11 ms·

The impossible dream of the nuclear-powered 1958 Ford Nucleon

78 points by kjhughes 5y ago

dang 5y ago
Past related threads: The Nucleon, Ford's 1958 nuclear-powered concept car that never was - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22836272 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22836272 - April 2020 (93 comments) Ford Nucleon - a nuclear-powered concept car from 1958 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4745123 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4745123 - Nov 2012 (47 comments)
Maxburn 5y ago
At least they covered the energy conversion problem. I've always thought it would be easier to skip the electric step and drive a steam engine to drive vehicle wheels directly. But of course capturing the expended steam to condense back down to water to feed the loop would be a huge problem. And if you don't do that all you did was trade your fuel source and still have a range problem with water tanks. A nuclear jet engine might be more interesting, directly heating / expanding the air for propulsion with only that single stage of energy conversion. Admittedly whatever is conducting the heat from the core to the air would have to be pretty exotic. Obviously I'm not an engineer and probably reading a little too much scifi.
- spijdar 5y ago
  Not sure if you're already aware, but attempts at making nuclear jet engines (for the purposes of putting on a jet aircraft) were attempted in the 50s. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aircraft_Nuclear_Propulsion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aircraft_Nuclear_Propulsion Allegedly, Russia finally managed to get this working in 2018, with a nuclear powered missile having "infinite range", although there appears to be no real open information besides Russia saying "we have it" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/9M730_Burevestnik https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/9M730_Burevestnik
- mikro2nd 5y ago
  There is no such thing as "too much scifi"...
SigmundA 5y ago
If only we had thermocouples with solar panel like efficiency...
- lr1970 5y ago
  > If only we had thermocouples with solar panel like efficiency... Thermocuples are still heat engines converting thermal energy (heat) into zero-entropy energy (electricity in this case). Second Law of Thermodynamics limits efficiency of all heat engines as per Carnot theorem [0]. No free lunch (aka perpetual motion machine of the second kind) [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnot%27s_theorem_(thermodynamics) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnot%27s_theorem_(thermodyna...
  - SigmundA 5y ago
    Not looking for perpetual motion only a compact solid state heat engine on par with others in effciency that would allow a small nuclear battery to work without the steam engine complexity issues. The mars rover uses a RTG that puts out 2000 watts of heat and only 100 watts of electricity. Get it to 20% efficiency like solar panel and you're talking 400 watts, 40% like a steam engine would be 800 watts.
- toss1 5y ago
  Exactly - and for about a million other purposes also! This [0] seems like a good survey - some progress is being made raising the efficiency into the mid-teens... [0] https://www.intechopen.com/books/green-energy-advances/thermoelectric-energy-harvesting-basic-principles-and-applications https://www.intechopen.com/books/green-energy-advances/therm...
cosmodisk 5y ago
What I like about that era is that companies were brave to think wild. Even if the car and it's workings are close to science fiction,I'm sure it generated absurd amount of press coverage + got lots of people really excited about the future. Look at Ford now: super boring company making ever bigger pickups.. Hardly any excitement could come out of it now.
- serf 5y ago
  >What I like about that era is that companies were brave to think wild. i'm not usually an advocate for such technologies, but self-driving cars are pretty wild -- at the very least they're a pretty large legal risk for those that are playing in that field.
  - sandworm101 5y ago
