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It's almost obsolete though. Fast tractors and fusion will heat gas turbines not steam turbines. Before the century is out, we won't be boiling water for owt but tea
What about solar and wind? I get the joke but actually future advancement involves not boiling water we think. Many of the new fusion methods don’t involve just heating water. Also check out coal engine trains they’re fucking insane how complex and detailed they are. I can’t believe they were made so long ago
@@SendingFreedomTM The science of entropy was discovered and used to figure out how to make steam engines that didn't explode during normal use. Before entropy, it was common knowledge that sometimes boilers just explode, so live with it.
One other significant factor for nuclear trains: You could instead build a nuclear power plant, and run electrical cables along the track, to make an electric train, which gets functionally the same performance, but without the locomotive carrying an extra 200-300 tons of reactor, which means you can get 200-300 tons of cargo. The reason nuclear power for ships is effective is because ships are very efficient at carrying huge amounts of weight in addition to the nuclear waste being less of a concern in remote parts of the ocean.
Nuclear power with a closed loop for large vessles would be nice. As long as they were the type that entombed themselves during a melt down. I seen an SMR that had this feature. We already have electified trains in many places. So I agree with you that is a better method then having a thousand SMRs in trains on a daily basis. Trains in the future? Fast charging batteries at stops could do it within 20 years. The amount of energy you could get back in certain places through regenerative breaking is immense by picking up heavier loads at the top of hills. Using fast charging batteries/capcitors at certain places on top of that. There is an electric dump truck called the E Dump. Pure EV, and never has to recharge due to receiving heavier loads at the top of a hill, and then it uses regen breaking to charge 100% by going down it. Then uses that energy stored in the batteries to go up the hill. I am not saying that is what will happen. Only that it is possible in certain routes.
Exactly. One other thing that makes nuclear naval vessels more viable than trains is that ships don't travel along defined paths. Anywhere there's ocean, they can go, so running a cable isn't feasible. Meanwhile, with trains, you already need rails, so just adding cables is a relatively simple process.
Another reason why nuclear reactors work so well on ships is because it’s must harder to crash a ship that’s travelling at only 20 mph and literally 100s of miles away from the nearest object.
@larrywalsh9939 thank you! That movie was hard to watch. It made no sense to put a perpetual motion engine on a train to survive a global cooling apocalypse.
@@darrenmessick4971 some of the many other problems with the movie is in no way can a child be used to replace a broken gear, the whole thing is thermodynamically nonsensical, if the whole world is frozen over then how are the tracks still intact and clear, if this magical device is capable of producing unlimited energy then what's to be gained from moving a train around instead of staying in one spot, but the thing that irked me most was that this train makes no stops, so it takes on no supplies, ergo it's a closed biosphere - even growing bugs there's no way they could replace lost biomatter that gets consumed through life processes. Recycling waste will only get you so far but without additional biomass being taken onboard on regular intervals, they all would have starved to death ages ago.
Trains have this issue of sometimes derailing, so it would probably make more sense to have the nuclear power station in a fixed location and have it feed energy into the grid to run the train and anything else that might need power. Which is how things work and if we can switch to renewable reactors here in the U.S. like what is used in Japan and Europe, where spent fuel can be re-enriched to be used again. This drastically cutting down on the amount on nuclear waste created that then needs to be stored for long periods of times and even reduces the length of time that waste needs to be stored by utilizing radioactive isotopes with much shorter half-lives. I know people get uncomfortable when discussing nuclear energy due to things like Chernobyl but, the RBMK reactor #4 at the Chernobyl site was inherently dangerous by design, as it was not a pressurized water reactor with a traditional containment vessel. Compared to say, Three Mile Island, the nuclear meltdown was contained, where Chernobyl very much was not) and the the secondary nuclear reactor on the island ran without issue, pumping electricity into the grid for decades after and only just recently was decommissioned in 2021. Nuclear fission in the only carbon free high energy density source of power we have access to today and is going to be essential to moving towards a carbon free energy future. So to completely write off nuclear fission is really foolish, especially with the number of advancements that have been made to make it extremely safe.
Or, you could go with actual renewables which are actually cheaper, actually clean, generate no hazardous waste, and require no fuel pipeline at all. It saves a lot of money and words.
Nuclear trains, I say; nuclear trains, you say. My friend’s house, until he was 18, was next to a railway station. Crumpsall is now a station on the Manchester Metrolink tram network. Three or four times a week, a train carrying nuclear waste would meander up the line heading toward Windscale, now Sellafield, starting from the nuclear power stations in Kent, Wales, and elsewhere. On a few occasions, they broke down and crawled into the station-the entire lot of them. The police would look worried until they saw the Chinese takeaway a few minutes away. Then the train would be abandoned, and they would order a 20-person banquet: chicken balls, beef and chicken fried rice, and, for the unadventurous, half rice, half chips, and curry. At no point were any containers tampered with. A freezing cold and drizzly night at the beginning of January in North Manchester obviously was not at the top of the KGB’s list of priorities.
It is a shame that nuclear enery got such a bad name. I suspect that it is mainly due to the fossil fuel lobby that didn;t want fossil fuel to end. Nuclear has had bad press but in real terms is very good. There have been many deaths and issues with fossil fuels compared to nuclear but nuclear has had the worst press
As events of the last few years clearly show, KGB agents are by far not among our brightest, but even considering those miserable standards, I'd still wonder what on Earth could have they planned with some heavily shielded containers of nuclear waste and why. Even in an actual war it would be rather stupid thing to tamper with. Can't even blow it up efficiently to make a dirty bomb. Like, if you leave it unattended for weeks, then sure, someone will eventually appear with proper tooling and take it, because it has some value on the black market, and who wouldn't risk dying in radiation sickness for a few grand, but it's still a massive effort, not something to be expected to happen in a few hours.
@@matwyder4187 1)Intelligence gathering and foreign operations were not under the jurisdiction of the KGB, as it was analogous to the FBI except that it also operated in countries of the Warsaw block, the one responsible for foreigh operations is the GRU 2) The FSB now only does assasinations now(outside Russia's borders) 3)Why the hell would they steal nuclear waste if the SU had their own breeder reactors, and since 1970s, commercial nuclear plants of their own
funnily enough, coal contains trace amounts of radioactive elements. Considering the amount of coal being burnt at coal powerplants this means coal power plants releases a relatively large amount of radioactive waste through their smoke. This is why costs of building a nuclear powerplant can't be reduced by converting a coal powerplant into nuclear, because the ground around the area has too much radioactivity for a nuclear powerplants safety guidelines. This compared to the amount of radioactive elements released by a nuclear powerplant (0) is a hilarious contradiction
You actually receive less radiation inside of a nuclear power plant than outside of it because all of the shielding is blocking the radiation on the outside from getting to you.
they why are they not monitoring the coal with radiation meters? They dont! And there is no talk of radiation being admitted out the stacks because there is no solids going up the stacks. We monitored the stack discharge and have records of how clean the stacks are. If you want to talk about radiation, lets talk about why they can't get rid of the spent fuel because it is so highly radioactive, towns refuse to let trucks or trains run through the town. Because of this, most nuclear plants have to store the spent fuel rods on property. Most still have them in pools to keep cool because they cant get rid of them, radioactive dumps in y our town.
@lifequest7453 Lobbyists for states where coal is mined work very hard to suppress information about the radioactivity of coal partcularly that of coal plant ash piles which by all measures should be considered radioctive waste and disposed of accordingly but there is so much of it that it is considered prohibitively expensive.
I believe there are only seven still on the seafloor - the US Navy's USS Thresher & USS Scorpion, the Soviet Union's K-27, K-8, K-219, and K-278 Komsomolets, and Russia's K-159. The Soviet K-429 sank *twice*, but was raised after both sinkings and put back into service, before being eventually scrapped. And the Russian K-141 Kursk was salvaged after sinking and scrapped. Those are probably the other two that were counted.
The issue is is that submarines even the smallest ones are far bigger than locomotives and they have a lot more tonnage and most importantly volume to dedicate to Safety Systems and backups and all that jazz
@@Shinzon23 yep, and not to mention "nuke" training for Navy techs is way longer and more expensive (factor in that top secret clearance background check) than for a train engineer. Service depots for trains are less complex too. It just doesn't make economic sense in a world where the risk of adversary induced meltdown isn't worth the cost
@@absalomdraconis not really. there is much smaller amount of fission material and by-products, tan compare to power plant. Their decay will cause small uptick compared to natural radiation in sea water. Nuclear weapons on those vessels would be bigger issue
Babcock and Willcox is working on a microreactor that can fit into a couple of standard shipping containers. They use a gas turbine system that uses heated helium rather than steam, so there's no need for a condenser. It also means that in an emergency the reactor can be cooled by ordinary air. Right now the design is aimed at replacing diesel generators for remote power generation, but I'm sure if it pans out someone will look into redesigning it to fit into a locomotive form factor.
