
Ford Nucleon - a nuclear-powered concept car from 1958 - gnosis
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Nucleon
======
iyulaev
On a related note, I'm somewhat surprised that molten salt reactors don't get
much interest or press.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molten_salt_reactor>

It seems like they have many advantages over conventional water-based reactors
and are much, much safer to boot. Also the waste products decay quickly so
storing the waste for long periods of time is less of an issue. But I guess
anything nuclear is pretty much out of fashion today.

~~~
stewartbutler
A complete wild-ass guess -- those concerns are most important in small-scale
reactors, and the primary driving force behind small reactors is Navy
submarine use. At sea you are surrounded by water, so there is no reason not
to use it as your fluid. Adding salt would add another complication to the
supply chain.

I guess you could theoretically pull salt out of the water, but there is no
telling what impurities may be left. Reverse-osmotic water filtering makes
water so pure that it supposedly extracts minerals back out of your bones and
teeth, so impurities are no concern when it used as an exchange fluid.

~~~
iyulaev
The MSRs use molten salts in the sense of ionic compounds, not in the sense of
NaCl. They're talking about uranium flouride or liquid flouride thorium.

~~~
stickfigure
...which is one of the challenges of MSRs. Long-term high-temperature exposure
to corrosive flourine salts is a not-completely-solved materials problem.

------
BrianPetro
"I'm sure that in 1985, plutonium is available in every corner drugstore, but
in 1955, it's a little hard to come by."

I suppose Ford realized that having fissile material in every garage can prove
to be a bit of a hazard.

~~~
jobu
Thankfully there's the Mr Fusion Upgrade:
[http://www.oreillyauto.com/site/c/detail/EB00/121GMF.oap?key...](http://www.oreillyauto.com/site/c/detail/EB00/121GMF.oap?keyword=121gmf)

------
Aardwolf
In the 50's, people were actually dreaming of the future! Today, everything
seems so depressed instead.

~~~
majormajor
They weren't always good dreams! Make sure you're ready to Duck and Cover...

And as far as cars go, I'd rather have a self-driving car than a nuclear car.

------
ryangallen
As a former Ford test driver, I can tell you they are no longer going in this
direction.

------
givan
Research in this direction could provide us cleaner air in the cities and more
health.

Just one small change like this, nuclear instead of gasoline in the cars could
make a tremendous impact on our lives.

I think adding a new variable to the existing capitalist system along with
existing one and only, profit, something that takes into account health or the
ecosystem could change our lives dramatically.

Entrepeuners competing not only on cost and profit but also on health and
ecosystem impact could make a big difference to us and our planet.

It will be great that we finally realize how important stuff like this is and
focus more on research instead of using 100 year old polluting technologies
because there is no obvious pressure to move forward.

~~~
miahi
It's easy to forget that for a cleaner air in a city you can choose between
rendering half a city inhabitable because two cars collided (if they are
nuclear cars) or rendering a far away country inhabitable because of the
byproducts the clean car's components produced (lithium extraction, neodymium
magnets production, aluminium extraction and so on).

~~~
nnq
...you mean "uninhabitable" ...twice!

~~~
miahi
Yes! Sorry and thank you!

------
bhousel
What a crazy wheelbase. I can't even imagine what it would be like to drive a
car where the front wheels are behind the driver.

~~~
geon
I'm guessin it was done purely to make it look more futuristic, since the
reactor itself wouldn't really affect the design very much.

~~~
nkoren
Actually, the rear wheels were placed directly beneath the reactor to
accommodate its expected-to-be-significant weight. And the front wheels
couldn't be too far from the rear wheels, in order to support an appropriate
turning radius (without all-wheel steering). There was actually a modest
amount of real engineering done in support of this thing, and the wheelbase
was one of the results of that.

------
rjv
Ignoring the hazardous nature of something like this - how economically viable
would this be today? Let's say over a 10-year span driving 10,000 miles/year..
how much would I spend on gasoline at 30 mi/gal vs. plutonium?

~~~
mseebach
This thread suggests that a small power plant at 1.5 GW takes about 1500 kg of
uranium a year[1]. That's 13,140 GWh, or 0.114 kg uranium pr. GWh.

A regular car motor produces up to 90kW[2].

10000 miles at 40 mph average is 250 hours, or 2,500 hours over the 10 year.
It's low speed, so let's assume the engine runs at half the rated output on
average, 45kW, for a total of 112 GWh or 12.8 kg uranium.

The classroom stuff is $90/kg[3], or $1,152 total fuel costs for ten years.

1: <http://www.physicsforums.com/showthread.php?t=360052>

2: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nissan_SR_engine>

3: <http://www.chemicool.com/elements/uranium.html>

Edit: more importantly, though: nuclear reactors are very poor at variable
power output, so they are a bad fit for cars. Perhaps long haul trucks.

~~~
uvdiv
Appreciate the effort, but there's some huge errors there. The reactor you
mention will fission 1,500 kg of _one_ isotope, U-235 -- out of some ~50,000
kg of nuclear fuel (3-5% U-235, rest being useless U-238), and 300,000 kg of
mined uranium (mostly U-238, most of which is thrown away in enriching from
0.7% to 3-5% U-235 fuel). OTOH, your classroom uranium cost is for natural
uranium, 0.7% U-235. So you're underestimating cost by 2 orders of magnitude
at least.

Here's real numbers from the industry [1]. You use $90/kg. They say on the the
order of $3,000 per kg of reactor-grade UO2, which is $60,000-$90,000 per kg
of the U-235 isotope.

