine or aircraft carrier is probably the smallest practical scale for a reactor and I bet there is a ton of trade-offs.

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dragonwriter 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

>Joking aside, I think small nuclear power sources tend to use much, much more problematic stuff than enriched uranium.

The rover ones use Pu-238.

> You know, the Mars rover‘s pictures are censored in some areas… that’s where the radioisotope batteries are located.

The Curiosity and Perserverance rovers each have one MMRTG (multimission radiothermal generator), and I've never seen a picture of the rover where it is censored, and its actually explicitly called out and shown and drawn attention to in lots of NASA publicity stuff.

https://share.google/cqF7eqAJtLH52ALtN

https://mars.nasa.gov/internal_resources/788/

	▲	jijijijij 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		Looks like I misremembered or confused the censoring stuff. Thanks for the correction.

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DoctorOetker 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Why would those nuclear "batteries" be censored from Mars rover imagery? To prevent bad actors from acquiring the stuff for a dirty B?

	▲	jijijijij 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		Yeah, the Mars Liberation Front may use it to attack City 1! It‘s the battery tech, which is classified military stuff. I presume it’s a thing you put in submarine detectors deep in the ocean, or compact spy satellites. But indeed, it’s the type of radioisotope that’s dangerous to just be around, where minuscule amounts could fuck up the whole village. But terrorists would probably rather get their hands on emitters from the medical field than fly to mars.