    Self-driving cars were already 'pretty wild' tech in 1950s. The tech might be a little more practical today, but it is a very old concept. "In the 1950s, the Radio Corporation of America (RCA) believed it had the self-driving car buckled up and locked down. The company’s quarterly magazine, Electronic Age , featured its vision of the “highway of the future” in its January 1958 issue." "About two and a half years later, reporters experienced the highway themselves on a test track located in Princeton, NJ. The cars drove themselves around the track, using sensors on their front bumpers to detect an electrical cable embedded in the road. The cable was equipped with signals warning of obstructions ahead, such as a stalled vehicle or road work, and the cars would autonomously brake or switch lanes, depending on what was up the road. A receiver on the dashboard would also interrupt the vehicle’s radio to announce information about upcoming exits." https://www.electronicproducts.com/throwback-tech-self-driving-cars-were-a-thing-in-the-1950s/ https://www.electronicproducts.com/throwback-tech-self-drivi...
    - fiddlerwoaroof 5y ago
      I wish there’d be more initiatives to make roads “legible” by self-driving cars: distinctive computer-readable markings, machine-readable codes on signs, etc.
0-_-0 5y ago
Now I know where the old Fallout games borrowed their car aesthetics from: https://fallout.fandom.com/wiki/Chryslus_Motors_Corporation#Products https://fallout.fandom.com/wiki/Chryslus_Motors_Corporation#...
- ergot_vacation 5y ago
  It's always fun seeing younger (or just less experienced) people come off the Fallout games and go "Wait, that was real? That actually happened?" Indeed it did. That's the fun of Fallout: it's only about 25% satire, and that's bananas.
  - 0-_-0 5y ago
    I wish the new Fallout games got that right so well!
cainxinth 5y ago
How did they plan on preventing core exposure in the event of a high speed collision?
- hugg 5y ago
  They didn't. They just made a model
  - cainxinth 5y ago
    I know, but surely they had to consider the possibility. There’s no mention of it in this article or the car’s Wikipedia article.
- ergot_vacation 5y ago
  One of the things I wonder every time this car gets brought up is what the fallout (heh) of an accident would actually be. I'm sure it would be bad, yes, but HOW bad exactly? The dose makes the poison after all, and a car-sized reactor is a lot smaller than a Chernobyl-sized one.
belorn 5y ago
Radioisotope thermoelectric generators are used to build car sized rovers, so the idea did have some practical application.
eloff 5y ago
So a typical nuclear reactor in a car is a terrible and unworkable idea. But what about an EV powered by nuclear batteries? Could that be economical or safe? You'd have pretty much unlimited range. http://www.bristol.ac.uk/news/2016/november/diamond-power.html http://www.bristol.ac.uk/news/2016/november/diamond-power.ht... My gut feeling is it can't compete with lithium ion batteries in terms of rate of discharge or economics. But if money was no object, I think it may be possible.
- duskwuff 5y ago
  "Nuclear batteries" aren't, strictly speaking, batteries. They're RTGs, and they have very low (and constant) power output relative to other energy sources.
  - moftz 5y ago
    It would take days to fully charge an EV from a typical RTG and there's no way an RTG could put out enough power to even keep an EV rolling on a flat highway at highway speeds. They are good for remote, unmanned stations but not much else.
    - jandrese 5y ago
      An RTG powered electric car may not be able to drive cross country at highway speed, but most cars spend the vast majority of their time parked. Having a RTG constantly top off the battery of an electric car would probably work quite well, assuming you worked out the many, many issues surrounding the RTG itself first.
      - stickfigure 5y ago
        A "large" RTG puts out a few hundred watts of electrical. A very efficient electric car might consume 25 kWh/100 miles, so about 250 watt-hours per mile. If your car sits parked 6 days per week, it might work. Also: RTGs are typically 3-7% efficient, so your trunk will put out thousands of watts of waste heat continuously. Hope you live in a cold climate.
Animats 5y ago
There were plans in 1954 for an atomic powered locomotive.[1] [1] https://books.google.com/books?id=bVMEAAAAMBAJ&lpg=PA78&ots=oNcGmhCvuD&dq=x-12+locomotive&pg=PA78&hl=en#v=onepage&q=x-12%20locomotive&f=false https://books.google.com/books?id=bVMEAAAAMBAJ&lpg=PA78&ots=...
tibbydudeza 5y ago
I seem to recall the Soviets and US thinking about nuclear powered bombers during the cold war. Sanity prevailed as they realized how to deal with crashes and protecting the flight and ground crew from getting irradiated. Ballistic missiles soon made use of bombers a moot point.
watersb 5y ago
Today, I am re-reading "Tom Swift and His Triphibian Atomicar". http://www.tomswift.info/homepage/atomicar.html http://www.tomswift.info/homepage/atomicar.html It's my favorite of the Fabulous Swifties. Keeping the dream alive.

