Nuclear powered Planes, Trains and Automobiles
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- Опубликовано: 24 авг 2024
- To quote L.P Hartleys 1953 book “The GoBetween”, “The past is a different country, they do things differently there”.
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That’s definitely something that could be applied our attitude to the newly discovered atomic power in the late 1940’s and 50s.
Within just a few years after the first atomic bombs had been dropped on Japan, it seemed as though the atom would the cure all our all our energy needs with power “too cheap to meter” as was once quoted.
Whilst ships and submarines of the leading navies went nuclear, companies put forward ideas for atomic powered planes, trains and yes, indeed automobiles.
The first idea of using a radioactive power source for a car, in this case, Radium, dates back to 1903 and in 1937 further analysis of the concept thought that it would need 50 tonnes of shielding to protect the driver. But with the development of the small self-contained reactors for ships and submarines in the 1950’s, the idea of atomic cars was back on the table.
In 1958 Ford unveiled a Uranium powered concept car called, with a typically 1950’s futuristic name, the Ford Nucleon. In essence, it was a scaled down submarine reactor in the back of the car which would heat stored water into high-pressure stream which then drove two turbines, one which provided the power to the wheels and the other which drove an electrical generator.
Ford engineers anticipated that it would have a range of about 5000 miles before you would need to nip into your local Ford dealers for the uranium core to be swapped out for a new one.
The passenger compartment was situated over the front wheels allowing the bulk of the reactor and the heavy shielding to be more centrally placed and to keep you as far as possible from the reactor.
As was the optimism of the 1950’s and the naivety of the general public, it was believed that nuclear power would eventually replace petrol power in the future.
Something which doesn’t bear thinking about if imagine that a car crash could turn into a major nuclear incident.
Ford only ever made scale models of the Nucleon as they anticipated the miniaturisation of the reactors and lighter shielding materials. As these didn’t appear and with the public’s increased awareness of radiation and nuclear waste, the project was dropped and the models ended up in the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Michigan.
Now if you thought that the Ford Nucleon was a bit far fetched just look at the French Simca Fulga, a 1958 concept car designed by Robert Opron. This was meant to show how cars might look in the year 2000, powered by a nuclear reactor with voice control and guided by radar and an autopilot which communicated with a control tower. At over speeds of 150 km/h two of the wheels would retract and it would balance on the remaining two with the aid of gyroscopes.
Also in France in 1957-58, the Arbel-Symétric was proposed with either a gas generator or 40Kw nuclear reactor called the “Genestatom”. This would use radioactive cartridges made from nuclear waste. However, the French government disapproved of the use of nuclear fuel in cars and the development stopped.
Of all the land-based forms of transport, Trains were the most likely candidates to be nuclear powered, especially those travelling across large areas where electrification had not been done.
In the US, a nuclear-powered locomotive called the X-12 was put forward in a design study for the Association of American Railroads and several other companies by Dr Lyle Borst, one of the early members of the Manhattan project, which created the first Atomic bomb.
Title: Adam Are You Free?
Author: P C III
Source: www.pipechoir.com
Nightingale sounds from Gerry Gutteridge flic.kr/ps/Mk2zU
License: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0
7:57 General Electric=General Atomic
What would you say if I told you that there is a real General Atomic, and that they have been around since 1955?
That's probably where the name came from
@@Techblaze21654 probably, although tbh I didn't know that they were a thing until i looked into it a bit
Still exists in the Fallout universe!
@@davidmagann1805 came here to find this comment
2:32 "voice control and radar" they weren't wrong..
Just about 20 years or so off
It's not truly radar, just passive infrared sensors.
@@scottiebones It is truly radar. For example Bosch produces Radar Sensors for modern cars.
😯
True story... I was a research and development electronic technician in 1970 and my boss was an electrical engineer who told me that he worked for 13 years on a government project making a nuclear airplane. After a couple reactor melt downs they perfected the reactors and engines, met all specifications, and even had the airplane sitting in the research hanger ready to install the engines and take the first test flight. The day of the first test flight and after waiting 13 years, when they showed up for work they were informed the project was cancelled. He told me that he really believed that the plane was still around and ready to fly. The only limit on the flight time was food and water and the sanity of the flight crew.
The plane could land and the crew and food could be cycled every few weeks.
I had read that the US actually flew a nuclear powered plane but it irradiated everything behind it. Asked an old engineer I knew that worked on stuff like that in Nevada. He laughed and shook his head and said, "That thing was a mess!"
... and you can go see the engines today at the EBR-1 National Historic Landmark about 30 minutes west of Idaho Falls, Idaho. They are massive things, about three stories high. inl.gov/experimental-breeder-reactor-i/
All I had read about was a proposal for nuclear powered aircraft, comparing them on an economic basis. The comparison was between a nuclear powered aircraft vs conventional, at masses of 2000 ton and 4000 short tons, and seeing what range would allow for more cargo to be carried cheaper. (As a comparison, the max takeoff weight of a 747 is ~500 short tons, while the AN-225 is ~700 short tons)
@Ian Mangham Thanks, updated!
The nuclear power sources on remote science missions aren't the same as the ones used in power stations or submarines. They are radioisotope thermoelectric generators. They work by capturing the heat from the passive decay of the radioisotope, not by the neutron stimulated decay. Because of this, they can only output a tiny fraction of the power/weight of nuclear reactors.
Was gonna say this, glad someone else was paying attention :p
I can't stand it when people call RTGs as reactors.
Even a battery is technically a reactor. RTGs are basically magic hot rocks minus the magic...maybe.
