this post was submitted on 29 Mar 2026
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So was the popular conception back then that power was somehow magically transferred directly from uranium to the power grid?
Miniature breeder reactor
You would drop in the uranium fuel source and it would be used to create more fuel.
The weapons grade stuff is U-235, right? Do conventional nuclear reactors enrich U-238 to U-235?
Uranium 235 or plutonium 239, may be completed with Hydrogen for more energy release: deuterium and tritium.
AFIK natural uranium is mainly centrifugated for the heavier 238 and lighter 235 to separate. Enriched uranium is just having a higher percentage of 235.
Plutonium 238 is man made in reactors
Uh, that understates things a little bit. Hydrogen bombs (which utilize fission for triggering the fusion reaction) are generally a few orders of magnitude more powerful than fission bombs. The opposite is more accurate: fusion bombs that use spent Uranium as a tamper roughly double their yield.
What grid? It looks like the "power box" on the wall is generating power for that house all by itself, no transmission necessary.
Considering that the smallest operating nuclear reactor ever made was this big...
...and that critical mass is a thing, I can only assume the "power box" was some kind of RTG.
Wouldn't all but the largest RTGs struggle to power more than a few incandescent light bulbs, though? Looking at the table on Wikipedia, their output is usually only from a few dozen to a few hundred watts.
It was 60 years ago. If they put same effort to it as they put to computers you would have one in your pocket.
RTGs aren't as limited by technological investment as they are constrained by fundamental physics.
It is pretty hard to irradiate a whole block and give everyone turbo-cancer with my smartphone, tbh.
The Soviets used RTGs quite a bit for remote installations, and "whoops, we lost one, I hope nobody finds it and kills their family" is a real concern (that was kind of ignored because a. Russia is big and b. it's the Soviets we are talking about)
Nobody wants you to wear it. It would be enough if you could keep it next to the building that would power it for next 100 or 1000 years. Wouldn't it be nice to not have to worry about energy in your house for couple of generations ? You can read about ex. carbon-14 battery https://www.ukaea.org/case-studies/carbon-14-diamond-battery/ or watch video here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IgGVt4sUnnw
Looking at the illustration, it's hard to figure out year it was drawn. The artist is creating a 'future house.' Also, it's not clear if this is an educational comic, or one for entertainment.
99% of the people today ahve some idea of what 'gamma rays' are, but we all accept that they can turn a normal man into The Hulk.
It was worse than that. Our understanding of radiation took awhile. While Uranium glass is probably safe I wouldn't go using it regularly. A lot of women ("radium girls") suffered from cancers induced by licking their brushes when painting luminescing instruments. This comic looks like 50s era when post the bomb sci-fi was full of "atomics" as the stuff of the future.