The Nucleon, Ford's 1958 nuclear-powered concept car that never was
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"The [statement] that the heat released by the complete fission of one pound of nuclear fuel is equivalent to that obtainable by 1400 tons of coal (or 300,000 gallons of fuel oil), has led to some erroneous conclusions. The fantastic possibility has been envisaged of including in an automobile enough fissionable material, about the size of a pea, to last the life of the vehicle. In order to realize why this is not within the bounds of reality, it is necessary to understand something about the fission process."
Glasstone -- Principles of Nuclear Reactor Engineering (1955) [1]
[1] https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015003994194&vi...
Asimov's fiction had quite a bit of arbitrary nuclear devices
I find it rather unlikely he was a wife beater considering what I've read about the relationship with his ill wife. It seems far more likely this is gossip spread by folks on a mission to slander great men of the past. If you can't provide any actual evidence backing that claim, you should really refrain from spreading such things IMHO.
https://thebaffler.com/outbursts/surely-youre-a-creep-mr-fey...
Obviously, Wikipedia isn't a reliable source, but it's not particularly contested that Feynman was a wife-beater to Wife No. 2.
Nothing in that paragraph even contests that he did physically abuse her....?
Cruelty can come in many forms beyond physical trauma.
"The divorce had a fleeting life in the national press--not because Feynman was a celebrity, but because columnists and cartoonists could not overlook the nature of the extreme cruelty: Prof Plays Bongos, Does Calculus In Bed. "The drums made terrific noise," his wife had testified. And: "He begins working on calculus problems in his head as soon as he awakens . . . He did calculus while driving his car, while sitting in the living room and while lying in bed at night.""
As far as I can tell they went through that route so they could get a quick divorce and not have to go through a cooling-off period.
It is alleged here on Page 64.
This is testimony of his ex-wife - take that as you will.
We saw a movie where they talked about the future which showcased nuclear powered cars. They may have even used the Ford design but I no longer remember. After the tour they had a Q&A so I asked about the validity of nuclear powered automobiles. What happens in the event of a bad crash? Do we just not use that particular intersection for the next hundred years?
The guy absolutely mocked me and was very derisive. On the ride home I will never forget the teacher told me that I'd asked a legitimate question and the guy was totally out of line. I think at the time I was maybe 8-9 years old.
It was also presented in a Home Economics class, not even the science class. I suspect that even the least of the science teachers would have eviscerated that demo.
A Teknika Molodezi (a popular science journal from USSR) from around late fifties told that... "by the year 2000, every soviet housewife would have a nuclear reactor"
Remember, that was in times when electricity linkup for a household was still a relative luxury. Even in Moscow back then, it was very normal to live in an apartment with very poor, irregular electricity supply, or none at all.
I do vividly remember pictures of possible applications, like powering a fridge, providing heat, hot water, or steam for house cleaning... or cooking.
Only at the very end, there was a bit of scepticism "it now appears that advances in metallurgy open a clear way to making a reactor as small as a stove, but material science has not yet found a way to contain radiation that is not as bulky, heavy and expensive as lead or uranium"
They actually envisioned having a true reactor under the hood.
An actual fission reactor generating steam would indeed be the best most likely, when you ignore small stuff like emergency cooling, all the control mechanisms and shielding. ;-)
The issue is that weight is the enemy of flight, and nuclear shielding is heavy. The US was working on distributed shielding: instead of being centralized around the reactor, messing with the CG, it was spread out.
[1] https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015001555146&vi...
Another fun fact, if you've heard of molten salt reactors (MSR) or the associated thorium fuel cycle, you should know that almost all of the tech development related to those projects came from the program to develop nuclear-powered aircraft. The first MSR was called the Aircraft Reactor Experiment (ARE) [2]. The second one, the famed MSRE, was built in the building that had been entirely funded and built for the air force project, using mostly parts and certainly the expertise built by it.
[1] https://www.osti.gov/biblio/1048124-comprehensive-technical-...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aircraft_Reactor_Experiment
That looks like some sort of bio-mechanical abomination descended from Cthulhu.
https://www.flickr.com/photos/lhoriman/3763287997/in/album-7...
https://www.flickr.com/photos/lhoriman/3763298693/in/album-7...
The lead-lined railroad locomotive was pretty cool too:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/lhoriman/3763363831/in/album-7...
(there's a few more if you click through to the album)
There's some revisionism in the Wikipedia article, but you can still make out the outline intent.
https://i0.wp.com/farm4.static.flickr.com/3314/4554374811_dc...
Tupolev Tu-119 ... had two conventional turboprop engines and two direct-cycle nuclear jet engines, and got around the shielding weight issue by simply not including it.