Mike mf Panik indeed a battery is a reactor it combines an anode cathode and closed electrical circuit to create a chemical reaction. But there is no active reaction in a RTG, the isotopes release heat no matter what at a constant rate. The vessel does not change this decay in any way. Therefore RTG is not a reactor.
You're right, but I want to point out that fission is very different form decay. Fission happens when a neutron hits an atomic nucleus and splits it into two smaller nuclei, while decay occurs when an unstable atomic nucleus spits out a particle via the weak force. Decay events are always random, while fission events can be controlled via the number of neutrons flying around.
Meanwhile in an alternative universe.. all cities have been wiped out due to car crashes
or just waiting in traffic behind rows of nuclear reactors -
asdaffewwerqa asafdaqwrad Russian dash cam videos would be even more entertaining in this universe :D
Probably more so, just much higher rates of cancer lol.
Nuclear Reactors are much cleaner for our enviornment then conventional engines
atvkid0805 ask Russia and Japan, about how clean they are, New York almost found out as well.
Fallout vibes :D
59 years left
Yeah lol
AHHH, there’s a deathclaw in the room
Grab your rad away and rad x we are going in
Fallout is commin'
My car is fusion powered
Millions of years ago some plants stored some energy from a huge fusion reactor then eventually got buried
No way! Mine too!
It's animals you dolt not plants
@@tthung8668 "No"
It's plants. Fossil oil is from plants.
@@zolikoff Depends on the fossil fuel. Petroleum and natural gas comes from phytoplankton and zooplankton while coal and methane comes from plants.
Nuclear Smart Phone!!, there you go!
That would certainly give new fire to the "cell phones cause cancer" people.
glows in the dark!
Honeyyyyyy try not to drop the phone or you will wipe us all ))))
And yeah.. phone crash test will be only in arizona desert ))))
Dbrand promotion: ( spare us for the sake of jesus )))
Betavoltaic Strontium-90 batteries!
cafeta what of you drop it and it breaks
We kind of *DO* use nuclear powered cars if you have an electric car and a nuclear power plant.
David Buschhorn lol. very indirectly so. :)
Even more indirectly, conventional planet-raping cars burn fossil fuels which store energy from the giant nuclear fusion reactor in sky that reached Earth millions of years ago.
My car is solar powered! Millions of years ago, ancient plants sucked up the sun's energy and stored it in the ground as they died and got buried...
My car is Big Bang powered!
+David Hill: Fission? Nah. Fusion!
When Fallout was This close to becoming reality
50s and 60s, what a weird and exciting era
and I think its the best looking era
racism era💀
> Fallout
Antonluisre ?
I thumbs down to keep it 76. :)
Now we know why cars explode like mini nukes when we shut them. xD
@@uku4171 It did work; 2-years ago, ...for 20mins.😉
I also thought of that
2:33 lol, how cars might've looked in the year 2000! But by 2005, we were supposed to have hover boards and Autobot City!
they look like george jetson's car :))
and btw, where is my flying car?
To be fair, only a dozen years after 2000 or so, we do have autopilot and other things like that. They were not too far off in that regard.
yea and by 2000 we were already suppose to have manned mission to Saturn ! :D but i think it makes sence that people thought so with all the moon landings and etc. they thought technology would advance faster than what we have now.
Marius Snow it's more about economy and political commitment, than technology. With our technology we could do unimaginable right now, if not for lack of finance.
Sadly, a flying car's cost isn't as nice as its concept.
These sound like extra juicy targets for terrorists and military bombing targets
Would still use this over diesel
@@jimboonie9885 Why?
A correction: the nuclear power on the Space probes come from nuclear-powered GENERATORS. Not Nuclear REACTORS.
They operate off of the decay heat of certain radio-isotopes. Namely Plutonium-238 (though Strontium-90 is a decent secondary candidate).
While these things are great for space travel, they are literally just solid-state devices, with a lump of radioactive material decaying and emitting heat, and a bunch of thermocouples harvesting about 1000-2000 watts of thermal energy into about 100 watts of electricity.
They are not small nuclear reactors - just generators. They do not use sustained fission chain reactions, and they can never be scaled up to provide the tens, hundreds, or thousands of kilowatts necessary to perform transportation tasks. This is an improper analogy, and your very well made video would be improved if this allusion was removed.
Well said. Thank you for bringing this to light.
That's absolutely 100%... correct, actually.
The only way any space probes past Mars (and recently Jupiter with Juno) have conveyed any information to Earth is through antennae powered by RTGs. The overall SNR you can from a transmitted signal is a function of both the transmission power and receiver power - so with large enough antennae arrays on Earth, and straight empty space from here all the way to Pluto, we can pick up these signals.
Communications engineering is a really interesting subset of electrical engineering. But I'm not quite sure I understand what point you wanted to make here. My comment was on the lack of scale-ability for RTG - it's a very reliable, inefficient, low-power method that generates a lot of waste heat (good for keeping computers warm enough to function) and a little bit of power (enough to run small computer, camera, a few instruments, and an antennae - often not all at once). Can you clarify what exactly you wanted to discuss here?
To clarify on my end - my insistence on needing kilowatts or megawatts of power refers to running ion engines of any appreciable amount in order to transport larger ships. (Or to power a ship with a human crew, growing food, recycling oxygen, etc.) Ion drives work by accelerating gas to speeds hundreds or thousands of times faster than rocket fuel propellant would leave. Which is great - you can get a lot more push off of the same propellant mass.