I honestly can't think of any good reason to want a nuclear reactor for the vast majority of remote sites, and if I did then helium as coolant would eliminate it from consideration (that stuff literally leaks through every material available to humanity).
If you can make a reactor withstand a rail crash, you can use the nuke engines to run cargo. Excess energy gets dumped into overhead lines where they exist, to assist with powering non-nuclear passenger trains. Any excess after that can run EV chargers and the general local electricity grid. Just another source of electricity along with the rest. Heck, you could have the engines running solo and just travelling to where they're most needed to cope with seasonal loads.
Ehhhh, why dont you just build a big reactor to power everything if you build the infrastructure anyways? In Europe all railways are electrified already (almost)
lmao what, you want to put nuclear reactors on trains and then use overhead power lines to TAKE extra power away from the train to power other things? instead of oh i dont know, having the nuclear reactor on the ground and GIVING power to the train via overhead lines
You forgot to mention that power generated a coal or gas power plant is more efficient than combustion engine and add on top of that the more efficient use of that energy by electric motors. Like you said though it also allows future changes to our power grid sources such as nuclear, solar, wind, etc,. It's not energy source constrained.
Here is how you 'Safely' run a train on nuclear power: Option 1: Build a nuclear power plant and then electrify the trains with overhead wires to run on the electric power from that nuclear powerplant. Option 2: Use that nuclear power to create e-fuels and then use those e-fuels to run conventional diesel locomotives.
Oh the idea for a small modular reactors never went away....in fact some of the very first nuclear reactor Design Concepts were for small Reactors to power stuff up in the Arctic or especially places like Greenland
Oh the ideas for small nuclear reactors never went away in fact small nuclear reactors are some of the very very first designs ever thought up because the military wanted them to Power Equipment up in places like the Arctic
@@Shinzon23The problem with small nuclear reactors is that the engineers always went "we could make the parts slightly bigger, for not much cost, and get 1GW of power out of it". Big reactors just turn out cheaper.
@@robertoaguiar6230 there's an enormous difference between fissionable materials packaged safely for a dangerous train ride vs. active fuel rods, active in a powered nuclear reactor. Good luck activating a SCRAM system on a reactor that's just derailed and smashed into somethign at 100 Km/H
Went through Arco, Idaho a couple weeks ago. Stopped at ERB-1 to see the nuclear bomber engines displayed there. Seeing the actual machines really brings this story home.
That's exactly how I felt while reading about A-bomb technology. We take two specifically shaped pieces of certain metal, put one into the other and get a raw energy surge sufficient to obliterate a town. Is this even "science" anymore? The whole electricity thing looks like a fraud as well, only it's actually working. A world of Sword and Electricity. "I have harnessed the power of Fundamental Interactions, and hereby banish thee from this plane! BEGONE IN PRIMORDIAL FIRE!" Well, any true "magic" would be just another type of science, categorized, algorithmic and repeatable.
As a point regarding the big fear of a crash and/or radiation leak: Radioactive materials are currently transported in cylinders made of concrete and steel. These have been tested in every way possible including hitting them with anti-tank rockets, crashing them into boulders, and dropping them from fifty feet or more. In no case was the casing even cracked let alone breached. If these containers can be built, then a safe reactor vessel can be designed.
You've been listening to Kyle Hill, I assume. Much of what he says is true, but he's unapologetically and unscientifically biased in favor of nuclear energy, so much so that he blinds himself to its shortcomings. You're thinking of nuclear waste casks. That's not relevant to this case - in a portable nuclear reactor, it has to be active, so you couldn't just stuff it away in a cask like you can with waste, it needs to be active within the reactor. So, in the event of a crash, this unprotected nuclear vessel gets ruptured and an appalling disaster occurs.
@@larrywalsh9939 It's not Kyle Hill that's biased. You can absolutely put an operating reactor in the same kind of protective shell as a spent fuel cask, with the only difference being the pipe connections for the secondary fluid loop and wiring for pumps and sensors. You know a lot about nuclear power that simply isn't so.
@@larrywalsh9939 It's incredibly sad that you link this random comment to Kyle Hill with absolutely no evidence to suggest that it had anything to do with anything that he's ever said. Hill's videos are not biased and are extremely well researched.
@@dirtyblueshirt Putting an operating nuclear reactor on a train, in the same kind of confinement system that nuclear waste casks are based on, simply isn't feasible - the weight and volume would be ludicrous. Plus, waste can be stored densely, but the reactor cannot, and thus is cannot be made as impervious to penetration during a high-energy collision.
@@PistonAvatarGuy I based my comment on the fact that he described nuclear waste casks almost exactly as Hill did in his video on the subject, that's why I made that connection. That's not "absolutely no evidence". I do like Kyle Hill and I respect him as a science communicator but the man is absurdly biased about nuclear technology. It takes an intense level of unscientific bias to put out videos viewed by millions where he literally says "nuclear power is incredibly safe!" - this strains credulity. Nuclear power has useful potential, but pretending it's "incredibly safe" is simply denying the obvious and catastrophic risks involved. I respect his videos but his stance on this matter makes it hard to take him seriously.
My father was a nuclear engineer for Detroit Edison in Michigan. I grew up with Fermi II not far away, and I've always thought that nuclear power was a good idea. Just like guns, not everyone should have them, and they have to be handled VERY carefully. Like aviation, nuclear energy is not dangerous, it is simply very unforgiving of any carelessness or neglect. Nuclear power however is about three orders of magnitude worse than aviation if things really go wrong.... With proper planning and operational control, just like aviation, this is safe. What is NOT safe is for any sort of non-governmental organization to use this technology in any sort of vehicle! It's the whole "Oh, what could possibly go wrong" thing, basically times 10! Holy shit they mounted a nuclear reactor not just in a cargo ship, not potentially in a train, or a car as Ford promoted during the 1960's.....They were actually crazy enough to mount a reactor in a B-36 and ACTUALLY FLY IT WHILE IT WAS CRITICAL! Holy shit that is scary~! If that thing had gone down over New Mexico there would be two-headed coyotes and children born with six limbs all over the southern United States. This stuff is safe if properly handled. But the consequences when things aren't properly handled....
If that thing had gone down over New Mexico there would be two-headed coyotes and children born with six limbs all over the southern United States..........are you sure you are not talking about Georgia, Kentucky, Tennessee or Alabama?
Might be a useful vehicle for arctic and antarctic conditions since it could reliably provide electricity for locomotion and heating without the fuel constraints of fossil fuel powered vehicles. The naturally lower environmental temperatures would be an effective aid to cooling, and the remoteness of the locations would reduce the potential damage of any radiological accidents. Many reactor safety technologies and techniques could be adapted from submarine reactor designs, which have consistently proven safe for decades (at least the USN ones, I'm not as familiar with other nations). Come to think of it, a nuclear powered version of those giant snow-crawler vehicles in a train configuration would be better since it wouldn't need tracks, and it could be wide enough to float if it breaks through ice or melting permafrost.
It is not surprising that a 1950s nuclear scientist said a nuclear train was feasible. Even a conventional power unit of that size would have problems--that is a very high axle loading--not many tracks would be available to it, and it would wear them out quickly. The costs would only start with the construction of such a beast--they would multiply during its use.
Good point. You can make shielding as thick as you need. You just have to take into account the extra tons of weight on rail lines and bridges not designed for it.
@@matsv201 Um-hmm. One would wonder why they didn't do that in the first place--perhaps there was some reason--length or total weight limitations or the like. But they didn't. More axles would make it longer, and add more total weight. They may have been bumping up limits imposed by the infrastructure, and hoping that more rails in the future would be able to take heavier loads.
@@phantomforester9337 360 tons, 15 axle is 24 ton per axle , that is really not to bad for individually sprung axles. If they added one axle more they would come down to 22.5ton/axle that is a typical axle load for a fast speed mix locomotive. Some heavy freight loco have over 30 ton axle load and mix freight loco often have axle load of 25 tons.. The ICE1 power unit have a axle load of over 20 tons, that is really bad for a loco that have a top speed of 280km/h (they basically lowered the top speed becasue the very high wear of the rail. The concept of having lower axle load for higher speed was something that evolved with high speed rail mostly in the late 60 and early 70s. The fast steam locos of the 1930 could have a axle load over 30 ton on the drivers. And those was rigidly sprung so that is even worse than a electric driven axle. So i would say 24 tons is really not that bad.