On the flip side, you're greatly overestimating fuel usage (your assumptions
are equivalent to about 6 mpg mileage), and you have a unit error where you
accidentally multiplied by one thousand (45 kW * 2,500 hours = 112 MWh, not
GWh!). So the figure is about 1/3,000x yours: about 5 grams U-235, or 100
grams reactor-grade fuel, or 1 kg of natural uranium. Costing on the order of
$300.

This doesn't apply to (imaginary) nuclear cars. With reactor-grade fuel, you
need hundreds of tons of uranium, and hundreds of tons of moderator, to get a
critical reaction. This won't fit into a car. The only way to approach a
reactor this small is to use highly enriched fuel -- "weapons-grade", which is
not sold at petrol stations. This is how they miniaturize reactors to fit in
submarines and space satellites (like [2], not an RTG).

If you _did_ try to build a car like this, it be pathologically wasteful. The
amount of HEU would need to be several kg or more, to have a critical reaction
at all. But because a car uses so little power, you would burn less than 1% of
it (several grams) over hundreds of thousands of miles. Extrapolating (using
[3]) enrichment costs ($150/SWU from [1]), the fuel cost would be on the order
of $300,000. And almost entirely wasted.

[1] <http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf02.html>

[2]
[http://www.etec.energy.gov/Operations/Major_Operations/SNAP_...](http://www.etec.energy.gov/Operations/Major_Operations/SNAP_Overview.html)

[3] <http://www.wise-uranium.org/nfcue.html>

------
petercooper
What bothers me most about that car is what way round it is. It says the
engine is at the back but if that end were actually the front, it'd look
pretty stylish, like an SLR McLaren Stirling Moss.

~~~
stewartbutler
Seems like a horrible idea to have a nuclear reactor in your primary crumple
zone -- most high-speed collisions would be front-end collisions.

~~~
lucisferre
It's clearly just a horrible idea to have a nuclear reactor in your car. I'm
not sure worrying about where it's placed is even necessary at that point.

~~~
petercooper
I guess being at the back you could have an airbag style system that propels
the reactor into the sky like an ejector seat if there's a crash. Just don't
drive in any tunnels or under bridges..

~~~
lucisferre
I'm picturing all those times they ejected the warp core of in Star Trek.

------
bduerst
What I don't understand is why nobody has tried to put together a nuclear
reactor + stirling engine in cars yet.

An engineering buddy and I tried doing the math for getting cars up on the
same configuration, but quickly realized that albeit each vehicle would
contain miniscule amounts of uranium, someone could buy up a bunch of them and
aggregate a large amount of uranium (bad).

For trains or large hauling vehicles it would be perfect, but most of the new
trains/rail receive their electricity via some track delivery mechanism
anyways.

~~~
whatshisface
Freight trains in America have no way of getting electric power from the rails
in a safe manner. If you could actually build a train-sized power plant, it
would work wonderfully.

Interesting fact: For engineering reasons, the engines in the trains do not
directly connect to the wheels. Instead, they operate generators that power
electric motors attached to the wheels. Installing a nuclear power plant would
be as simple as adding another car to the train and changing around some
wires.

------
guscost
If this car (and a budget) was available I would buy one just to support the
technology, like many electric vehicle owners do today.

~~~
btipling
Could you imagine the impact it would have on traffic if every car accident
had to involve radiation containment? Why would you support this? It could
take hours, or perhaps millennia, to clear the road.

------
simba-hiiipower
ah, the second i read that title fallout 3 came to mind..

always wondered about its feasibility; interesting to see it was based on a
real-world concept (though a very unrealistic one at that).

though i wonder how life would be different if nuclear really had gained
traction and supplanted fossil-fuels as our primary energy source.. today a
concept like this seems laughable (to me anyway), but i'm thinking given the
atmosphere back then and considering all the promise nuclear held, it wouldn't
have been that ridiculous to imagine a time when mini-reactors could be
powering passenger vehicles. i know the science behind it is far more complex,
but just like computing devices have evolved and gotten increasingly
smaller/safer/more-reliable over time, so too could nuclear reactors i
imagine..

------
zerostar07
Interesting how the designer tried to keep the reactor away from the driver. I
'm sure it's a safe distance. OTOH, the lack of doors is baffling.

------
gambiting
On a slightly related note - Russia tested and flew a nuclear-powered plane.
It had hardly any shielding and all pilots that flew it have already died from
cancer. US also flew a plane with a working reactor on board,but it wasn't
powering the plane.

The design was finally abandoned not because it was impossible to do - quite
the contrary. Both US and Russia had working nuclear-powered engines. But it
was deemed too dangerous to actually use. In case of a crash a large area
would be contaminated.

So the only possible application for a nuclear engine is on a intercontinental
missile carrying nukes, because you don't care about the fallout and it would
have unlimited range.

~~~
Someone
Even there, I guess the risk is deemed too high. ICBM silos typically are not
built on the border of your country, and even if they were, those rockets
could still crash in your country or in a friendly or neutral country they
pass over en route to their target. That unlimited range isn't worth much,
either, as conventional rockets already have sufficient range (as long as we
are targeting things on earth) Finally, I suspect it is cheaper and easier to
build and maintain a conventionally powered ICBM than to build a nuclear
powered one.

------
Create
...Boeing does make rovers.

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curiosity_rover#Specifications>

------
jnsaff2
This is a perfect troll.

Post something mildly interesting or controversial from wikipedia. Mind you
does not have to be new or newsworthy.

People click on it and fall into the wikipedia loop, reading about related
topics clicking around wikipedia semi-aimlessly.

Wastes a ton of time and kills a man-month or so of productivity (or more at
HN scale). No good comes of it except people feel entertained.

~~~
drcube
Jesus, it's a short, nerdy wiki article. I wonder what you must think of
Hollywood?