But moment exchange is (mv) - mass and velocity are directly related, while kinetic energy is (1/2mv^2). So if I want to double my momentum gained from ejecting a kilogram of propellant, I need to double the ejection velocity, and thus I'll double my delta-v. But to double the velocity, I have to put in 4x as much energy. Very quickly, ion engines start to have very large power budgets, and a few dozen or hundred Watts from an RTG just won't be up to the task. Micro-adjustments for deep space satellites - perhaps. But nothing that would involve large probes or human transportation.
Anyway, an RTG just can't be scaled up to create kilowatts or Megawatts of electricity. It just becomes impractical. You need a full nuclear reactor, that is producing energy from fission events - not regular nuclear decay.
Actually, electricity in nuclear plants comes from a generator too. The generator is basically a set of big magnets spun by a turbine driven by steam heated by the nuclear reactor itself.
What's used in spacecraft is called a Radiothermal Generator or RTG, and while it also uses heat said heat is from decay not fission, and the way its converted into electricity is more technical.
@@nnelg8139 that's more of wording than technicality
The Car at 2:30 reminds me at the Car developed by Homer Simpson
Ha ha yes! I wonder if it was inspiration
HAHAHA yeah that's what I've been thinking since my childhood
The Homer!
A great video, very well composed and produced. I really like your work!
I love your name! Would you happen to be related to Dr. Strangelove?
"Yea, your suffering shall exist no longer; it shall be washed away in Atom's Glow, burned from you in the fire of his brilliance."
Praise be to ATOM! May division find us both Brother.....
5000 miles is a pretty unimpressive range considering the complexities of trying to shove a nuclear reactor into a car.
Some things were just never that practical.
Nuclear powered trains seem like they would still have made some sense. But at scales below that it just seems... A rather questionable use of technology.
(and aircraft have weight issues.)
Still, even with trains, the idea is rather niche compared to just using an electrified rail network and powering that from nuclear power (or whatever else you may have handy.)
I'm with the trains! That niche is definitely there. I'm thinking "Belt and Road Initiative" territory, developing vast barren areas. You see a lot of this in videos from China about new bridges and railways and highways... they often seem to be in surprisingly blank terrain, where it seems like there's nothing but gravel to the horizon....
Exactly and you need to fill up water too of course. The amount of miles I do I'd be replacing the reactor fuel every odd week
What about boats? Some already are 100% nuclear powered
Weight issue with planes? The nuclear powerplant, if compact, would be lighter than a heavy load of jet fuel for a long flight. And consider people from low-lying island countries at risk from rising sea-levels due to climate change. Telling those people that a plane that burns normal jet fuel is mor okay than one that burns uranium; is like telling a rape victim that rape is okay, or telling a badly traumatized war veteran (the Iraq War produced plenty of those!) that we should glorify war.
@@justushall9634 It's not the weight of the reactor that is the issue. It's the weight of the shielding. Unless of course you like getting hit with 1000 rems of radiation of course.
So thats why the cars in Fallout explode like nuclear bombs...
just saying the explosion is way to small to create a nuclear mushroom cloud just saying
@@markkostecka1454 Yeah, also the plasma shouldn't be neon green and lasers shouldn't be red, like Shoddycast said, it's an artistic choice for the fallout universe
@@sebdom7850 the plasma should be purple and the lasers could be any color depending on the Crystal /glass used to make the colour
@@markkostecka1454 Interesting, the lasers can be that (but they also are a lot slower than they should be), the plasma being green I considered difference between our universe and the Fallout universe, like how radiation can mutate people and be less likely to give them cancer, laser guns having recoil and fusion technology being easier create
@@sebdom7850 the laser guns are Like the ones in star wars but the real life eqivilant is the size of a us battle ship turret and goes the speed of light
I always enjoy Curious Droid's well-researched videos.
I must object to this video stating that US space probes use nuclear reactors, as those are not nuclear reactors. Thermoelectric generators are not able to be throttled and are fairly low powered (considering that the thermoelectric effect is not efficient).
RTGs are classed as nuclear reactors based upon their use of plutonium as a fuel source, not how they generate power.
So, a photoelectric button battery would get categorized as a nuclear reactor, simply because it includes plutonium? What if it contained enriched uranium, instead?
The difference between a reactor and an RTG is that a reactor operates based on sustaining an atomic chain reaction (hence, reactor), but an RTG operates by the natural decay of radioactive materials (hence, not a reaction and so not a reactor).
Richard Alexander Nailed it Rick. I was thinking the same thing when he basically said RTG's were nuclear reactors. Now I don't have to post an explanation myself. Thank you. :)
Yeah... That last sell part of the wonders of future unshielded nuclear transportation was a bit iffy...
They did launch one satellite using a fission reactor: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SNAP-10A
I’m still waiting for the narrator to say,
“Outstanding move”
Two could-have-been's not mentioned: Project Pluto, a nuclear-powered, nuclear armed cruise missile that used a nuclear ramjet engine, would fly at over Mach 3, at very low level. So low in fact that the shockwave from its passing would kill or cripple anyone directly under it - which would have been a mercy, as it would've been spewing lethal levels of gamma radiation behind it. It would be armed with 15 one megaton nuclear bombs that it would use TERCOM and astro-navigation to fly to targets and deploy. Then, once all fifteen warheads were ejected, it would find a final target, shut down the oxygen flow over the reactor, and circle the target slowly. The reactor, now no longer receiving cooling air blasting over it, would melt down. Molten plutonium would literally rain out over wherever the missile was circling, until it ran out of airspeed and crashed creating a permanently uninhabitable crash-site.