78 points by kjhughes 5y ago

dang 5y ago

Past related threads: The Nucleon, Ford's 1958 nuclear-powered concept car that never was - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22836272 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22836272 - April 2020 (93 comments) Ford Nucleon - a nuclear-powered concept car from 1958 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4745123 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4745123 - Nov 2012 (47 comments)

Maxburn 5y ago

At least they covered the energy conversion problem. I've always thought it would be easier to skip the electric step and drive a steam engine to drive vehicle wheels directly. But of course capturing the expended steam to condense back down to water to feed the loop would be a huge problem. And if you don't do that all you did was trade your fuel source and still have a range problem with water tanks. A nuclear jet engine might be more interesting, directly heating / expanding the air for propulsion with only that single stage of energy conversion. Admittedly whatever is conducting the heat from the core to the air would have to be pretty exotic. Obviously I'm not an engineer and probably reading a little too much scifi.

spijdar 5y ago
Not sure if you're already aware, but attempts at making nuclear jet engines (for the purposes of putting on a jet aircraft) were attempted in the 50s. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aircraft_Nuclear_Propulsion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aircraft_Nuclear_Propulsion Allegedly, Russia finally managed to get this working in 2018, with a nuclear powered missile having "infinite range", although there appears to be no real open information besides Russia saying "we have it" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/9M730_Burevestnik https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/9M730_Burevestnik
mikro2nd 5y ago
There is no such thing as "too much scifi"...

SigmundA 5y ago

If only we had thermocouples with solar panel like efficiency...

lr1970 5y ago
> If only we had thermocouples with solar panel like efficiency... Thermocuples are still heat engines converting thermal energy (heat) into zero-entropy energy (electricity in this case). Second Law of Thermodynamics limits efficiency of all heat engines as per Carnot theorem [0]. No free lunch (aka perpetual motion machine of the second kind) [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnot%27s_theorem_(thermodynamics) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnot%27s_theorem_(thermodyna...
- SigmundA 5y ago
  Not looking for perpetual motion only a compact solid state heat engine on par with others in effciency that would allow a small nuclear battery to work without the steam engine complexity issues. The mars rover uses a RTG that puts out 2000 watts of heat and only 100 watts of electricity. Get it to 20% efficiency like solar panel and you're talking 400 watts, 40% like a steam engine would be 800 watts.
toss1 5y ago
Exactly - and for about a million other purposes also! This [0] seems like a good survey - some progress is being made raising the efficiency into the mid-teens... [0] https://www.intechopen.com/books/green-energy-advances/thermoelectric-energy-harvesting-basic-principles-and-applications https://www.intechopen.com/books/green-energy-advances/therm...

cosmodisk 5y ago

What I like about that era is that companies were brave to think wild. Even if the car and it's workings are close to science fiction,I'm sure it generated absurd amount of press coverage + got lots of people really excited about the future. Look at Ford now: super boring company making ever bigger pickups.. Hardly any excitement could come out of it now.

serf 5y ago
>What I like about that era is that companies were brave to think wild. i'm not usually an advocate for such technologies, but self-driving cars are pretty wild -- at the very least they're a pretty large legal risk for those that are playing in that field.
- sandworm101 5y ago
  Self-driving cars were already 'pretty wild' tech in 1950s. The tech might be a little more practical today, but it is a very old concept. "In the 1950s, the Radio Corporation of America (RCA) believed it had the self-driving car buckled up and locked down. The company’s quarterly magazine, Electronic Age , featured its vision of the “highway of the future” in its January 1958 issue." "About two and a half years later, reporters experienced the highway themselves on a test track located in Princeton, NJ. The cars drove themselves around the track, using sensors on their front bumpers to detect an electrical cable embedded in the road. The cable was equipped with signals warning of obstructions ahead, such as a stalled vehicle or road work, and the cars would autonomously brake or switch lanes, depending on what was up the road. A receiver on the dashboard would also interrupt the vehicle’s radio to announce information about upcoming exits." https://www.electronicproducts.com/throwback-tech-self-driving-cars-were-a-thing-in-the-1950s/ https://www.electronicproducts.com/throwback-tech-self-drivi...
  - fiddlerwoaroof 5y ago
    I wish there’d be more initiatives to make roads “legible” by self-driving cars: distinctive computer-readable markings, machine-readable codes on signs, etc.