@@phantomforester9337 I was starting to think that it sounds way to heavy for the reactor sheelding and i started to calculate it and my result was about 7 tons to get it to background. Of cause, that is the reactor only and not the heat exhanger and other radioactive system, so including them its end up about 20 tons. The cooling system looks to be way to big as well. The total heat output would be slightly more as a modern SD70 loco, and it have only 2 meters of cooling systems. So 3 or 4 meter should do: they would really not need 12 meters. It seams to me they probobly just added everything up as a extra safety margin. I found a article about the reactor. It seams like it would be very unlikely to burst. I would say the main stumbling block is probobly proliferation
How to make a Nuclear powered car without all the radiation shielding. 1. build a nuclear power plant. 2. connect vehicle charging infrastructure to power plant 3. Charge electric vehicle. 4. drive away using electricity generated by nuclear power.
@@PistonAvatarGuy Define e-fuel please. Even bio mass producted ethanol creates green house gases when being produced and burned. The idea is to lower our production of green house gases in order to try and stem the evironmental damages we are doing to both the planet and its atmosphere. Bio mass such as plants and algae are great at trapping and holding C02 as long as they are alive. Once dead and starting to decompose or are burnt as fuel, that trapped CO2 and other pollutants are released into the atmosphere and environment. Hydrogen and nuclear energy are for the most part carbon neutral. Yes there is a carbon price to be paid in developing the infrastructure needed to suppot these energy sources, but the same holds true for all sources of energy production we currently use, and that includes solar and wind. There is quite an interesting debate on the actual carbon cost per kwt hour generated solar panels actually incur with their production and operations. Basically it all boils down to the Heinlien TANSTAAFL principle (Google it), everything has a cost, the only difference is something either more or less then others.
@@Ayrshore Charging times have gotten a lot faster in recent years, however they are still much longer then the time it would take to refill a fuel tank with either existing types of crude based fuel or liquid hydrogen.
Electrified networks don't work quite so well in ultra long-haul freight due to the sky-high maintenance requirements and also the continued impacts of weather. Network reliability becomes a genuine pain point and also an ever increasing waste of money as the asset degrades. Electrified networks are great for short point-to-point freight as well as passenger lines, but as soon as you start talking continental distances, especially in locations with severe temperature variations, they just stop being viable.
Cooling would be the problem. You need to cool the water you superheated into steam back to a liquid so you can superheated it again. Power plants use cooling towers (that big huge chimney with steam coming out from coal and nuclear plants) cool the water that was turned to steam. The water from the towers evaporates and drains into cooling ponds before being returned to the river. Trains don't have access to a river or cooling ponds, so some other massive means will need to be carried to cool it
Fear mongering driven by fossil fuel ceos and their government puppets. Statistically, fossil fuels kill so many more people than nuclear. Nuclear power is one of the cleanest and safest forms of energy we have.
Brilliant idea, I remember as a teenager in UK watching a crash test of a train at full speed ploughing in to a nuclear kettle meant for transporting nuclear waste. The kettle survived no issues at all. Build the containment strong enough and this concept could be quite good in reality.
Cheap? No Clean? Yes Cleaner? Standard electric locomotives on a pure green power grid (hydro, geothermal, nuclear). Side note: Solar and wind are inefficient and ineffective on this scale, and take up unnecessary space we need for farmland, industry, and housing.
@cedvelt Offshore wind is showing to be damaging to ecosystems. Solar roofs work on a small scale, but en mass, it's inefficient, and not everyone can afford it or believe in it. But you are right. Nuclear and geothermal are financial drains in the short term. But we'll benefit in the long term.
@@cedvelt Solar has an absolutely abysmal EROI, especially when battery storage is included in the equation. The EROI for solar is so bad, that the energy used to produce the solar energy systems becomes a major concern. Right now, the vast majority of solar panels (and associated electronics, batteries, etc) are produced in China, which gets most of its energy from coal. The production of silicon also requires coal, or some other carbon-rich fuel. Ever wonder why we're not getting anywhere with regard to reducing CO2 emissions on a global scale? Because moving the tailpipe of your energy production systems to the other side of the planet doesn't actually solve anything.
Won't be a huge issue if there's a clean up crew there relatively quickly and the core is intact. If the core is exposed it'll be a nuclear disaster. If the core isn't exposed it'll become a nuclear disaster if left some long enough.
Actually it is a Fission/Fusion system, they are both happening in the Sun, the main reaction is the Hydrogen to Helium but there are heavier elements being forged and broken down all the time, even helium gets broken back down into hydrogen.
Also, why store radioactive waste for 100k years but not the radioactive source material just lying in the ground everywhere? What a very very bad video
@@gregedwards1087 Not really of any significance though. It's like 99.9% fusion, and 0.01% fission. Making his claim to "just look at the sun" still wildly inaccurate. There have been recent finds in very old stars on their way out creating a more substantial amount of fission, but still not very much. Stars are fusion powered, not fission. He was wrong, or should I say, the writer was wrong. But someone should have caught it, cause it's just plain false.
@@smtx11, Very true, I was wondering if anyone would actually pick up on that fact and congrats to you, well done, BUTT this is a YooChoob video and while this comment was wrong on his part there are YooChoob videos that are way more wronger (lol) like Flerf and 'Free Energy' videos where not one aspect of what they present is anywhere near accurate. Cheers, :)
@@metagen77, learn something about Half Lives of Radioactive materials plus the differences between processed and unprocessed materials then you will understand what is wrong with your uneducated and nonsensical comment.
A completely missed point also would be bad actors trying to hijack the train to obtain the nuclear fuel to use it for weapons, Nowadays nuclear powerplants have high security for this very reason.
I'm not really all that concerned that joe blow terrorist is going to raid a nuclear train and use it to build a bomb. It would have to be another country to pull it off, but then they not only have to raid the train, but get the material out of the country they raided it from and back to their country. I just don't really see it. Now, they could use it in a sort of dirty bomb (just strap radioactive stuff to regular bomb then blow up to spread it around), but given how many orphan sources are around, not to mention radioactive materials that can be made much more easily than stealing them from a operating reactor...Nothing is stopping them from doing something like that now. I can't find a report of a single such device being made, let alone used. I haven't looked super hard, but given the general fear around nuclear, I think if such a thing happened it would be shouted from the rooftops.
Understand that in some sense, every form of locomotion we have that is not powered by human exercise is actually a bomb on wheels or rails such as gasoline engines, hydrogen fuel cells steam engines, all technically bombs, if improperly used same as nuclear power
I also think that training a railway crew to operate a nuclear reactor and maintain those qualifications on top of the plant maintenance that would have been required by the NRC would have been excessively high. Maybe with large scale usage it could be achieved but in my experience keeping the personnel trained and maintenance done on a nuclear plant is significantly more than any other form of power.
When I was growing up in the 80s (get off my lawn!) there was an oft-repeated story that GE wanted to run with this, and in order to assuage the public's fears, built a containment unit with the amount of uranium that would be needed, and intentionally crashed or derailed it to prove it was safe.
You should do a video on the NS Savanah and other nuclear cargo ships. they almost worked but the container system came out just after and replaced the old system quickly.
My grandfather worked at Burnham Labs in Denver, CO for the Denver & Rio Grande railway during the 50's as a civil engineer. He told the story of the nuclear train, which as my memory serves, lines up pretty well with this video. However, there was one thing that wasn't mentioned in the video that my grandfather talked about and that was the proposed weight of the train would require a complete rebuilding of the train roadways as the existing ones would not have been able to withstand the weight. Well, that's what I remember my grandfather saying some 45 years ago, so... grain of salt?
The problem here is securing the fuels as the locomotives sat in rail yards. Too many things get vandalized and stolen from such places as it is. Clearly you couldn't risk this happening with fuel rods!
well shifting all the issues to power production reduces your problems from hundreds of thousands of badly maintained ICE vehicles to one power plant. It also reduces the need to ship gas around the country, while using gas.
If they HAD built that beast, every railbed and trainbed in the country would have had to be completely rebuilt just to handle the weight of the locomotive. Simin, when you were comparing the train reactor operation to a land based power generating station, I was thinking "Wrong comparison! A nuclear submarine would have been a much better one." Since many were/are actually electrically driven rather than a "direct drive" from the steam turbines that spin the generators. The size would have been more comparable too, at least for the early generation of nuke boats.
Boilers are maintenance intensive period. This thing will go down every year for boiler tube failures / reinstalls etc. It's the nature of this method of power generation, especially if you are swinging the load on it, that tears the hell out of boilers.