The other was equally as horrifying _seeming_ but actually quite neat. The Orion project would've used nuclear bombs for propulsion in deep space. By ejecting a nuclear explosive out of the back of a spacecraft shielded by essentially a large "plate", the spacecraft would've been propelled by the oomph of the bombs going off behind it, eventually pushing it to tens of thousands of miles an hour.
A low-flying Pluto wouldn't kill people from the shock wave, it would kill them by bombarding them with neutrons from the unshielded reactor. Also, one idea for Project Orion was indeed horrifying: it was to use it as a gigantic nuclear missile which would lob a humongous hydrogen bomb high over the USSR whose blast of light and radiation would basically fry a whole continent from space. Closest thing to a Death Star we ever dreamed up, and scared the crap out of President Kennedy and the Orion engineers who just wanted to explore the Solar System.
thedungeondelver The Orion Project: Deep space exploration for astronauts who really want to give the remaining population of Earth a giant middle-finger as they boldly go where no one has gone before...
@@RCAvhstape Such bright explosion would make a hole in the Ozone layer which is naturally decayed by UV from our Sun at a slow rate. Nobody would be stupid enough to blow a hole in our own atmosphere's protective layer! People would drag them by the ear and kick them out of office right?
He did a video on Orion. About 800 nuclear explosions to get one launch vehicle into space.
I'm a big fan of next gen nuclear power but the idea of using it directly in transportation is just stupid.
Daniel Thompson not if it's done smart, it would be great in airplanes, buses, heavy construction equipment and even trains but I agree small cars should just run on electricity because they don't need much torque.
So what happens when that plane crashes? An accident that involves release of nuclear material in a stationary MSR is more or less inconceivable, but put it in a plane and the risk is non zero.
Daniel Thompson with todays technology we could put designs into test in modern computers, that way you would know the best way to construct a very safe nuclear reactor for planes.
Firstly flying is inherently risky. You can make it very safe but never 100% safe. Secondly there is no need for it, we don't need planes that fly for weeks at a time these days.
I never said there's need for it, neither that it would be 100% safe. What I said is that it can be done and it could be safe, would it be worth it? I don't think so
explain thorium reactors and alternative space lunch ideas such as skyhooks ,mass drivers,and slingatron
plz
it would be cool
mmm... space lunch.
For alternative Space lunches look by at "Tested". For Space Launch methods look up "Isaac Arthur"
Hello can you hear me now Isaac Arthur's stuff is great!
Seems like people in the 40s and 50s viewed nuclear power the way we view IoT - most people think everything is better when connected, no downsides at all.
Most people? Are you sure?
Just like IoT, it was a security disaster.
Yeah people thought 2001 would be a utopia. 1 date. 9/11/01.
@@herbertdaly5190 Yes most people. Also everyone loves the cloud. Cloud cloud cloudy cloud
@@herbertdaly5190 Yep, most pepole
Remember Juicero?,why would a Juicer, fridge or toaster need internet conection?
Last year I was on a trip to see the 2017 eclipse, taking a road trip to the western US. One of the places we stopped was EBR-1, one of the first-ever nuclear power plants. Outside, they actually have two hulking constructs filled with pipes and scaffolds and a large central cask. These are actually testing armatures to mount a nuclear reactor and several J-43 engines with fuel systems converted to use, rather than combustion, nuclear energy as heat to sustain jet thrust.
The whole construct was on rails that ran along the desert wastelands that served as the testbeds for America's burgeoning military in the early Atomic Age. It really seemed a shame that we lack planes or trains that run on nuclear. Shame it seems it would never really work.
Mr secretary: "We need to planes flying soon as possible."
Engineers: ".. but sir, the pilots will all die of radiation poisoning."
Mr secretary: "Meh.. the pilots are all expendable. There's plenty more where they came from. Fuckem."
Engineers: "..Uhh.. right. Ok then."
Your videos truly are a pleasure to watch. Yet another one I thoroughly enjoyed. Please keep making them.
Great video, but a few comments: Spacecraft do not use _nuclear_ (fission)power plants to generate electricity, but _radiological_ ones that rely on alpha or beta decay. There have been a few test reactors flown in space, but all practical spacecraft either use RTGs or solar.
I was also a little disappointed you didn't mention the type of nuclear reactors tested for Aircraft Reactor Experiment. At least in the US, the reactor tested was a _molten salt reactor_ that used liquid fuel. All the other reactors mentioned here (I believe) used solid fuel elements and either water or sodium metal for cooling. But the aircraft reactor, because the fuel was dissolved in a molten salt, could operate at higher temperatures (and thus higher efficiency), low pressure (and thus less deadweight), and, in a land-based power plant, be practically meltdown-proof because the fuel was already fluid and not solid uranium or uranium oxide.
Building on the Aircraft Reactor Experiment, the scientists at ORNL ran the Molten Salt Reactor Experiment from '65 to '69 with great success, and this design forms the basis for one of the Gen-IV reactor types proposed in 2002 and are in active development today.
Cheers! :D
Pyre Vulimorph; he correctly stated that the reactor proposed for the X-12 nuclear locomotive also used a liquid fuel; name weapons grade uranium in a sulfuric acid "soup." Refueling the reactor would have consisted of replacing the soup mixture; the old mixture would have the waste products removed so it could be used again.
This again. Soviets flew fission reactors to space and even dropped one on Canada.
