Commercially, Nanite Systems has employed a variety of methods for powering our vehicles, devices, automata, and spacecraft. The following are the most prominent and relevant.

Nanite-assisted biometabolism


Also known as a voltaic metacell, this uses synthetic bacterial enzymes to simulate complete anaerobic and aerobic respiration in a completely contained vessel. For most reactors of this type, maintenance to reverse entropy and replace the chemical substrates involved is required approximately every 1200 days, but with nanomechanical repair of the enzymes and substrates, as well as regular electrical charging, NS has developed a metacell storage device that is expected to lose 1% of its peak voltage and power output only once every three million recharges, or 2700 years for a typical eight-hour battery.

Nanite-assisted bubble fusion (sonofusion)


Achieving unity with cold fusion, much less above-zero energy gain, was widely held to be a myth until 2005 when Taleyarkhan et al. successfully demonstrated a mechanical intervention method to stabilize acoustic cavitation. Modern nanotechnology-mediated bubble fusion depends on programmed nanoparticles that help to both nucleate the cavities and trigger actual fusion using their unique and variable thermokinetic properties.

Casimir generator


Discovered in the mid-twentieth century, the Casimir effect is a physical phenomenon whereby two non-polarized metal plates in close proximity produce up to 100 kPa of relativistic van der Waals force between them. Through careful construction of nanomaterials this relatively weak phenomenon has been scaled up dramatically, yielding a permanent power source adequate to fulfill the negative energy requirements of Thorne traversable wormhole drives and Alcubierre drives. Miniaturization of such technologies appears to be impossible, and they are generally unsafe to operate inside of a planetary atmosphere due to the relativistic hazards they generate, as well as the complications of spacetime curvature produced by strong gravitational fields.