6:23 Fun Fact: the Titanic really could have used #33 from this nuclear powerplant... Can you guess what it is? Its a steam muffler! On the night of the sinking when the engines were stopped all of that high pressure steam had to go somewhere about the boilers cool down and so these mufflers prevent that escaping steam from creating a roaring sound and definitely would have helped the night of the sinking as many passengers and crew struggled to organize over the immense sound
One thing I was thinking also, in the event of a derailment the radiator car is likely to separate from the reactor car, and even a properly scrammed reactor needs a lot of cooling to prevent decay heat from causing a meltdown. This was a major part of the Fukushima accident: the reactors all scrammed properly and shut down, but since the backup generators were out, they couldn't keep cooling water pumps running. From an economic standpoint, you'd also need a substantially larger crew to operate one of these compared to a diesel electric. In addition to the engineer and conductor, you'd also want to have well-trained reactor operators, and maybe a health physicist, and those guys are going to demand decent salaries. You also need security and a whole infrastructure for servicing and maintaining these locomotives, as well as a lifecycle program that accounts for the disposition of the powerplant when the locomotive is at the end of service, similar to how nuclear navies deal with submarines. As others have already stated, running electric trains off a grid powered by a stationary nuclear power plant is a lot safer and easier, and is in fact how many modern electric trains operate today. So in a way, we already have "nuclear powered trains".
The problem at the Fukushima plant was the designer company made a bad design and instead of installing the diesel emergency Generators Above the flood plain (yes you have to consider a one in a million event like the Tsonomi) so it would not be effected should the land flood. The generators were installed at ground level where water could flood them out. These are the EMERGENCY GENERATORS that were installed at vulerable locations.... This company should have known better (and we have all heard of them)
2:47 - "So, what went wrong?" Answer: trains derail, and imagine the damage that could be done if one got hijacked. Risk vs. reward analysis: _UNFEASIBLE._
Sounds like Dr. Borst was projecting small modular nuclear reactors, which suggests that whichever of the current development crop of small modular rectors actually works on a production scale will immediately create the potential for nuclear trains, and likely nuclear cargo container ships.
Sounds like a convoluted way to put a electric train in places that already have electric rails or overhanging wires, however in reality it would be a possibility in the future because many places don't have those. Places that don't have trolley busses, for example, are electrifying busses by buying battery or hybrid models instead of installing all the infra estructure for trolleys. Sometimes countries want to buy a one piece solution that will just fit to what they have, so it would all depend on commerce, international relations and time for the accessibility trickle down from the countries that will build them, allies that can buy them new, and later on and on to the rest.
We can do nuclear powered locomotive today. Technology is called Modular Reactor. Fits inside standard shipping containers. Advantage of such a train is that it can be useed as mobile power station. Deployable to anywhere where there is rail.
Before selling railroads and public on passenger safety, locomotive would probably have been very successful for freight usage, which railroads trended towards with the rise of Airliners and interstate highways.
0:33 and already a question, why do we need a heavy engine to move from a to b, if we can have electrified train tracks and even roads and lighter trains, trolleybuses and even trucks to do the long haul and have a stationary power plant (whatever of type you want to use) that isn't in the risk on running into somebody's stupid truck, bus, car stuck on a unsave crossing, in the risk of some derailment, i heard there are issues in america with that, or in risk of flying from a bridge cause some 14 cent electronic part from China is failing to correct the course of a ship???
The failure of the X-12 reminds me of that of the NS Savannah, for the same reasons: construction cost, nuclear safety, bad publicity for nuclear power. Note that there is also the Sevmorput cargo ship which is the only other non-military naval vehicle to be powered today with a nuclear reactor. It is expected to be decommissioned this year.
Where did the cooling system get it's energy (for the water pumps and fans, etc.) from once the reactor was shut down but still produced heat that needed to be handled? From an auxiliary combustion engine? A battery? Or even overhead wires? Power plants have access to the grid as *consumers* and backup systems for that purpose. If that fails you get something like in Fukushima. And would the infrastructure have been able to handle the weight? From what I can find "normal" locomotives usually weigh no more than 200 t. That's 160 t less than the X-12. But then again they might be shorter (have less axles), so that the weight per axle, the interesting metric here, is about the same?
I'm only sad they didn't build this as the attention brought to it would have given us at least 3 great early 70s disaster movies such as "Runaway Nuclear Train 1974," "Runaway Nuclear Train 1975," and "Runaway Nuclear Train 1976" would have all been theatrical sensations! All staring Leslie Nielsen, Loyd Bridges, Ernest Borgnine, OJ Simpson and Karl Malden as Federal Agent Stophatrain, he's Greek! Bruce Willis would have done at least 4 remakes in the 1990s. Sadly, this great cultural opportunity was missed! I'm not kidding, and don't call me Shirley!
What's interesting, though, is that with the development of Generation IV reactors, such a train could actually be built in 2024. The development of the small modular reactor (SMR) could mean it won't need to be as bulky as the X-12 proposal.
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Don't forget that coal exhaust also is radioactive
12:15 "Coal fired locomotive can produce two tons of Co2 on a single round trip" I paraphrased, but a single round trip to where?
@08:21 The Sun uses nuclear FUSION not fission.
"Human advancement is measured in how complicated is the method we use to boil water"... I don't remember the author, but it's brilliant!
Dan Simmons... one of the Hyperion books and a killer quote
It's almost obsolete though.
Fast tractors and fusion will heat gas turbines not steam turbines.
Before the century is out, we won't be boiling water for owt but tea
What about solar and wind? I get the joke but actually future advancement involves not boiling water we think. Many of the new fusion methods don’t involve just heating water. Also check out coal engine trains they’re fucking insane how complex and detailed they are. I can’t believe they were made so long ago
@@SendingFreedomTM
The science of entropy was discovered and used to figure out how to make steam engines that didn't explode during normal use.
Before entropy, it was common knowledge that sometimes boilers just explode, so live with it.
That just blew my mind,I'm sure Ive heard it before but yes!
One other significant factor for nuclear trains: You could instead build a nuclear power plant, and run electrical cables along the track, to make an electric train, which gets functionally the same performance, but without the locomotive carrying an extra 200-300 tons of reactor, which means you can get 200-300 tons of cargo.
The reason nuclear power for ships is effective is because ships are very efficient at carrying huge amounts of weight in addition to the nuclear waste being less of a concern in remote parts of the ocean.
Nuclear power with a closed loop for large vessles would be nice. As long as they were the type that entombed themselves during a melt down. I seen an SMR that had this feature.
We already have electified trains in many places. So I agree with you that is a better method then having a thousand SMRs in trains on a daily basis.
Trains in the future? Fast charging batteries at stops could do it within 20 years. The amount of energy you could get back in certain places through regenerative breaking is immense by picking up heavier loads at the top of hills. Using fast charging batteries/capcitors at certain places on top of that.
There is an electric dump truck called the E Dump. Pure EV, and never has to recharge due to receiving heavier loads at the top of a hill, and then it uses regen breaking to charge 100% by going down it. Then uses that energy stored in the batteries to go up the hill.
I am not saying that is what will happen. Only that it is possible in certain routes.
Exactly. One other thing that makes nuclear naval vessels more viable than trains is that ships don't travel along defined paths. Anywhere there's ocean, they can go, so running a cable isn't feasible. Meanwhile, with trains, you already need rails, so just adding cables is a relatively simple process.
So basically, France.
Another reason why nuclear reactors work so well on ships is because it’s must harder to crash a ship that’s travelling at only 20 mph and literally 100s of miles away from the nearest object.
Yup, nuclear powered supertankers and cargo ships makes much more sense, also given that there's no electric grid in the ocean.
A real life snowpiercer .
I was hoping to find a snowpiercer mention
That was a terrible, terrible, terrible movie.
@@larrywalsh9939 show is good tho
@larrywalsh9939 thank you! That movie was hard to watch. It made no sense to put a perpetual motion engine on a train to survive a global cooling apocalypse.
@@darrenmessick4971 some of the many other problems with the movie is in no way can a child be used to replace a broken gear, the whole thing is thermodynamically nonsensical, if the whole world is frozen over then how are the tracks still intact and clear, if this magical device is capable of producing unlimited energy then what's to be gained from moving a train around instead of staying in one spot, but the thing that irked me most was that this train makes no stops, so it takes on no supplies, ergo it's a closed biosphere - even growing bugs there's no way they could replace lost biomatter that gets consumed through life processes. Recycling waste will only get you so far but without additional biomass being taken onboard on regular intervals, they all would have starved to death ages ago.
4:18 harnessing nuclear power
8:57 x-12 atomic locomotive
13:23 nuclear vehicles
Fallout developers: WRITE THAT DOWN! WRITE THAT DOWN!
Unfortunately, the engine doesn't allow a moving objects like that.
I'm pretty sure that's already canon in the Fallout universe.
my first thought
I knew I'd find a fallout comment here 😂
Trains have this issue of sometimes derailing, so it would probably make more sense to have the nuclear power station in a fixed location and have it feed energy into the grid to run the train and anything else that might need power. Which is how things work and if we can switch to renewable reactors here in the U.S. like what is used in Japan and Europe, where spent fuel can be re-enriched to be used again. This drastically cutting down on the amount on nuclear waste created that then needs to be stored for long periods of times and even reduces the length of time that waste needs to be stored by utilizing radioactive isotopes with much shorter half-lives. I know people get uncomfortable when discussing nuclear energy due to things like Chernobyl but, the RBMK reactor #4 at the Chernobyl site was inherently dangerous by design, as it was not a pressurized water reactor with a traditional containment vessel. Compared to say, Three Mile Island, the nuclear meltdown was contained, where Chernobyl very much was not) and the the secondary nuclear reactor on the island ran without issue, pumping electricity into the grid for decades after and only just recently was decommissioned in 2021. Nuclear fission in the only carbon free high energy density source of power we have access to today and is going to be essential to moving towards a carbon free energy future. So to completely write off nuclear fission is really foolish, especially with the number of advancements that have been made to make it extremely safe.
