I think that was kind of a whimsical suggestion; like, even if you had a magical technology that eliminated all need for electrical wiring, you'd still only reduce building costs by a small amount.

Aerated concrete is extremely popular in Kazakhstan and Russia in private houses. It's cheaper than bricks, it's sturdy enough, it provides good insulation, it does not require much skill to use, pieces are huge, so it's much faster to build.

There are drawbacks, of course, but overall it's a very popular technology.

I thought the point about modular wiring was interesting. Why aren't all wall studs fitted with grommeted mouseholes at outlet and switch height?

Nuclear batteries have their place, but consumer products are not it.

First, you can’t switch them off, so they are either always warm or the are trickle-charging another storage system (batteries, capacitors, whatever) within the device.

Second, the radiation. You can do various things to limit the risk, but the LD50 is something like 0.25 watts of absorbed ionising radiation sustained for 18 minutes, so damage to the batteries (malicious or accidental) would have significantly greater harms than, say, asbestos, CFCs, or domestic carbon monoxide sources.

You absolutely do not want a 10 watt lightbulb powered by built-in atomic batteries anywhere it can get messed with, let alone a 2 kW kettle or a 5 kW oven.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acute_radiation_syndrome

> Nuclear batteries removing the need for electrical wiring seems very pie in the sky to me but perhaps I'm just ignorant of the practical application of it.

tl;dr very feasible sans NIMBYs

The DoE investigated this exact thing. I happened across the papers while browsing microfiche. It makes the most sense to serve a neighborhood off small house/shed sized generating facility. As you scale up you can switch to normal turbine operation, as you scale down you move back to thermoelectric operation. Single houses could be powered from thermoelectric piles but this would probably have been reserved for expensive, remote vacation homes.

Closer to battery sized, you can layer radioactive material against quantum dots that turn alpha particles into photons and emit those photons directly onto a PV cell.