I believe they've actually developed nuclear plants that actually run off of nuclear waste, but the really useful innovation will never happen until the laws banning the building of home fission reactors...

I get the safety arguments, etc, but My thought is smaller reactors would produce less waste and call less fallout if they failed.

actually, I've been playing with the idea of making a small solar/nuclear hybrid, base on a video I saw a long time ago, think it was kipkay. He took a small bit of nuclear material from an old smoke detector and fastened over the end o of a webcam so you could see the radioactive decay. He had this idea you could use it as an actual random number generator, based on the data from the webcam.

I'm wondering if you could do something similar with a solar panel and the same material. Obviously you couldn't power a house or anything like that, but a portable phone charger that always had juice would be pretty cool. (dunno if it would be feasible, of course, just an idea...)