Tiny Nuclear Power: Penn State’s Portable “Nuclear Battery” for Earth and Space
Inside a gray shipping container, quiet as a parked truck, there could soon pulse a miniature star. Yes, I’ve definitely watched too many movies, it’s true, and yes, I also have a weird fear of shipping containers, but that’s not why I wrote about this. I don’t mean a little flame you could cup in your hands either, or a coal glowing in a hearth, but the tamed heartbeat of nuclear fire: condensed, sealed, packed away with the patience of decades.
For about a century now, nuclear power has been about who can build it bigger (how masculine of it). Giant domed reactors looming over rivers, cooling towers venting steam into the sky, blue pools of spent fuel, the larger the better. The dream was always scale, the promise that bigger machines meant cheaper electricity eventually (eventually being the key word here).
Now, though, the pendulum is swinging small. We’re finally bending our ear toward the dream of the micro-reactor, a nuclear battery that could be set down like a crate and left to illuminate a city block, a research base, or the first footprints on Mars.
Tiny Magic
As someone who is just an inch and a prayer above 5 feet tall, I’ve always had a thing for the small. Penn State University has a similar passion it seems, as it’s one of the pioneers exploring this shift toward small-scale nuclear power. In collaboration with Westinghouse, they’re studying the deployment of the eVinci microreactor: a system roughly the size of a shipping container that can operate autonomously for up to eight entire years without refueling.
Unlike conventional reactors, which require teams of operators, constant monitoring, and elaborate cooling infrastructure, eVinci is designed to be self-regulating. Its heat pipes transfers energy without moving parts, reducing the risk of failure. The reactor is also sealed in a specific way so that it could be delivered by truck, set down on a concrete pad, and switched on without constructing an entire nuclear facility around it.
The appeal is obvious, but worth stating. It’s decentralized, transportable, and a low-maintenance nuclear energy that could change how we power our future. A town in Alaska or a forward operating military base could benefit enormously from this. Don’t forget that data centers currently consume megawatts day and night, and even a lunar station in the perpetual shadow of a crater will need a ton of energy to keep it alive.
Each could, in theory, be powered by this “nuclear battery.”
I totally get it though, there’s something a little uncanny about shrinking the atom’s fire into something so portable. A star that once demanded an empire’s architecture that now fits inside a steel box might be a little eerie to wrap your mind around.
It’s the same strangeness we feel when holding a seed though. Within that tiny husk is an oak, or a sunflower, or an entire field of wheat, just shrunk down to potential and hope. A nuclear microreactor is a seed of light. It can be planted in frozen tundra or Martian regolith, and it will bloom into warmth and power.
Or think of lanterns.
For most of history, we carried around flame in glass that was unequivocally fragile, always flickering, and easily snuffed. Then came the magical bulb, and the fluorescent tube, and the LED no bigger than a grain of rice. Now, with eVinci, we are on the cusp of a lantern that glows with the splitting of atoms themselves instead oil or tungsten.
The paradox is delicious and a little bit terrifying: something so small, holding something so immense.
Places I think would benefit most from this tech:
Remote communities in places like Alaska or northern Canada, where energy costs can be cripplingly high. Villages depend on diesel generators, with fuel hauled in by barge or small plane at staggering expenses. A single microreactor could replace an endless convoy of fuel drums, giving steady, carbon-free power for years.
Disaster relief zones when hurricanes knock out grids or earthquakes topple infrastructure, power is often the first thing lost and the last restored. Hospitals fall back on sputtering diesel reserves in these situations. A nuclear battery, dropped in by truck or helicopter, could stabilize entire communities in the days after catastrophe hits.
Data centers could also benefit from these in pretty life-changing ways. Our digital lives are ravenous. Artificial intelligence training runs consume as much electricity as small towns. Data centers are expanding faster than grids can supply them. A microreactor, silent and steady, could anchor a server farm, keeping it lit without straining local infrastructure.
Probably the most poetic of all uses though would bring us to the Moon and Mars. Solar power falters in dust storms or during the endless nights of lunar craters. Batteries are too heavy to ship in bulk, but a nuclear battery…compact and sealed, nice and long-lasting…could glow like a hidden sun, sustaining greenhouses, life-support systems, and even laboratories on alien soil.
One of NASA’s chief engineers once remarked that “power is the currency of space exploration.” If that’s true, then microreactors are the gold coins we may carry to new worlds.
Technology isn’t only about what it can do; it’s also about whether people believe in it.
A microreactor doing its thing in a far-off valley may be scientifically safe, but if the villagers nearby don’t trust it, the project fails before it even begins. Trust is harder to engineer than steel, and harder to maintain than uranium. Communities scarred by past nuclear accidents carry generational memories that no glossy brochure can erase. The glow of a reactor, no matter how contained, sometimes conjures images of mushroom clouds instead of lantern light.
Policymakers have to work to balance data with psychology, because acceptance is built not just on kilowatts but on confidence. Engineers can measure shielding thickness, but sociologists measure fear. For nuclear batteries to take root, their makers have to engage with our stubborn tendency to be afraid of the things that we don’t understand, not just with regulators.
The Economics of Small Suns
A nuclear battery promises low operating costs, but the road to deployment is paved with immense upfront expense. It’s pricy to make tiny suns, which is a sentence I never expected to write, but also one that makes complete sense to me.
Building, testing, and certifying a portable reactor is a billion-dollar ballet of permits and prototypes. Diesel is dirty, but it’s cheap; solar is intermittent it’s true, but it’s subsidized by the government. Microreactors have to compete on economics, not just in physics.
If the first communities to brave them see lower bills, we’ll most likely see them spread like fire through dry grass. If they see higher costs or delays, the dream cools. Economists remind us that energy transitions are not about technology alone, they’re also about markets, subsidies, and political winds (we’re in the middle of this in America right about now).
A star in a box is only useful if someone can afford to keep the lid closed and the light flowing. Though engineers design these reactors for peace, history loves to point to otherwise. The same portability that makes them ideal for disaster zones makes them tempting for battlefields. A forward base lit by a microreactor doesn’t need fragile fuel convoys, and in that efficiency lies strategic power. Every military use would deepen civilian suspicion though. I mean, if these are weapons’ tools, could they ever be neighbors’ tools?
The Philosophy of Fire
From Prometheus stealing flame to Oppenheimer quoting the Bhagavad Gita, nuclear fire has always been more than power, it’s also myth and a firey symbol.
A portable reactor isn’t only an engineering artifact, it’s also a philosophical one. It forces us to wonder: what does it mean to hold the stars in our pocket? I love to think of someone out there, carrying a sun on the back of a truck. Are we shrinking the cosmos into commerce?
Philosophers warn that every tool reshapes the hand that wields it, and it’s true that fire gave us civilization, but also ash.
Nuclear power gave us electricity, but also shadows etched into Hiroshima’s walls. The microreactor condenses that paradox into a shipping container, maybe the deeper question isn’t can we carry fire this way, but should we. In that pause, that hesitation that lives in my bone marrow, people out there are busy revealing both our wisdom and our fear.
History is filled with accidents born of politics, shortcuts taken too soon, and human error. What if a microreactor is damaged in transit? What if one is stolen?
Theft is a big one. It’s not absurd to ask if hostile people could repurpose them. Could nations skirt treaties by cloaking enrichment programs under the guise of micro-reactor research?
The word “nuclear” still carries ghosts: Hiroshima, Chernobyl, Fukushima.
It’s one thing to dream of a portable sun, it’s totally another to live beside it.
A Star to Carry Around
This is really what progress always feels like though, a mixture of awe and unease. It’s why I’ve always been drawn to new inventions and the curious. A technology that could save us, or haunt us, depending on how we cradle it is what great novels are written about and what philosophers dream of.
A nuclear battery isn’t a candle or a coal furnace, it’s a seed of the stars themselves, compressed and shrunk into our hands. We may tuck it into the corner of a village, or the cargo bay of a spacecraft, and walk away knowing it will burn quietly for years. It could be the matchstick humanity carries into the dark, enough light to guide us, but fragile if mishandled. Our new lantern, just a little more hot.
We are, once again, children playing with fire. The question is whether this time, at last, we’ve learned to tend it.
Related Reads You Might Enjoy:
The Psychology of Tiny Things: Why We Love Miniatures, Dolls, and Dioramas
This New Material Pulls Drinking Water Straight Out of Thin Air
Digital Synesthesia: When AI Starts to Sense the World Like We Do
Other reads for a deeper dive:
“eVinci™ Microreactor.” Westinghouse Electric Company, 2024, https://www.westinghousenuclear.com/evinci-microreactor.
World Nuclear Association. “Small Nuclear Power Reactors.” World Nuclear Association, Aug. 2023, https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fuel-cycle/nuclear-power-reactors/small-nuclear-power-reactors.aspx.