Year-:2015
Country-: India
..." Safety features include Driver's airbag as standard across all variants!!"
They made a TV show about a super-wide nuclear powered train traveling around the US. It was called Supertrain! The show was really bad but the model they used for exterior shots of the train was vary cool.
5:36 NBC's SuperTrain? (It was supposed to be 'The Love Boat' on rails) The scale model wrecked during shooting. Would have made a nice Disaster of the Week movie. ALSO...Did you remember the nuclear vehicle from 'The Big Bus'?
Let's not forget the 1960's bat mobile. Robin was quoted as saying ATOMIC BATTERIES to power turbines to speed ready to move out. Then batman would say roger. So the batmobile was powered by atomic batteries. What ever the heck that is.
The novel on which the movie 'When World's Collide' was based had a sequel. On the now defrosted planet they discovered mostly intact advanced alien technology which included rechargeable automobiles. In a manner not explained by the author the batteries combined radioactivity and electricity. Written in the 1930s they had no idea how atomic energy would work.
A real life "atomic battery" is a radioisotopic thermoelectric generator, or RTG, like the ones flown on space probes. They are basically a thermocouple wrapped around a substance like plutonium or strontium 90 which generates heat from decay. The whole thing is encased in shielding to survive a launch failure and is quote safe to handle if built right, but not very efficient for the weight. So they are good for powering a space probe's electronics, but to power an electric car they'd be kind of weak and heavy.
In a 1960s encyclopedia (The annual update?) they had a radioisotope, a phosphor and a photovotaic cell act as a battery for low power applications.
Must not have panned out.
The radiation degrades the PV cell?
The Big Bus: The greatest, most under-rated movie of all time... Hollywood is probably getting to remake it...
The fallout franchise: "let me introduce myself"
Thorium cycle reactor was developed initially as power source for planes, and gave quite promising results.
i really like how these clips are so straightforward and then thats it. right to the point.
5:13
The Nazis called. They want their Breitspurbahn idea back
the nazis would have added a huge cannon to the train i Imagine.
@@ucitymetalhead no there was an actual idea for a railway system with 3m rail width
“After the Fall of communism in Russia in the late 1980s”...actually, the fact is the USSR was dissolved on 26 December 1991.
You could argue that communism died before the USSR dissolved, with perestroika and glasnost. I'm not sure when both were first even mentioned though.
"Fall" does not necessarily mean "end" when discussing history, as the latter is more acute, while many a thing and much time contribute to a fall.
Thank you so much for always making these awesome videos for us. I really appreciate your hard work. Greetings from Germany :)
2:35 that was so accurate, it's spooky!
IMO the biggest applications for nuclear technology should be terrestrial power generation and space travel. We already have one of these, and the US has successfully tested a nuclear thermal rocket engine.
Nice documentation, well explain, fine work. Bravo.
In case I didn't already comment on it...space probes do not use miniature reactors. They use RTG's which are essentially to heat what a solar cell is to light. The decay heat from a small amount of plutonium (or another element) is directly converted to electrical power.
Wonderful work.your all videos are knowledgdable.
There was a satirical movie from the 70s, a "Greyhound" Bus was nuclear power.
The super train actually makes sense with Russia I'm surprised the Soviets didn't at least do a conventionally powered supersized train just for their space program as transporting parts via barges was not an option.
The US nuclear powered bomber was designed around the ARE ( airborn reactor experiment). It ran on liquid salt cooled, Thorium fuelled reactor that was built and ran for hours without issues. Another notable mention is Project Pluto which was a sold uranium fuelled direct cycle cruise missile scramjet( no shielding needed) which was very large. Its engine was tested as both a scale prototype and full size prototype and performed perfectly.
I randomly decided to try and see what other people have as far as nuclear train videos and you seemingly had a monopoly on this stuff for a while
"Wait Doc! You mean this sucker is NUCLEAR!?" ( from the movie Back to the Future)
Just... Get it out.
Has anyone noticed that he looks like varys from Game of Thrones?
Yes, many times over...
Sparrow Vivek I was just about to mention that!!
Are you telling me he may be a eunuch?
Depends on your perspective...
let's ask his little birds!!
you're a really comforting narrator
It just seems if we are going to do the nuclear route, it needs to be in the form of safer, more efficient stationary designs such as LFTR reactors on Earth and advanced nuclear reactors in space. What we have done in space so far isn't more advanced, but instead throw some radioactive waste into a bottle and get a small amount of heat off of it as it decays.
So if you really look long and hard at nuclear power on Earth we get something like the following:
1. Airplanes - Sounds nice, but don't need it and bound to cause a lot more problems than it solves unless of course your goal is exposure to the horrors of nuclear fallout.
2. Cars - Yeah, every major crash, which there are piles of every year, is a nuclear disaster. We might end up with a nuclear winter with all of the catastrophic accidents and poorly maintained vehicles, especially if light water reactors are used.
3. Trains - You really don't want to be around that derailed freight train carrying hazardous materials being pulled by nuclear powered locomotives. Talk about a train wreck...
4. Ships - Away from military use, there comes the question of how much are you going to spend on that security detail and what happens if you don't? Also are we ever going to get commercial freighters into the modern age? I suppose at least huge sums are spent on fueling giant ships, so it seems a bit more plausible the security and precautions around nuclear may be weighed to see if it is the cheaper option.
If we look long and hard at Nuclear in space, we get something like the following:
1. Space is already full of radiation. Your space ship in deep space is spewing out radiation in an already radiation filled solar system? Does it really matter?
