Somewhere in the deep recesses of my memory, I remember reading about a "tiny' nuclear power source. It looked like a football about 4 feet long an 2 or 3 feet tall. There were a pair of terminals to attach your load to and it was claim it would produce 3kW DC for years. Was supposed to weigh a couple 3 hundred pounds with no moving parts. It was in "Popular Science/ Pop Mechanics" in the mid 60's then disappeared. Anybody ever hear about these or did my fevered pre-teen brain remember something completely wrong?
Unlikely, or just speculation on the part of the writer that denies basic physics.
If it produced 3kW of electricity, no conversion process is perfect, or even close to 100% efficient so that means some part of such a "football sized nuclear power supply" would have to be making more than 3kW of HEAT.
That's kinda spicy.
The RTG's of space probes are actually smaller than this, and use the heat of decaying Plutonium to drive thermocouples with a cold side against space, but they make nowhere near 3kW.
The Curiosity rover's plutonium dioxide pellet(s?) was glowing red hot at about 2kW of thermal power at launch, but it only produces something less than 125W of DC. And being on Mars nobody gives a damn about shielding beyond protecting the insturments from interference.
And that's with whatever extra efficiency the -100F or whatever the Martian temp is gives the thermoelectric cells in heat differential.
There are betatovic power supplies that create electricity directly from nuclear decay, they somehow capture the high velocity electrons (beta particles) from tritium decay, but they're nowhere near that kind of electric output.
IIRC they were used as experimental pacemaker batteries for a time. :tinfoil:
