Tiny Nuclear Power: Penn State’s Portable “Nuclear Battery” for Earth and Space

Inside a gray shipping container, quiet as a parked truck, there may soon pulse a miniature star.
Not a flame you could cup in your hands, nor a coal glowing in a hearth, but the tamed heartbeat of nuclear fire: condensed, sealed, humming away with the patience of decades.

For a century, nuclear power has been about enormity: domed reactors looming over rivers, cooling towers venting steam into the sky, blue pools of spent fuel.
The dream was always scale, the promise that bigger machines meant cheaper electricity.
But now, the pendulum is swinging small.
Humanity is bending its ear toward the whisper 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 perhaps the first footprints on Mars.

Grounding and Self Regulating

Penn State University is one of the pioneers exploring this shift toward small-scale nuclear power.
In collaboration with Westinghouse, they are studying the deployment of the eVinci microreactor: a system roughly the size of a shipping container that can operate autonomously for up to eight 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 transfer energy without moving parts, reducing the risk of failure.

The reactor is sealed in such a way that it can 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: decentralized, transportable, low-maintenance nuclear energy.
A town in Alaska.
A forward operating military base.
A data center consuming megawatts day and night.
Even a lunar station in the perpetual shadow of a crater.

Each could, in theory, be powered by this “nuclear battery.”

The Poetry of Scale

There is something uncanny about shrinking the atom’s fire into something so portable.
A star that once demanded an empire’s architecture now fits inside a steel box.

It is the same strangeness we feel when holding a seed.
Within that tiny husk is an oak, or a sunflower, or an entire field of wheat.
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 human history, we carried flame in glass: fragile, flickering, easily snuffed.
Then came the 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 not with oil or tungsten, but with the splitting of atoms themselves.

The paradox is delicious and terrifying: something so small, holding something so immense.

Applications for Use Include:

Remote communities:
In places like Alaska or northern Canada, energy costs can be cripplingly high.
Villages depend on diesel generators, with fuel hauled in by barge or small plane at staggering expense.
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.
A nuclear battery, dropped in by truck or helicopter, could stabilize entire communities in the days after catastrophe.

Data centers:
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.

Space:
Probably the most poetic of all: 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, sealed, long-lasting…could glow like a hidden sun, sustaining greenhouses, life-support systems, and 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.

The Weight of Trust

Technology is never only about what it can do; it is also about whether people believe in it.

A microreactor humming in a far-off valley may be scientifically safe, yet if the villagers nearby don’t trust it, the project falters before it begins.
Trust is harder to engineer than steel, 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, may conjure images of mushroom clouds instead of lantern light.

Policymakers must balance data with psychology, because acceptance is built not on kilowatts but on confidence.
Engineers can measure shielding thickness; sociologists measure fear.
For nuclear batteries to take root, their makers must engage not just with regulators but with the human spirit itself.

The Economics of Small Suns

A nuclear battery promises low operating costs, but the road to deployment is paved with immense upfront expense.

Building, testing, and certifying a portable reactor is a billion-dollar ballet of permits and prototypes.
Diesel is dirty, but it is cheap; solar is intermittent, but it is subsidized.
Microreactors must compete not just on physics but on economics.

If the first communities to host them see lower bills, adoption spreads 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 are about markets, subsidies, and political winds.

A star in a box is only useful if someone can afford to keep the lid closed and the light flowing.

The Shadow of Militarization

Though engineers design these reactors for peace, history whispers otherwise.

The same portability that makes them ideal for disaster zones makes them tempting for battlefields.
A forward base lit by a microreactor does not need fragile fuel convoys, and in that efficiency lies strategic power.
But every military use deepens civilian suspicion: if these are weapons’ tools, can they ever be neighbors’ tools?

Critics argue that blurring the line between civilian and military reactors risks undoing decades of non-proliferation work.
Advocates counter that dual-use is inevitable, that nearly every technology from GPS to the internet began in uniform.

The nuclear battery is no exception.
Whether it becomes a lantern of peace or a torch of war depends less on the physics of neutrons than on the politics of nations.

The Philosophy of Fire

From Prometheus stealing flame to Oppenheimer quoting the Bhagavad Gita, nuclear fire has always been more than power: it is myth, it is symbol.

A portable reactor is not only an engineering artifact, it is also a philosophical one.

It forces us to ask: what does it mean to hold the stars in our pocket?
To carry a sun on the back of a truck?
To shrink the cosmos into commerce?

Philosophers warn that every tool reshapes the hand that wields it.
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.
Perhaps the deeper question is not can we carry fire this way, but should we. And in that pause, in that hesitation, humanity reveals both its wisdom and its fear.

The Unease

But the dream of a nuclear lantern comes with shadows.

Waste…even the smallest reactor produces spent fuel.
It must be stored, shielded, and safeguarded. A container-sized reactor still leaves behind centuries of radioactive legacy.

Safety…designers claim these systems are “walk away safe”, that is, they can shut themselves down without human intervention.
Yet history is filled with accidents born not of physics but of politics, shortcuts, and human error.
What if a microreactor is damaged in transit?
What if one is stolen?

Theft is a big one. Portable reactors raise uncomfortable questions.
Could hostile people repurpose them?
Could nations skirt treaties by cloaking enrichment programs under the guise of micro-reactor research?

Trust. Communities may resist having a nuclear device parked in their backyard, no matter how safe engineers claim it to be.
The word “nuclear” still carries ghosts: Hiroshima, Chernobyl, Fukushima.

It is one thing to dream of a portable sun. It is another to live beside it.

A Star to Carry Around

Perhaps this is what progress always feels like: a mixture of awe and unease.
A technology that could save us, or haunt us, depending on how we cradle it.

A nuclear battery is not a candle.
It is not a coal furnace.
It is a seed of the stars themselves, compressed and offered 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.

We are, once again, children playing with fire.
The question is whether this time, at last, we’ve learned to tend it.

Sources:

“eVinci™ Microreactor.” Westinghouse Electric Company, 2024, https://www.westinghousenuclear.com/evinci-microreactor.

Pennsylvania State University. “Penn State Partners with Westinghouse on Microreactor Research.” Penn State News, 21 June 2023, https://www.psu.edu/news/research/story/penn-state-partners-westinghouse-microreactor-research/.

Howell, Elizabeth. “NASA Looks to Nuclear Power for Future Moon and Mars Missions.” Space.com, 5 Mar. 2022, https://www.space.com/nasa-nuclear-power-moon-mars.

U.S. Department of Energy. “What Is a Microreactor?” Office of Nuclear Energy, 8 July 2022, https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/what-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.