The part that jumped out at me as strange is that they claim their process generates electricity "directly" without having to drive a turbine. Supposedly they produce helium cations, and that can drive a circuit.
Can anybody comment on whether that makes sense?
Conventionally, neutrons are used to generate heat which is then used to drive steam turbines.
Thus you would capture the energy with a "reverse coilgun", "regeneratively braking" the particles down to a non-relativistic speed, rather than just using them to charge a capacitor plate.
Most fission plants throw away about two-thirds of their energy output as waste heat (according to: https://www.answers.com/Q/How_much_of_the_heat_generated_in_...), and their cooling towers are so much bigger than the reactor itself that they've become a symbol of the plants as a whole.
The cooling towers? The photographs in the news commonly show huge clouds of water vapor escaping from the tops of the towers with a picture caption about "nuclear" power or some such.
So, the suggestion is that nuke plants generate huge clouds of dangerous radioactive byproducts.
Such news content is easy: (1) Suggest that the cooling towers are the nuclear reactors and (2) don't mention that what is coming out is just water vapor, from water recently in some river or lake. Now the news people have their audience by their eyeballs for ad revenue and/or politics as in
https://www.peakprosperity.com/2019-year-in-review-part-1/#c...
“The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary.”
~ H.L. Mencken
https://www.exeloncorp.com/locations/power-plants/limerick-g...
The same imagery shows up on the covers of nuclear textbooks:
https://www.amazon.com/Nuclear-Engineering-Handbook-Mechanic...
If anything, laypeople think that radiation is scary because it's invisible, tasteless, and odorless.
In principle this could be more efficient than a heat engine, although the Wikipedia page seems to say that an "economically feasible" version would have around 60% efficiency, which is the same as a combined-cycle power plant.