Yes
Especially in the U.S. state of Ohio.
@@aceundead4750It's Ohio, literally nobody cares about it
Or, you could go with actual renewables which are actually cheaper, actually clean, generate no hazardous waste, and require no fuel pipeline at all. It saves a lot of money and words.
@Markle2k uhhh...That's not true lol Every resource has a HUGE cost attributed to it.Look what the cost of a hydro dam is lol
1:03 Not a pipe dream, but a BOILER dream.
Nuclear trains, I say; nuclear trains, you say. My friend’s house, until he was 18, was next to a railway station. Crumpsall is now a station on the Manchester Metrolink tram network. Three or four times a week, a train carrying nuclear waste would meander up the line heading toward Windscale, now Sellafield, starting from the nuclear power stations in Kent, Wales, and elsewhere. On a few occasions, they broke down and crawled into the station-the entire lot of them. The police would look worried until they saw the Chinese takeaway a few minutes away. Then the train would be abandoned, and they would order a 20-person banquet: chicken balls, beef and chicken fried rice, and, for the unadventurous, half rice, half chips, and curry. At no point were any containers tampered with. A freezing cold and drizzly night at the beginning of January in North Manchester obviously was not at the top of the KGB’s list of priorities.
Username certainly checks out
It is a shame that nuclear enery got such a bad name. I suspect that it is mainly due to the fossil fuel lobby that didn;t want fossil fuel to end. Nuclear has had bad press but in real terms is very good. There have been many deaths and issues with fossil fuels compared to nuclear but nuclear has had the worst press
As events of the last few years clearly show, KGB agents are by far not among our brightest, but even considering those miserable standards, I'd still wonder what on Earth could have they planned with some heavily shielded containers of nuclear waste and why. Even in an actual war it would be rather stupid thing to tamper with. Can't even blow it up efficiently to make a dirty bomb. Like, if you leave it unattended for weeks, then sure, someone will eventually appear with proper tooling and take it, because it has some value on the black market, and who wouldn't risk dying in radiation sickness for a few grand, but it's still a massive effort, not something to be expected to happen in a few hours.
That wast was probably gloves and cleaning wast
@@matwyder4187 1)Intelligence gathering and foreign operations were not under the jurisdiction of the KGB, as it was analogous to the FBI except that it also operated in countries of the Warsaw block, the one responsible for foreigh operations is the GRU
2) The FSB now only does assasinations now(outside Russia's borders)
3)Why the hell would they steal nuclear waste if the SU had their own breeder reactors, and since 1970s, commercial nuclear plants of their own
Norfolk Southern: *heavy breathing*
more like Union Pacific
You’d have to avoid the East Palestine nuclear exclusion zone.
funnily enough, coal contains trace amounts of radioactive elements. Considering the amount of coal being burnt at coal powerplants this means coal power plants releases a relatively large amount of radioactive waste through their smoke. This is why costs of building a nuclear powerplant can't be reduced by converting a coal powerplant into nuclear, because the ground around the area has too much radioactivity for a nuclear powerplants safety guidelines.
This compared to the amount of radioactive elements released by a nuclear powerplant (0) is a hilarious contradiction
You actually receive less radiation inside of a nuclear power plant than outside of it because all of the shielding is blocking the radiation on the outside from getting to you.
@@rubiconnn Which is why conventional sailors on a Nuclear Submarine have less exposure to people above water.
Once again, everybody, 'There is no such thing as clean coal'
they why are they not monitoring the coal with radiation meters? They dont!
And there is no talk of radiation being admitted out the stacks because there is no solids going up the stacks.
We monitored the stack discharge and have records of how clean the stacks are.
If you want to talk about radiation, lets talk about why they can't get rid of the spent fuel because it is so highly radioactive, towns
refuse to let trucks or trains run through the town.
Because of this, most nuclear plants have to store the spent fuel rods on property. Most still have them in pools to keep cool because they cant get rid of them, radioactive dumps in y our town.
@lifequest7453 Lobbyists for states where coal is mined work very hard to suppress information about the radioactivity of coal partcularly that of coal plant ash piles which by all measures should be considered radioctive waste and disposed of accordingly but there is so much of it that it is considered prohibitively expensive.
Nuclear powered car? Great Scott!
10:29 I feel very intelligent right now…the first thing I thought is “surely cooling is the problem”. I’m basically a nuclear physicist
Great video. Now the obvious. We're definitely going to need a video on the history of those 9 sunken nuclear submarines.
I believe there are only seven still on the seafloor - the US Navy's USS Thresher & USS Scorpion, the Soviet Union's K-27, K-8, K-219, and K-278 Komsomolets, and Russia's K-159.
The Soviet K-429 sank *twice*, but was raised after both sinkings and put back into service, before being eventually scrapped. And the Russian K-141 Kursk was salvaged after sinking and scrapped. Those are probably the other two that were counted.
Wouldn’t the correct comparison here be to nuclear submarines, which were developed in the same timeframe
Evidently,no lol
Yes, yes it would. But don’t let rational thinking get in the way of spewing out another video. 😂😂😂
The issue is is that submarines even the smallest ones are far bigger than locomotives and they have a lot more tonnage and most importantly volume to dedicate to Safety Systems and backups and all that jazz
Trains are too small for this. Nuclear ships, though, that could make sense!
@@Shinzon23 yep, and not to mention "nuke" training for Navy techs is way longer and more expensive (factor in that top secret clearance background check) than for a train engineer. Service depots for trains are less complex too. It just doesn't make economic sense in a world where the risk of adversary induced meltdown isn't worth the cost
what's worse than a nuclear meltdown is a nuclear meltdown where the center of origin can change depending on where the train crashes
It was a really good Monday for being a Saturday.
but fallout taught me nuclear cars go boom boom if i breath heavy on it.
Question for a video: what happens to the nuclear reactor of a submarine or carrier when they are hit and then sunk?
Hopefully nothing! Otherwise a very large contamination risk.
@@absalomdraconis not really. there is much smaller amount of fission material and by-products, tan compare to power plant. Their decay will cause small uptick compared to natural radiation in sea water.
Nuclear weapons on those vessels would be bigger issue
Huh...so this isn't about the X-12 from Middlesbrough bus station to Newcastle via Coxhoe and Durham? 😂
The shake, rattle and roll of an Arriva bus would maybe set off a big bang . . . ?
That's next weeks video.
You'd see less mutants around a nuclear reactor than you would at Middlesbrough bus station I reckon.
The art of progress is to preserve order amid change, and to preserve change amid order.
Babcock and Willcox is working on a microreactor that can fit into a couple of standard shipping containers. They use a gas turbine system that uses heated helium rather than steam, so there's no need for a condenser. It also means that in an emergency the reactor can be cooled by ordinary air. Right now the design is aimed at replacing diesel generators for remote power generation, but I'm sure if it pans out someone will look into redesigning it to fit into a locomotive form factor.
This hangs heavily on the NRC getting its head out of its ass in terms of regulation
I honestly can't think of any good reason to want a nuclear reactor for the vast majority of remote sites, and if I did then helium as coolant would eliminate it from consideration (that stuff literally leaks through every material available to humanity).
@@absalomdraconis Fortunately for us, reality isn't constrained by your imagination.
@absalomdraconis Except modern reactor designs generally shut down when they lose their coolant, that's part of the deal with the new designs
@@bower31 you aren't going to lose coolant that fast. It would take years with no make-up before you lost enough to be a problem.
With courage you will dare to take risks, have the strength to be compassionate, and the wisdom to be humble. Courage is the foundation of integrity.
If you can make a reactor withstand a rail crash, you can use the nuke engines to run cargo. Excess energy gets dumped into overhead lines where they exist, to assist with powering non-nuclear passenger trains. Any excess after that can run EV chargers and the general local electricity grid.
Just another source of electricity along with the rest. Heck, you could have the engines running solo and just travelling to where they're most needed to cope with seasonal loads.
That sounds like a way better way to build a SMR, only if America had electrified rails.
Ehhhh, why dont you just build a big reactor to power everything if you build the infrastructure anyways?
In Europe all railways are electrified already (almost)
That test was made in the 80s. Lool at nuclear flask rail crash test.