This made my day.
"...radiation shielding, which was one of the main concerns for the engineers. Liquid sodium, beryllium oxide, cadmium, paraffin wax and steel plates were used for protection."
Clearly, the Soviets weren't suicidal. They were obviously looking for lightweight ways to shield the neutron radiation, which is very damaging to both humans and electronics. The gamma radiation would still reach the crew, but attenuated by the distance. Gamma isn't too bad, because little of it is absorbed.
> a young technician, took only three years to die
Well, that wasn't radiation poisoning (it kills within days or not at all), and it wasn't cancer (that takes longer to develop). What was it? Ethanol poisoning?
https://www.fantasticfiction.com/s/hilbert-schenck/steam-bir...
Apparently they know for sure that 20 000 will be able to mingle in Amsterdam on Oct. 1.
And just a few years after the famous Hill Valley lightning storm in 1955!
Maybe it's just that it's the only nuclear powered car I can think of. Oh wait, that sucker's electrical. It just needs the nuclear reaction to generate the 1.21 gigawatts for the flux capacitor!
"Does it run like on regular unleaded gasoline?"
"Unfortunately, no. It requires something with a little more kick: Plutonium!"
"Ah, Plutonium. Wait a minute, are you telling me that this sucker is nuclear?"
"Hey hey hey! Keep rolling! keep rolling there! no no no no! This sucker's electrical! But I needed a nuclear reaction to generate the 1.21 gigawatts of electricity I need"
I should try that in public. No, those aren't nuclear plants over there. They're electrical! They just use nuclear reactions to generate the electricity you need.
I've always thought that the possibilities of radioisotope thermoelectric generators were under-utilised. They would be amazingly practical for off-grid living. Surely it must be possible to make a relatively safe one by packing it inside a solid metal case and then burying it in the ground outside your home.
I wonder how far an EV could travel with an RTG in the trunk.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-mission_radioisotope_the...
RTGs are good for low maintenance, which is why they are used for unmanned space probes, unattended lighthouses, etc.
> I wonder how far an EV could travel with an RTG in the trunk.
About the same distance they could with an inert mass of similar mass in the trunk.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00295450.2017.1... (Found it)
An intentional nuclear explosion is air exploding because it's heated by a nuclear reaction. Chernobyl was water exploding because it was heated by a nuclear reaction. It's the same thing, but it's also a steam explosion. Is that paper saying "Chernobyl was not an ordinary boiler failure"? Of course it wasn't.
What happened, as commonly understood, is that the reactor was in a state where it had a positive temperature coefficient. The insertion of the graphite-tipped control rods added reactivity, it became super-critical, and thanks to feedback, the power spiked to an order of magnitude more than the design power. All that heat flashed the water in the pressure channels to steam, which blew the top off the reactor. A steam explosion caused by heat from a nuclear reaction.
Now what the hell is a "critical explosion", what is "a nuclear jet", and how is a "nuclear explosion" not the sudden expansion of water or air?
I don't know much about nuclear physics (particle yes, nuclear engineering no).
Huh, I guess it was this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chrysler_Turbine_Car
Wrt. nuclear - while nuclear on Earth is pretty much done away (at least for fission, for fusion - well, once somebody develops a laser pulse efficiently fusing proton+boron it probably can have a chance), the space is the true nuclear domain. In particular i think that launch window and flight time limits of flying to Mars would naturally lead to nuclear powered LEO-to-Mars Starships.
The Hybrid system was already a pretty big ask for the car companies and developing a novel compact hardy turbine at the same time was just too much. Plus hybrids are seen as more of a stepping stone to pure electric vehicles so you might put a ton of time and energy into developing it only to have the entire concept become obsolete in only a few years.
Don't be too sad though, turbine technology does live on, the M1A1 and M1A2 Abrams main battle tank. It's the reason for the incredible land speed but also ridiculous fuel consumption and enormous IR signature.
They're not common in my city, but there's (only) one on the bus line that drives by my house. It's only a bit louder than piston engines buses, but the sound is very distinctive so you can hear it from a mile away.
> General Motors at one time manufactured a bus powered by a gas turbine, but due to rise of crude oil prices in the 1970s this concept was abandoned. Rover, Chrysler, and Toyota also built prototypes of turbine powered cars, Chrysler building a short prototype series of them for real-world evaluation. Driving comfort was good, but overall economy lacked due to reasons mentioned above.
It’s light, powerful and can run on petrol, diesel, jet fuel - but at pretty poor mpg.
Edit: Crikey - about 5 gallons to the mile!
What could possibly go wrong?