I'm sure this was always a bit tongue-in-cheek and/or just non-technical salespeople drumming up some hype. Here we are talking about it many decades later. The 1950s reactor designers certainly were not that stupid. In fact, a 1955 textbook on nuclear technology says this in its intro:
"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]
On the other hand, Feynman On Patents is a good overview of why these ideas would be thrown about: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rc9gwPB78lk (& well, we did end up with nuclear submarines)
Asimov's fiction had quite a bit of arbitrary nuclear devices
Thank you for sharing this link. Somehow I've never stumbled upon it. I am a big fan of Feynman ( his book were invaluable when I was studying physics in the university )
I have suspicion Feynman is a "don't meet your heros" type person - There's Feynman the very great scientist but then there's also Feynman the egotistical misogynistic alleged wife beater.
> there's also Feynman the egotistical misogynistic alleged wife beater
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.
Feynman did not return to Cornell. Bacher, who had been instrumental in bringing Feynman to Cornell, had lured him to the California Institute of Technology (Caltech). Part of the deal was that he could spend his first year on sabbatical in Brazil.[123][108] He had become smitten by Mary Louise Bell from Neodesha, Kansas. They had met in a cafeteria in Cornell, where she had studied the history of Mexican art and textiles. She later followed him to Caltech, where he gave a lecture. While he was in Brazil, she taught classes on the history of furniture and interiors at Michigan State University. He proposed to her by mail from Rio de Janeiro, and they married in Boise, Idaho, on June 28, 1952, shortly after he returned. They frequently quarreled and she was frightened by his violent temper. Their politics were different; although he registered and voted as a Republican, she was more conservative, and her opinion on the 1954 Oppenheimer security hearing ("Where there's smoke there's fire") offended him. They separated on May 20, 1956. An interlocutory decree of divorce was entered on June 19, 1956, on the grounds of "extreme cruelty". The divorce became final on May 5, 1958.[124][125]
Obviously, Wikipedia isn't a reliable source, but it's not particularly contested that Feynman was a wife-beater to Wife No. 2.
"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.
Wait what? Do you have a source for this? The only thing approaching misogyny that I'm aware of with Feynman was his playboy phase after his wife's death.
I'm pretty sure I've told this story on HN before. When I was a wee lad we took a school trip to the Enrico Fermi nuclear plant South of Detroit.
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.
In the 7th grade we had a representative from the local atomic plant come and visit. She demonstrated "here's a spent fuel pellet-- see that it pegs the geiger counter, but so does this piece of Fiestaware!"
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.
I do remember something similar, but back from the union.
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"
I think the joke is that there were no Soviet housewives in the year 2000 anymore, so the statement "all Soviet housewives now have a nuclear reactor in their home" is correct.
In Asimov's Foundation series you see similar references to housewives having "nuclear knives" for slicing meat like in a deli, as well as washing machines I think
From the title, I thought this was in reference to a car powered by a radioisotope thermoelectric generator, like the kind used in spacecraft and some lighthouses. But the article mentions being powered by uranium pellets, and wikipedia confirms "The car was to use a steam engine powered by uranium fission similar to those found in nuclear submarines"
They actually envisioned having a true reactor under the hood.
RTG powered car could work, but the electrical power available would be rather small, they have horrendous power to weight ratio. Steam turbine powered by heat from the radio isotopes would work better, but would still be very very expensive due to cost of the isotopes.
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. ;-)
Slightly related: I wasn't aware of this until last year, but at one point nuclear-powered jet aircraft were a thing. Think cold-war jets, always ready to counter if the other side strikes, that could stay aloft for a month or more.
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.
Ah, my favorite topic. There was a $1B (1950s dollars) program in the 1950s to make these. It led to vast nuclear development. Some good reading and pictures on it are in this huge report [1]. I particularly like this image: https://whatisnuclear.com/img/nuclear_rocket.jpg
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.