2. The inner solar system has lots of light to work with, but gets a lot weaker the further you get out.
3. Most places you go in the solar system, the Sun always shines, just at different intensities with the distance.
4. Much of the solar system of potential interest there is not a very good light resource.
5. If we really want to get a more useful thrust out of ion drives, especially in the farther reaches of the solar system, it helps to have a powerful and lightweight nuclear reactor.
6. If we want more efficient engines in space, nuclear does tend to provide more kick.
7. A Lunar base in shadow for a couple of weeks at a time could really use something like Nuclear power. If a nuclear reactor melted down on Luna, it is like at least there is no other life here and no atmosphere or anything. The material just stays in place until we scoop it up and put it in a sealed container.
8. A Mars base, especially during a dust storm, could really use something like nuclear power. Also as Mars tends to be a lot colder than Earth, the warmth from a nuclear reactor could be nice. On Mars you want to be a little more careful than say Luna as the wind can blow radioactive particles around, however at least at present we consider Mars to be a pretty dead place, so the damage possible is a lot more limited.
9. As Mars doesn't seem to have much of a resource for chemical energy like Earth does, the idea of nuclear for some form of transit may be revisited. Maybe a large land ship or something going long distances around Mars? The idea being nuclear will probably be the only practical way to do certain tasks on Mars, but maybe you could find a solution that works reasonably well under the circumstances.
In summary it seems there are not many places where you could really justify using nuclear over other means on Earth. This is as in we have something that already works and nuclear is just way to problematic in way too many ways to be a reasonable solution. So if you want to do it better, maybe look at other technologies to get the job done or at least fine tune / enhance the existing ones. However in space while there are a number of places where solar power seems like a great option, there are also a lot of places and a lot of cases where it is nuclear or bust, plus the concerns we have here on Earth are not so much of a concern elsewhere in the solar system.
If it catched up we'd live in the pre-war Fallout world by now.
This thinking is what led to the fallout games. And oh boy is it awesome :D
The basic problem with scaling down a reactor is that the shielding cannot be reduced below a certain thickness. The minimum system weight is about 40 tons.
the train at 4:30 - also one thing most people (and me up until a few days ago) don't think of, is maintaining vehicles like that. any locomotive with an unpowered tender etc is rely hard to maintain, becuse workers cant move them around by themselves in a workshop, they will need to bring a shunter in, which hasn't been needed since the steam era. a few years ago railway companies started experimenting with gas (as in natural gas, LPG gas, not petroleum) locomotives, but these needed large tenders to house the gas, as there wasn't enough room on board the loco (gas takes up more space than liquid fuel). the 2 main reasons this project failed was 1) Diesel fuel prices dropped significantly while the project was going on, and 2) most railway companies no longer had the ability to move around unpowered loco tenders any-more.
good for the environment and the future, bad for having to buy newer equipment.
Hum . . . A future of self-driving, nuclear-powered cars. What could go wrong?
Dear author! Ту-96ЛАЛ (for "flying atomic lab") newer had direct cycle nuclear jet engines, it only had an idle reactor in its bomb bay. The only reason of existing Ту-96ЛАЛ was to test the shielding, so when you say "it had no shielding" you're utterly wrong. The plane had shielding, both lead and composite, both for crew compartment and around reactor itself.
Fancy shirt does not substitutes elementary fact-checking.
so the bald guy is making misleading anti-soviet propaganda!!!!
The US army have recently developed a new gas turbine with a inline reactor having the reactor actually inside the turbine.
Then the gas (probobly helium) just lops back, get cooled, then go in to the front end again.
This is much cheaper nowdays when 20% enriched uranium can be made cheaply with laser enrichment. Back in the 50-tys and 60-tys with gas difusion enrichment it cost four as much energy for every double of enrichment. This is why most early reactors used 3-3.5% fuel while nowdays most reactors run 5-7% enriched fuel. This is also a reason why modern old reactors nowdays can produce more Power when they was built.
With a integrated turbine reactor running at 20% it can be tiny. It also produce a fraction of the waste that normal reactors do
Chrysler tv 8 - nuclear powered amphibious tank. Really want this thing in an apocalypse
4:19 *PLEASE* use (also?) metric system units. Thank you.
The research he found was most likely information on the blueprints of the train which of course were American so it was in imperial units. Brits are also pretty familiar with it. Just going to have to research it yourself.
Man... This is so odd... I feel so bad that such a great content channel like this would feel that way about international users: "Just going to have to research it yourself."
Hope he listens and try to help us (non british / non american followers) to better understand the measures.
Vitor Madeira Why do you feel bad? Do you know how much of an ass you sound like? It's just one example in one video, who cares. It doesn't effect you at all, we can move on...
Why not let the author deal with the situation?
Please, forget my question here. It was not intended for you.
if you don't like it, don't answer.
Thank you.
Vitor Madeira More than just Americans and British understand these units. Think of every 1 metre as 3 foot for a general idea. Us non metric users do this when exact measures aren't needed.
war war never changes!
ask homann nice fallout 4 reference
Every single aspect of war has changed drastically even during the last centuries. You couldn't make a more ignorant statement if you tried.
Taxtro the quote is a reference the the game fallout 4 is you’d actually read the other reply’s you would of realised that.
ask homann Yes it does, it kills more people!
C'mon Raiders.....come and get some!!!!
You should do a piece on nuclear powered shipping as that's probably the most practical mobile use of nuclear power. Ships are already quite massive so shielding isn't as much of a problem, and unlike land transportation where electrification is entirely practical shipping doesn't currently have many real alternatives to fossil fuels.