Hear me out... what if we just took the nuclear reactor off the rails then
lmao what, you want to put nuclear reactors on trains and then use overhead power lines to TAKE extra power away from the train to power other things?
instead of oh i dont know, having the nuclear reactor on the ground and GIVING power to the train via overhead lines
You forgot to mention that power generated a coal or gas power plant is more efficient than combustion engine and add on top of that the more efficient use of that energy by electric motors. Like you said though it also allows future changes to our power grid sources such as nuclear, solar, wind, etc,. It's not energy source constrained.
Here is how you 'Safely' run a train on nuclear power: Option 1: Build a nuclear power plant and then electrify the trains with overhead wires to run on the electric power from that nuclear powerplant. Option 2: Use that nuclear power to create e-fuels and then use those e-fuels to run conventional diesel locomotives.
France chose Option 1 for its TGV .
Option 2 exists from 1990" and was streamlined by US Navy to synthesize fuels using CO2 trapped in sea water.
Would definitely love to see a video on those 9 sunken submarine.
I love that we totally passed over these ideas but now there's companies seriously considering similar sized plants for small rural cities.
Oh the idea for a small modular reactors never went away....in fact some of the very first nuclear reactor Design Concepts were for small Reactors to power stuff up in the Arctic or especially places like Greenland
Oh the ideas for small nuclear reactors never went away in fact small nuclear reactors are some of the very very first designs ever thought up because the military wanted them to Power Equipment up in places like the Arctic
@@Shinzon23The problem with small nuclear reactors is that the engineers always went "we could make the parts slightly bigger, for not much cost, and get 1GW of power out of it".
Big reactors just turn out cheaper.
A life spent making mistakes is not only more honourable but more useful than a life spent in doing nothing.
The difference between this concept and a stationary nuclear power plant is that the stationary ones don't tend to crash into things.
Powerplant's nuclear fuel is transported by trains.
@@robertoaguiar6230 there's an enormous difference between fissionable materials packaged safely for a dangerous train ride vs. active fuel rods, active in a powered nuclear reactor. Good luck activating a SCRAM system on a reactor that's just derailed and smashed into somethign at 100 Km/H
Went through Arco, Idaho a couple weeks ago. Stopped at ERB-1 to see the nuclear bomber engines displayed there. Seeing the actual machines really brings this story home.
It all just boils down to magic hot rocks.
That's exactly how I felt while reading about A-bomb technology. We take two specifically shaped pieces of certain metal, put one into the other and get a raw energy surge sufficient to obliterate a town. Is this even "science" anymore? The whole electricity thing looks like a fraud as well, only it's actually working. A world of Sword and Electricity. "I have harnessed the power of Fundamental Interactions, and hereby banish thee from this plane! BEGONE IN PRIMORDIAL FIRE!"
Well, any true "magic" would be just another type of science, categorized, algorithmic and repeatable.
Thank you! Great video.
As a point regarding the big fear of a crash and/or radiation leak: Radioactive materials are currently transported in cylinders made of concrete and steel. These have been tested in every way possible including hitting them with anti-tank rockets, crashing them into boulders, and dropping them from fifty feet or more. In no case was the casing even cracked let alone breached. If these containers can be built, then a safe reactor vessel can be designed.
You've been listening to Kyle Hill, I assume. Much of what he says is true, but he's unapologetically and unscientifically biased in favor of nuclear energy, so much so that he blinds himself to its shortcomings.
You're thinking of nuclear waste casks. That's not relevant to this case - in a portable nuclear reactor, it has to be active, so you couldn't just stuff it away in a cask like you can with waste, it needs to be active within the reactor. So, in the event of a crash, this unprotected nuclear vessel gets ruptured and an appalling disaster occurs.
@@larrywalsh9939 It's not Kyle Hill that's biased. You can absolutely put an operating reactor in the same kind of protective shell as a spent fuel cask, with the only difference being the pipe connections for the secondary fluid loop and wiring for pumps and sensors.
You know a lot about nuclear power that simply isn't so.
@@larrywalsh9939 It's incredibly sad that you link this random comment to Kyle Hill with absolutely no evidence to suggest that it had anything to do with anything that he's ever said. Hill's videos are not biased and are extremely well researched.
@@dirtyblueshirt Putting an operating nuclear reactor on a train, in the same kind of confinement system that nuclear waste casks are based on, simply isn't feasible - the weight and volume would be ludicrous. Plus, waste can be stored densely, but the reactor cannot, and thus is cannot be made as impervious to penetration during a high-energy collision.
@@PistonAvatarGuy I based my comment on the fact that he described nuclear waste casks almost exactly as Hill did in his video on the subject, that's why I made that connection. That's not "absolutely no evidence". I do like Kyle Hill and I respect him as a science communicator but the man is absurdly biased about nuclear technology. It takes an intense level of unscientific bias to put out videos viewed by millions where he literally says "nuclear power is incredibly safe!" - this strains credulity. Nuclear power has useful potential, but pretending it's "incredibly safe" is simply denying the obvious and catastrophic risks involved. I respect his videos but his stance on this matter makes it hard to take him seriously.
Sometimes the cards we are dealt are not always fair. However you must keep smiling and moving on.
Nuclear Train?? Clicks on instantly
2:50 - Mid roll ads
4:20 - Chapter 1 - Harnessing nuclear power
9:10 - Chapter 2 - X12 atomic locomotive
13:25 - Chapter 3 - Nuclear vehicles
My father was a nuclear engineer for Detroit Edison in Michigan. I grew up with Fermi II not far away, and I've always thought that nuclear power was a good idea. Just like guns, not everyone should have them, and they have to be handled VERY carefully. Like aviation, nuclear energy is not dangerous, it is simply very unforgiving of any carelessness or neglect.
Nuclear power however is about three orders of magnitude worse than aviation if things really go wrong....
With proper planning and operational control, just like aviation, this is safe.
What is NOT safe is for any sort of non-governmental organization to use this technology in any sort of vehicle! It's the whole "Oh, what could possibly go wrong" thing, basically times 10!
Holy shit they mounted a nuclear reactor not just in a cargo ship, not potentially in a train, or a car as Ford promoted during the 1960's.....They were actually crazy enough to mount a reactor in a B-36 and ACTUALLY FLY IT WHILE IT WAS CRITICAL! Holy shit that is scary~!
If that thing had gone down over New Mexico there would be two-headed coyotes and children born with six limbs all over the southern United States.
This stuff is safe if properly handled. But the consequences when things aren't properly handled....
If that thing had gone down over New Mexico there would be two-headed coyotes and children born with six limbs all over the southern United States..........are you sure you are not talking about Georgia, Kentucky, Tennessee or Alabama?
Might be a useful vehicle for arctic and antarctic conditions since it could reliably provide electricity for locomotion and heating without the fuel constraints of fossil fuel powered vehicles. The naturally lower environmental temperatures would be an effective aid to cooling, and the remoteness of the locations would reduce the potential damage of any radiological accidents. Many reactor safety technologies and techniques could be adapted from submarine reactor designs, which have consistently proven safe for decades (at least the USN ones, I'm not as familiar with other nations).
Come to think of it, a nuclear powered version of those giant snow-crawler vehicles in a train configuration would be better since it wouldn't need tracks, and it could be wide enough to float if it breaks through ice or melting permafrost.
It is not surprising that a 1950s nuclear scientist said a nuclear train was feasible. Even a conventional power unit of that size would have problems--that is a very high axle loading--not many tracks would be available to it, and it would wear them out quickly. The costs would only start with the construction of such a beast--they would multiply during its use.
Good point. You can make shielding as thick as you need. You just have to take into account the extra tons of weight on rail lines and bridges not designed for it.
Why would therr be a high axle load. Just ad more axles.
@@matsv201 Um-hmm. One would wonder why they didn't do that in the first place--perhaps there was some reason--length or total weight limitations or the like. But they didn't. More axles would make it longer, and add more total weight. They may have been bumping up limits imposed by the infrastructure, and hoping that more rails in the future would be able to take heavier loads.
@@phantomforester9337 360 tons, 15 axle is 24 ton per axle , that is really not to bad for individually sprung axles. If they added one axle more they would come down to 22.5ton/axle that is a typical axle load for a fast speed mix locomotive.
Some heavy freight loco have over 30 ton axle load and mix freight loco often have axle load of 25 tons..
The ICE1 power unit have a axle load of over 20 tons, that is really bad for a loco that have a top speed of 280km/h (they basically lowered the top speed becasue the very high wear of the rail.
The concept of having lower axle load for higher speed was something that evolved with high speed rail mostly in the late 60 and early 70s.
The fast steam locos of the 1930 could have a axle load over 30 ton on the drivers. And those was rigidly sprung so that is even worse than a electric driven axle.
So i would say 24 tons is really not that bad.
