What if Nuclear Cars are Feasible?

 There is 100% a much cooler car technology that nobody has found because they murdered science in 1945. 

 I use nuclear cars as an example since 'muh radiation' is such an obvious superstition. It's blocked by fundamentalism. Whether it is also blocked by practicality is irrelevant - more on this later.

 You can make real good nuclear batteries, "10 times more than the specific energy of commercial chemical cells." The problem is power. They last absolutely forever - 100-year half-life means this one lasts like 50 years before significant declines in power output - which means it's 10x capacity divided by 100 years, so 0.1 of the normal-battery capacity is the total annual output. 

 What you need is fast decay isotopes. These obviously can't be stored. You could generate them, though. 

 Hence, imagine this: instead of having a carburetor, you have a cyclotron, and it generates radiation on-site from slow-decaying isotopes like nickel-63. Hey presto, nuclear car.
 This means you have your 10x energy density less cyclotron running costs, but refuelling is still some kind of fluid, meaning it doesn't take hours. Perhaps a particulate suspension. Imagine a Tesla with 8x the range. Now you're cooking with nuclear gas.

 But nobody can prototype this, because muh radiation. The whole point of beta radiation is that you generate a current by capturing it, it's not [multiple feet of lead] gamma radiation. Maybe the math works out, maybe it doesn't. It would definitely be a cool novelty if the math doesn't work out.

 As I've mentioned before, we should at very least have personal blimps. Speaking of radiation, alpha radiation is basically helium manufacturing. Hydrogen is a better lifting gas, but it's like 20-25% better. If your alpha radiation's alpha use is generating heat for power, then the helium might even have a negative cost. Is it like [muh hindenburg] but it's not like flammability is totally irrelevant. 

 What else?

 What does 1 microwatt per cubic centimeter mean? It means to get a full watt you need a million of these things, which is 1 cubed meter. To get a kilowatt you need a thousand meters cubed...which is ten meters on a side. Not even your whole basement. Bonus: avoid the health-sapping aura of of AC current, no Faraday cages required. Terrible for any movement technology, totally fine for a stationary building. 

 Yeah this is not cost effective. Nuclear batteries are hardly cheap...someone should have done this for a novelty. Either get power-efficient appliance, enlarge the basement for 2 kW, and voila, go off the grid for the rest of your life, give or take a major earthquake. In 100 years it will need maintenance, and then you can just keep going. (I would build a secondary basement.) Doing things for novelty regularly leads to figuring out how to do them at profitable cost levels.

 Long-distance power transmission is high-voltage for efficiency. Hey, what's that: "However, the idle voltage of the device was way too high—tens of kilovolts—and the current was too low for practical applications." Is it possible to make a power plant that's just an array of nuclear batteries? Well, not an AC plant, probably, no. Admittedly that's less a dead-science issue than a tyranny and freedom issue. AC is not used because it's better, it's used because politics and DC is illegal. The tyranny is upstream of science being murdered....