0-_-0 5y ago

Now I know where the old Fallout games borrowed their car aesthetics from: https://fallout.fandom.com/wiki/Chryslus_Motors_Corporation#Products https://fallout.fandom.com/wiki/Chryslus_Motors_Corporation#...

ergot_vacation 5y ago
It's always fun seeing younger (or just less experienced) people come off the Fallout games and go "Wait, that was real? That actually happened?" Indeed it did. That's the fun of Fallout: it's only about 25% satire, and that's bananas.
- 0-_-0 5y ago
  I wish the new Fallout games got that right so well!

cainxinth 5y ago

How did they plan on preventing core exposure in the event of a high speed collision?

hugg 5y ago
They didn't. They just made a model
- cainxinth 5y ago
  I know, but surely they had to consider the possibility. There’s no mention of it in this article or the car’s Wikipedia article.
ergot_vacation 5y ago
One of the things I wonder every time this car gets brought up is what the fallout (heh) of an accident would actually be. I'm sure it would be bad, yes, but HOW bad exactly? The dose makes the poison after all, and a car-sized reactor is a lot smaller than a Chernobyl-sized one.

belorn 5y ago

Radioisotope thermoelectric generators are used to build car sized rovers, so the idea did have some practical application.

eloff 5y ago

So a typical nuclear reactor in a car is a terrible and unworkable idea. But what about an EV powered by nuclear batteries? Could that be economical or safe? You'd have pretty much unlimited range. http://www.bristol.ac.uk/news/2016/november/diamond-power.html http://www.bristol.ac.uk/news/2016/november/diamond-power.ht... My gut feeling is it can't compete with lithium ion batteries in terms of rate of discharge or economics. But if money was no object, I think it may be possible.

duskwuff 5y ago
"Nuclear batteries" aren't, strictly speaking, batteries. They're RTGs, and they have very low (and constant) power output relative to other energy sources.
- moftz 5y ago
  It would take days to fully charge an EV from a typical RTG and there's no way an RTG could put out enough power to even keep an EV rolling on a flat highway at highway speeds. They are good for remote, unmanned stations but not much else.
  - jandrese 5y ago
    An RTG powered electric car may not be able to drive cross country at highway speed, but most cars spend the vast majority of their time parked. Having a RTG constantly top off the battery of an electric car would probably work quite well, assuming you worked out the many, many issues surrounding the RTG itself first.
    - stickfigure 5y ago
      A "large" RTG puts out a few hundred watts of electrical. A very efficient electric car might consume 25 kWh/100 miles, so about 250 watt-hours per mile. If your car sits parked 6 days per week, it might work. Also: RTGs are typically 3-7% efficient, so your trunk will put out thousands of watts of waste heat continuously. Hope you live in a cold climate.

Animats 5y ago

There were plans in 1954 for an atomic powered locomotive.[1] [1] https://books.google.com/books?id=bVMEAAAAMBAJ&lpg=PA78&ots=oNcGmhCvuD&dq=x-12+locomotive&pg=PA78&hl=en#v=onepage&q=x-12%20locomotive&f=false https://books.google.com/books?id=bVMEAAAAMBAJ&lpg=PA78&ots=...

tibbydudeza 5y ago

I seem to recall the Soviets and US thinking about nuclear powered bombers during the cold war. Sanity prevailed as they realized how to deal with crashes and protecting the flight and ground crew from getting irradiated. Ballistic missiles soon made use of bombers a moot point.

watersb 5y ago

Today, I am re-reading "Tom Swift and His Triphibian Atomicar". http://www.tomswift.info/homepage/atomicar.html http://www.tomswift.info/homepage/atomicar.html It's my favorite of the Fabulous Swifties. Keeping the dream alive.