Indeed! Those HTREs in the lot were prototypes for this particular engine. The parking lot is for the Experimental Breeder Reactor I, the first reactor in the world to make electricity. It was cooled with sodium-potassium eutectic liquid metal. Really amazing museum now.
Don't forget Project Pluto - a nuclear powered ramjet on a cruise missile would have circled close to ground level irradiating huge areas after flattening them with supersonic shock waves.
There's some revisionism in the Wikipedia article, but you can still make out the outline intent.
Funny you should mention it. A similar hypothetical weapons system is deployed against Cthulhu in the excellent short story A Colder War by Charles Stross.
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.
Ruined some people's day though - next paragraph: "We had all been irradiated, but we ignored it. Of the two crews, only three men survived- a young navigator, a military navigator and me. The first to go, a young technician, took only three years to die".
Funny how someone who is not a radiologist can blurt out nonsense and nobody questions it. If you follow the link to the main article:
"...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?
The DOE land on which ORNL sits has a massive stand that they used for testing of this idea. They'd suspend a reactor to test shielding effectiveness. You can see it from a few spots on I-40/I-75 and on Highway 95 going by the lab's west entrance.
I wonder what the feasability would be like for an unmanned version nowadays - no need for shielding during flight (although you're basically flying a dirty bomb around).
The Russians claim to have made such a system. They also claim nuclear powered torpedoes. It is not 100% clear how far they really are. However, there was detectable accidents, so they are at least really trying. It ain't all bluff.
Years ago, I read decent alternate-history piece of fiction, set in a world where nuclear-powered bombers were put in service by the United States Air Force:Steambird
Anyone else reminded of the DeLorean from Back to the Future? It's got that circle kind of thing in the back where the fuel goes? Same for the Mr. Fusion!
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!
Ha. Later in my nuclear career, I realized the genius of Doc's claim:
"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.
It's amazing that this actually used (or was supposed to) a real fission reactor.
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.
> I've always thought that the possibilities of radioisotope thermoelectric generators were under-utilised. They would be amazingly practical for off-grid living.
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.
One problem with RTGs is you can't throttle them. They're going to produce that amount of power, no more and no less, according to their decay curve, whether you have a use for it or not.
The design of a nuclear bomb is necessarily very different from the design of a nuclear reactor. You could have a reactor that blows itself up from internal pressure (like Chernobyl did) but one not with any sort of nuclear (or even conventional explosive of the same size or weight) force.
There is a paper somewhere that actually suggests that Chernobyl might have contained a (small) nuclear detonation at the beginning. Not being a nuclear physicist I can't really critique 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.
Yeah, and that phrase has no meaning. Especially "critical explosion" is nonsense, because "critical" in the context of a nuclear chain reaction means "steady state".
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?
See, that's exactly the problem. They tack on "nuclear" and "critical" to empty phrases so they sound scary to people who know nothing about nuclear fission. Thanks for confirming.
I genuinely can't. We are ridiculously lucky that all we have to worry about in that range is limited blast and relatively easy to put out fire. The old country has a high amount of natural gas powered cars. Since they require user to be a little more careful during pumping, gas station attendant was mandated to it for you.
I remember my teacher in high school saying GM or Ford developed a turbine-based car that had the standard list of amazing features and never needed repairs, but it was quashed by the mechanics union (or some other similar conspiracy theory).
Turbines have great power to weight ratios but very poor efficiency at low loads (cruising on the highway is a low load). GM actually seriously considered this along with Chrysler and it was abandoned due to the oil crises.
> 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 is strange though that turbine based hybrid cars (in series or range extender configuration) haven't emerged in the recent years. It would be best of the 2 worlds - a small lightweight turbine as a generator would work in the most optimal mode, and the torgue/etc. characteristics of the car would be that of the electric motor.
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.
None of the car manufacturers have experience with turbine manufacture (except I guess Rolls Royce, and they don't build Hybrids).
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.
There are gas turbine based buses and trucks used in eastern Europe where LNG imported from Siberia is plentiful.
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.
"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...