The one big drawback to civilian nuclear shipping is security; even a well-designed, well operated nuclear powered ship is still susceptible to piracy, which is not a pleasant thought.
Excellent video. I highly recommend anybody traveling the US to make a stop at EBR-1, the Experimental Breeder Reactor 1, in central Idaho. On display outside are the two atomic jet test beds, as well as the heavily shielded locomotive that would be assigned to move the bomber to and from its ginormous hangar (which was actually built, and still exists).
Voyager and other spacecraft use RTGs that run off of radioactive decay, not nuclear fission (or fusion).
No wonder everyone back then thought the future was going to be crazy.
Some fools still think flying cars will happen...they would drop from the sky like flies lol
This guys videos are absolutely the best.
Many electric cars today are nuclear or indeed coal powered, funnily enough.
Thomas Joyce or by that logic, solar powered in the case of coal/gas/oil.
pbodybrooks or by that logic, fusion powered ;)
shlibber ?
Want a nuclear powered car buy a Tesla and move to someone where which a nuclear power plant nearby.
Nuclear energy is the best candidate for base level carbon neutral power generation.
I do like the idea of an extra wide train but without being nuclear powered
I'm glad they figured out cars that have small reactors on board was probably not the best idea. Still it's such a 50s way of looking at future ideas.
Wish they made *all* the really wild ideas and concepts public like they used to. Everything's a tightly guarded secret now until 50 years later when they deem it safe to disclose
Don't forget about the USAF's nuclear powered tunneling machine
To think - that using 1960's technology, the Soviets actually had planes flying powered by NUCLEAR reactors... I think (if humanity survives the 21st Century) that nuclear power will be the greatest "why didn't we use this earlier" technology in human history.
I think you are wrong. Nuclear power is like stone age tech compared to what is to come. It would be like saying "huh remember the good ol days when it rained coal on london and the sun never reached the ground, people as white as snow ..(if you washed their faces) for they had never seen the sun".. yea good ol days. Nuclear reactors are by far the most expensive way to produce electricity from all the established technologies we have. It also consumes fuel just like coal and gas.. its not sustainable, its dangerous , unreliable, very expensive and it takes ages to build a reactor. its ridiculously stupid to build new nuclear reactors which is why almost nobody is doing it anymore, the costs are just too high. Also it pollutes the air more than coal does due to the Co² from mining and transporting the nuclear stuff and from disposing it.. apparently its more complicated to fuel a reactor than a coal plant.. Coal though is becoming old timey too and plays a exceedingly lower role in my country, germany.
T.W. Someone I mean Nuclear power safer in a lot of cases, plus most accidents involving Nuclear stations were either human error (Chernobyl) or due to many things happening at once (fukishima)
The thing is nuclear is just an unecessary high risk, imagine one war between a nation with nuclear reactors and they get targeted and destroyed. It would affect the whole world immensely and that country and many other areas would be unusable for thousands of years. Chernobyl forced everyone to check all sorts of places for radioactivity, some forests or fields had dangerous levels of radioactivity for anyone who would eat anything out of them. Its not dissapearing fast either. That one "little" human error (those happen all the time!) created a damage that surely on long term was far more expensive to everyone than what thousands of reactors would have saved of money back in the day when other types of electricity weren't widely spread.
T.W. Someone Chernobyl is a great reminder of what not to do, the fail safe for one of the reactors were purposely disabled for testing, Plus the Chernobyl Nuclear powerplant used a flawed Soviet reactor design which helped cause the disaster
Actually, nuclear power is the least expensive source of electricity. Imagine if all the third world nations had access to cheap electricity. Poverty would be eradicated, which doesn't seem to be the plan.
another great video, thanks for the upload!!
One thing I don't see anyone saying (including Curious Droid): To have a small nuclear reactor, such as on a sub, in a plane, or on a train, you need highly enriched uranium. That carries a much greater proliferation risk. Having it in a mobile vehicle takes that risk to a whole new level. Of course, it worked well for the nuclear sub program, but there aren't too many Rickovers to go around.
I don't think you're ever gonna fit a nuclear reactor into a car and keep it that sleek...
4:07 A Four Loko unit? Does it run on Four Loko?!
Nuclear trains would be really useful for connecting space colonies on Mars or the moon. No environment to damage, no risk of hijacking, no earthquakes on Mars and no storms on the moon, reduced weight and could support itself for a long time in case the lines were damaged or something happened to either colony. Although to reduce radiation you'd want to electrify the rails and only use the reactor when you need it. You could also use the train to build the track, using it as a base for workers.
Tu-95 never flew on nuclear power. Testbed aircraft was equipped with reactor (flown numerous test flights, both with powered and cold reactor -testing shielding) - but there was never an actual transmission of reactor power to engines. Because engines - proposed turboprops HK-14A, closed cycle with heat exchangers, - never made it beyond design stage, let alone in-flight testing. Project was cancelled much earlier.
About "no shielding to protect crew". In reality, on Tu-95, right behind crew cabin, was installed 2-layer bio shielding. First layer- 5 cm thick lead plate. Second -sandwiched 15 cm thick mat of different polymeric materials, incl polyetylene and paraffine (against neutrons).
Uh, leave reactor in building, and simply *plug into* the tracks for trains, autos, planes, drones etc.
*oh, that's what we do now...lol*
How would you get the reactor to power an airplane? A battery bank? You would need a big ole bessy stack of lithium batteries for a purely battery powered airplane. Everything else? Sure!
