In other words, where do “nuclear powered” vehicles get their power from?
I imagine it’s not from fusion or fission, nor can it involve getting water to turn to steam, an in many other types of power generation.
So how does it work?
EDIT: it seems that nuclear submarines actually do use fission, so I’m switching my question to only focus on space vehicle power generation.
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> I imagine it’s not from fusion or fission
I’m not sure why you think that, but nuclear submarines do in fact have a compact yet fully-fledged fission reactor that boils water into steam to drive a turbine. Nuclear-powered space probes typically don’t have a reactor, but they have a device called an RTG (Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generator) that uses thermocouples to generate electricity directly from the heat of radioactive decay. RTGs supply only a trickle of power, but they are compact and long-lived and have no moving parts. There have been a handful of experimental nuclear fission reactors operated in space, typically using molten NaK metal instead of water as coolant, but none have flown since the late 1980s.
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