@@phantomforester9337
I was starting to think that it sounds way to heavy for the reactor sheelding and i started to calculate it and my result was about 7 tons to get it to background. Of cause, that is the reactor only and not the heat exhanger and other radioactive system, so including them its end up about 20 tons.
The cooling system looks to be way to big as well. The total heat output would be slightly more as a modern SD70 loco, and it have only 2 meters of cooling systems. So 3 or 4 meter should do: they would really not need 12 meters.
It seams to me they probobly just added everything up as a extra safety margin.
I found a article about the reactor. It seams like it would be very unlikely to burst.
I would say the main stumbling block is probobly proliferation
As a child of the 60s and my dad having worked in a dockyard refueling subs. I can't help wishing this had happened 😂
How to make a Nuclear powered car without all the radiation shielding.
1. build a nuclear power plant.
2. connect vehicle charging infrastructure to power plant
3. Charge electric vehicle.
4. drive away using electricity generated by nuclear power.
Or use that nuclear power to generate green hydrogen.........
@@gumpyoldbugger6944 If you're going to do that, you might as well produce e-fuels. No special, expensive electric vehicle necessary.
@@PistonAvatarGuy
Define e-fuel please.
Even bio mass producted ethanol creates green house gases when being produced and burned.
The idea is to lower our production of green house gases in order to try and stem the evironmental damages we are doing to both the planet and its atmosphere.
Bio mass such as plants and algae are great at trapping and holding C02 as long as they are alive.
Once dead and starting to decompose or are burnt as fuel, that trapped CO2 and other pollutants are released into the atmosphere and environment. Hydrogen and nuclear energy are for the most part carbon neutral.
Yes there is a carbon price to be paid in developing the infrastructure needed to suppot these energy sources, but the same holds true for all sources of energy production we currently use, and that includes solar and wind.
There is quite an interesting debate on the actual carbon cost per kwt hour generated solar panels actually incur with their production and operations.
Basically it all boils down to the Heinlien TANSTAAFL principle (Google it), everything has a cost, the only difference is something either more or less then others.
and stop to charge it up for an hour every 200 miles
@@Ayrshore Charging times have gotten a lot faster in recent years, however they are still much longer then the time it would take to refill a fuel tank with either existing types of crude based fuel or liquid hydrogen.
Yes Simon I have been living under a rock and I'll continue to do so.
Or ...... you build a few stationary nuclear power plants and electrify the rail? Almost sounds feasible (and is).
True, for trains. But nuclear container ships could make sense.
Then why are vast stretches not electrified to this day? I think you dont realize just how much rail there is
Electrified networks don't work quite so well in ultra long-haul freight due to the sky-high maintenance requirements and also the continued impacts of weather. Network reliability becomes a genuine pain point and also an ever increasing waste of money as the asset degrades. Electrified networks are great for short point-to-point freight as well as passenger lines, but as soon as you start talking continental distances, especially in locations with severe temperature variations, they just stop being viable.
@@sightseeinginstyle8119 The trans-Siberian railway is electrified.
The French figured that out a long time ago.
You ought to do one on the nuclear airplane. They got as far as buildiing a hanger for it.
The shame is we have too many trains derailing for stupid reasons and a nuclear train just wouldn't work
There’s a much easier way to run a nuclear train: build an electrified train and hook it up to a nuclear power plant
Electric trolley system!
Cooling would be the problem. You need to cool the water you superheated into steam back to a liquid so you can superheated it again. Power plants use cooling towers (that big huge chimney with steam coming out from coal and nuclear plants) cool the water that was turned to steam. The water from the towers evaporates and drains into cooling ponds before being returned to the river. Trains don't have access to a river or cooling ponds, so some other massive means will need to be carried to cool it
American suburbanites be like: "Passenger trains are communism! Fossil fuels are freedom!"
Always be mindful of the kindness and not the faults of others.
I have a feeling already that I'm going to get annoyed about the ignorance of anti-nuclear activists
Fear mongering driven by fossil fuel ceos and their government puppets. Statistically, fossil fuels kill so many more people than nuclear. Nuclear power is one of the cleanest and safest forms of energy we have.
We can do no great things, only small things with great love.
This couldn't possibly end poorly.... 😂
1st semi stuck on a level crossing would bring the pain in a whole new way.
@@puffnstuff12 Here comes the sun, doo-doo-doo-doo
@@ItinerantAdventurer the artificial sun*
Brilliant idea, I remember as a teenager in UK watching a crash test of a train at full speed ploughing in to a nuclear kettle meant for transporting nuclear waste. The kettle survived no issues at all. Build the containment strong enough and this concept could be quite good in reality.
If there's one thing we understand in the UK, it's kettles
what if we build more nuclear reactors and have them power electric trains?
NICE
No, that’s too sensible
She did a happy dance because all of the socks from the dryer matched.
Cheap? No
Clean? Yes
Cleaner? Standard electric locomotives on a pure green power grid (hydro, geothermal, nuclear).
Side note: Solar and wind are inefficient and ineffective on this scale, and take up unnecessary space we need for farmland, industry, and housing.
Offshore wind...geothermal and nuclear aren't financially smart in lots of places.
Also housing industry,...mostly have roofs you can use for solar.
@cedvelt Offshore wind is showing to be damaging to ecosystems.
Solar roofs work on a small scale, but en mass, it's inefficient, and not everyone can afford it or believe in it.
But you are right. Nuclear and geothermal are financial drains in the short term. But we'll benefit in the long term.
@@cedvelt Solar has an absolutely abysmal EROI, especially when battery storage is included in the equation. The EROI for solar is so bad, that the energy used to produce the solar energy systems becomes a major concern. Right now, the vast majority of solar panels (and associated electronics, batteries, etc) are produced in China, which gets most of its energy from coal. The production of silicon also requires coal, or some other carbon-rich fuel.
Ever wonder why we're not getting anywhere with regard to reducing CO2 emissions on a global scale? Because moving the tailpipe of your energy production systems to the other side of the planet doesn't actually solve anything.
Would love to see you do a video on the “Molten Salt Experiment” aka the Liquid Thorium Reactor.
*Uh huh* And a possible derailment won't be an issue? 😅
Not any more than current train derailments.
Exactly never ever in the era of terrorism and lunatic dictators we need to overcome
Nah it would be totally fine. Source: Trust me bro
@@jeffdroog Wrong 🤷🏻♀️. Use your head or, if you're incapable of doing that, just bother to watch the video
Won't be a huge issue if there's a clean up crew there relatively quickly and the core is intact. If the core is exposed it'll be a nuclear disaster. If the core isn't exposed it'll become a nuclear disaster if left some long enough.
Discovery consists of seeing what everybody has seen and thinking what nobody else has thought.
The sun runs on fusion, not fission.
Actually it is a Fission/Fusion system, they are both happening in the Sun, the main reaction is the Hydrogen to Helium but there are heavier elements being forged and broken down all the time, even helium gets broken back down into hydrogen.
Also, why store radioactive waste for 100k years but not the radioactive source material just lying in the ground everywhere? What a very very bad video
@@gregedwards1087 Not really of any significance though. It's like 99.9% fusion, and 0.01% fission. Making his claim to "just look at the sun" still wildly inaccurate. There have been recent finds in very old stars on their way out creating a more substantial amount of fission, but still not very much. Stars are fusion powered, not fission. He was wrong, or should I say, the writer was wrong. But someone should have caught it, cause it's just plain false.
@@smtx11, Very true, I was wondering if anyone would actually pick up on that fact and congrats to you, well done, BUTT this is a YooChoob video and while this comment was wrong on his part there are YooChoob videos that are way more wronger (lol) like Flerf and 'Free Energy' videos where not one aspect of what they present is anywhere near accurate. Cheers, :)
@@metagen77, learn something about Half Lives of Radioactive materials plus the differences between processed and unprocessed materials then you will understand what is wrong with your uneducated and nonsensical comment.
I love the sneak shot of that one nuclear concept car at the start. :)
A completely missed point also would be bad actors trying to hijack the train to obtain the nuclear fuel to use it for weapons, Nowadays nuclear powerplants have high security for this very reason.
I'm not really all that concerned that joe blow terrorist is going to raid a nuclear train and use it to build a bomb. It would have to be another country to pull it off, but then they not only have to raid the train, but get the material out of the country they raided it from and back to their country. I just don't really see it.
Now, they could use it in a sort of dirty bomb (just strap radioactive stuff to regular bomb then blow up to spread it around), but given how many orphan sources are around, not to mention radioactive materials that can be made much more easily than stealing them from a operating reactor...Nothing is stopping them from doing something like that now. I can't find a report of a single such device being made, let alone used. I haven't looked super hard, but given the general fear around nuclear, I think if such a thing happened it would be shouted from the rooftops.
Because it is pure B S. Did you hear that in a green peace lecture?