@@patdohrety2940 lithium ion technology as far as batteries go, is approaching 20 years old now.
They can fit the same power density in a film, that has semi flexibility and these are being tested for powering aircraft. Of course the number of aircraft is quite limited, yet it is actually being flight tested.
For a reactor to power an aircraft, admittedly: you're talking about using several state of the art technologies. Back in the 60's, they actually tried installing the nuclear reactor into an aircraft, and using the heat to power a set of turbines that powered the aircraft. For reasons obvious, this is simply crazy in my opinion.
😳😂😂
Take care.
@@d.cypher2920 How would the stored energy in the batteries be turned into thrust? Electrically powered turbine engines? Like some kind of battery powered jet engine?
@@patdohrety2940 i believe they're (I'm certainly not an expert, nor anywhere near qualified to give expert advice, etc.) Are using brushless electric motors. >I'll see if i can find a video of the actual aircraft in question....one moment.
@@patdohrety2940 here is one video, from i believe 9 months ago...yet, there are several other videos...
ruclips.net/video/r2hh_ni-vF4/видео.html
WEN POWER ARMOR ???
Maybe someday
An indirect nuclear turbojet engine can be used to generate ground based electricity without any cooling water. A somewhat portable nuclear power source that you bury with borated concrete and the engine sits above ground.
C.D. -Excellent video. Superb comments!
6:57 the real chem trails
Can Thorium be used instead of Uranium and Plutonium, it is safer. Also do a video on Thorium as an alternative nuclear power source
Thorium is not safer than uranium or plutonium based reactors. In fact, thorium is used to breed u233. What's safer are the types of reactors people are wanting to use thorium in.
The train at 10:04 is actually a train owned by the Finnish Railway Company traveling from Helsinki to St. Petersburg in Russia.
Brace for the truth: The US had a fully functioning, miniature scale nuclear reactor in 1988 that COULD NOT AND WOULD NOT FAIL. The engineers on two occasions cut off power to both sets pumps in the reactor. The temperature quickly spiked from 1000 degrees Fahrenheit to just under 1500 degrees, but slowly returned to safe temperatures naturally and shut itself down. The project was called the AFR, or Advanced Fast Reactor, or IFR, or Integral Fast Reactor, which is at the Argonne-West site in Idaho. From what I understand, it was a sodium-cooled breeder reactor. I have heard from a documentary on this reactor that it is 99% more efficient than other reactors at that time, and released only 1% of the waste. Now that I have looked into it, this next claim sounds more unlikely to me, but they also said that it could use waste from other reactors as its fuel. However, they could have used electrorefining to recycle the old reactor rods to create new rods with the addition of some new material to make up for the lost mass.
so there's a chance where everything is just Chernobyl?
The only problem is nuclear shielding. You can't have 10-20 feet thick lead walls around the reactor. Gotta figure another way out of this radiation problem
That's where 4th generation nuclear energy comes in
Lead cooled reactors are being made now that have a heat transfer material that also acts a shielding. This is the key to nuclear powered trains as it shields and cools the reactors to heat air and run turbines by molten lead heat exchange loops.
Officer: Pull over....pull over ....your speeding.
Person in Nucleon: My cars melting down.....back off... China Syndrome in progress.
Imagine someone trying to work on that car by themselves at home ? Or the core going into critical mass and melting down. You pull into a supermarket cause you're naive, I think we all were naive as far as this technology goes back then, and people surround the car. "Need a hand sir"? "Yeah...my car stalled and I'm starting to get a metallic taste in my throat". "Oh, that's just your alternator burning up....no biggie"
Meanwhile people start vomiting and losing sensations in their extremities and passing out. Now there's a big crowd wondering what is going on. Next day we read in the paper ...car owner and 7 others die from mysterious causes while 45 others hospitalized. Supermarket quarantined.
The possibilities of catastrophe with this car are endless. Thank God they never put these cars to market.
This sounds like the Soviet union
until nuclear fusion is realty nuclear powered cars are not practical
Wow, I had not heard about any of this. Thanks for another great article. Keep them coming!
The Voyagers and Curiosity rovers are not actually powered by reactors; what they use is known as a Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generator, or RTG. These use plutonium pellets, which are so radioactive that they generate heat even without a nuclear chain reaction, which drives heat engines. These work fine for spacecraft like Voyager, which do not require a large amount of power, but most RTGs don't output much more electricity than the average car battery. To power something like an airplane, or a full-sized car capable of highway speeds, you would need a LOT of RTGs, which would be very, very heavy, which brings us back to the problems reactor-powered aircraft and cars faced in the 1950s.
Even if you could engineer against accidents and radiation... I still wouldn't want this tech anywhere other than secure locations. How easy would it be for someone to hijack a nuclear train and steal the cores?
abz998 not very since there'd be a lot of security
Well you can sort of, 4th gen nuclear reactors are unlikely to go critical. As for security I agree. It is a terrifying thought that somebody thinks it is a good idea to build nuclear powered drones which have a track record of being hacked.
Draco Lithfiend yeh I agree but i think it would be better to have a driver so it couldn't be hacked and security near the reactor
Nearly impossible without being willing to die! The second you turn off a nuclear reactor it is still extremely radioactive and will be for months. Even after that you will still need protective gear and to remove lots of shielding and permanent seals.
are you trying to imply the core could be turned into a bomb?
Fallout, anyone...?
Kevin Morales yup
I hit like and you just earned another subscriber. Just wow. Loved it.
I love the soundtrack.... So soothing while watching this.