@@metagen77 Calling BS with BS I see, Here, How about you read a bit from the USNRC itself? www.nrc.gov/security/domestic/phys-protect.html
@@metagen77 Calling BS with BS I see, how about you read a bit from the USNRC itself? www.nrc. gov/security/domestic/phys-protect.html
Thank you
A bomb on rails. Got it. The Lizard Overlords never cease to amaze.
A nuclear reactor isn’t a bomb.
...you do realize a bomb is completely different than a nuclear reactor right?
We already have bombs on rockets lol Use your head.
So.... do you think bombs get to their destination by foot?
Understand that in some sense, every form of locomotion we have that is not powered by human exercise is actually a bomb on wheels or rails such as gasoline engines, hydrogen fuel cells steam engines, all technically bombs, if improperly used same as nuclear power
I also think that training a railway crew to operate a nuclear reactor and maintain those qualifications on top of the plant maintenance that would have been required by the NRC would have been excessively high. Maybe with large scale usage it could be achieved but in my experience keeping the personnel trained and maintenance done on a nuclear plant is significantly more than any other form of power.
Doris enjoyed tapping her nails on the table to annoy everyone.
When I was growing up in the 80s (get off my lawn!) there was an oft-repeated story that GE wanted to run with this, and in order to assuage the public's fears, built a containment unit with the amount of uranium that would be needed, and intentionally crashed or derailed it to prove it was safe.
You should do a video on the NS Savanah and other nuclear cargo ships. they almost worked but the container system came out just after and replaced the old system quickly.
My grandfather worked at Burnham Labs in Denver, CO for the Denver & Rio Grande railway during the 50's as a civil engineer. He told the story of the nuclear train, which as my memory serves, lines up pretty well with this video. However, there was one thing that wasn't mentioned in the video that my grandfather talked about and that was the proposed weight of the train would require a complete rebuilding of the train roadways as the existing ones would not have been able to withstand the weight. Well, that's what I remember my grandfather saying some 45 years ago, so... grain of salt?
8:26 I may be misinformed, but I thought the sun is mainly driven by fusion, not fission.
But otherwise great video, thanks 😆
The problem here is securing the fuels as the locomotives sat in rail yards. Too many things get vandalized and stolen from such places as it is. Clearly you couldn't risk this happening with fuel rods!
well shifting all the issues to power production reduces your problems from hundreds of thousands of badly maintained ICE vehicles to one power plant. It also reduces the need to ship gas around the country, while using gas.
If they HAD built that beast, every railbed and trainbed in the country would have had to be completely rebuilt just to handle the weight of the locomotive.
Simin, when you were comparing the train reactor operation to a land based power generating station, I was thinking "Wrong comparison! A nuclear submarine would have been a much better one." Since many were/are actually electrically driven rather than a "direct drive" from the steam turbines that spin the generators. The size would have been more comparable too, at least for the early generation of nuke boats.
The power of intuitive understanding will protect you from harm until the end of your days.
Boilers are maintenance intensive period. This thing will go down every year for boiler tube failures / reinstalls etc. It's the nature of this method of power generation, especially if you are swinging the load on it, that tears the hell out of boilers.
I'd love to see you do episodes on the new modern micro reactors
6:23 Fun Fact: the Titanic really could have used #33 from this nuclear powerplant... Can you guess what it is?
Its a steam muffler! On the night of the sinking when the engines were stopped all of that high pressure steam had to go somewhere about the boilers cool down and so these mufflers prevent that escaping steam from creating a roaring sound and definitely would have helped the night of the sinking as many passengers and crew struggled to organize over the immense sound
Her daily goal was to improve on yesterday.
I think it would be neat to see this rolling by. Not that I want to see anything bad happen only that it would have been pretty cool to see
One thing I was thinking also, in the event of a derailment the radiator car is likely to separate from the reactor car, and even a properly scrammed reactor needs a lot of cooling to prevent decay heat from causing a meltdown. This was a major part of the Fukushima accident: the reactors all scrammed properly and shut down, but since the backup generators were out, they couldn't keep cooling water pumps running.
From an economic standpoint, you'd also need a substantially larger crew to operate one of these compared to a diesel electric. In addition to the engineer and conductor, you'd also want to have well-trained reactor operators, and maybe a health physicist, and those guys are going to demand decent salaries. You also need security and a whole infrastructure for servicing and maintaining these locomotives, as well as a lifecycle program that accounts for the disposition of the powerplant when the locomotive is at the end of service, similar to how nuclear navies deal with submarines.
As others have already stated, running electric trains off a grid powered by a stationary nuclear power plant is a lot safer and easier, and is in fact how many modern electric trains operate today. So in a way, we already have "nuclear powered trains".
The problem at the Fukushima plant was the designer company made a bad design and instead of installing the diesel emergency Generators Above the flood plain (yes you have to consider a one in a million event like the Tsonomi) so it would not be effected should the land flood.
The generators were installed at ground level where water could flood them out. These are the EMERGENCY GENERATORS that were installed at vulerable locations.... This company should have known better (and we have all heard of them)
Wow, just wow!
Could you please make a Video about Salt Reactors? It would be the less dangerous solution to the Pressure Reactor.
moment at 16:35 is awesome!!!))))
1956 headline: "Two Trains Collide In Former City Of London"
Sounds like a great idea, You should inaugurate the train in the city of East Palestine, Ohio.
2:47 - "So, what went wrong?"
Answer: trains derail, and imagine the damage that could be done if one got hijacked. Risk vs. reward analysis: _UNFEASIBLE._
Sounds like Dr. Borst was projecting small modular nuclear reactors, which suggests that whichever of the current development crop of small modular rectors actually works on a production scale will immediately create the potential for nuclear trains, and likely nuclear cargo container ships.
Sounds like a convoluted way to put a electric train in places that already have electric rails or overhanging wires, however in reality it would be a possibility in the future because many places don't have those. Places that don't have trolley busses, for example, are electrifying busses by buying battery or hybrid models instead of installing all the infra estructure for trolleys. Sometimes countries want to buy a one piece solution that will just fit to what they have, so it would all depend on commerce, international relations and time for the accessibility trickle down from the countries that will build them, allies that can buy them new, and later on and on to the rest.
We can do nuclear powered locomotive today. Technology is called Modular Reactor. Fits inside standard shipping containers. Advantage of such a train is that it can be useed as mobile power station. Deployable to anywhere where there is rail.
Before selling railroads and public on passenger safety, locomotive would probably have been very successful for freight usage, which railroads trended towards with the rise of Airliners and interstate highways.
17:00 this sounds... familiar...
0:33 and already a question, why do we need a heavy engine to move from a to b, if we can have electrified train tracks and even roads and lighter trains, trolleybuses and even trucks to do the long haul and have a stationary power plant (whatever of type you want to use) that isn't in the risk on running into somebody's stupid truck, bus, car stuck on a unsave crossing, in the risk of some derailment, i heard there are issues in america with that, or in risk of flying from a bridge cause some 14 cent electronic part from China is failing to correct the course of a ship???
Transmission loss
The failure of the X-12 reminds me of that of the NS Savannah, for the same reasons: construction cost, nuclear safety, bad publicity for nuclear power.
Note that there is also the Sevmorput cargo ship which is the only other non-military naval vehicle to be powered today with a nuclear reactor. It is expected to be decommissioned this year.
Where did the cooling system get it's energy (for the water pumps and fans, etc.) from once the reactor was shut down but still produced heat that needed to be handled? From an auxiliary combustion engine? A battery? Or even overhead wires? Power plants have access to the grid as *consumers* and backup systems for that purpose. If that fails you get something like in Fukushima.
And would the infrastructure have been able to handle the weight? From what I can find "normal" locomotives usually weigh no more than 200 t. That's 160 t less than the X-12. But then again they might be shorter (have less axles), so that the weight per axle, the interesting metric here, is about the same?
I'm only sad they didn't build this as the attention brought to it would have given us at least 3 great early 70s disaster movies such as "Runaway Nuclear Train 1974," "Runaway Nuclear Train 1975," and "Runaway Nuclear Train 1976" would have all been theatrical sensations! All staring Leslie Nielsen, Loyd Bridges, Ernest Borgnine, OJ Simpson and Karl Malden as Federal Agent Stophatrain, he's Greek! Bruce Willis would have done at least 4 remakes in the 1990s. Sadly, this great cultural opportunity was missed! I'm not kidding, and don't call me Shirley!
A modern nuclear train would be powered by Nuclear Diamond Batteries.
You was wrong Simon about the waste being dangerous and we can use it to make Dimond nuclear batteries from the waste , you should do a video on it
Union Pacific DDA40X Centennial has 6600HP, one still runs.
Those 4-axle trucks didn't have many friends . . .
What's interesting, though, is that with the development of Generation IV reactors, such a train could actually be built in 2024. The development of the small modular reactor (SMR) could mean it won't need to be as bulky as the X-12 proposal.