Nuclear Car

The big problems are oil prices continue to go up and the environment green house effect is becoming worse. The causes of these problems are clear and have become our present danger. Unless we do something about these, we will continue to live in discomfort and worse suffer a much larger scale, uncontrollable, and unforeseen events.

General Motor's Chevrolet has soon their electric car, Chevrolet Volt, to dominate where the rubber meets the road, because of its practical benefit to the driving public wherein the price of gasoline is no longer reachable in their pocket and the notable concern to care about our deteriorating environment needs to be addressed. Honda has now it's hydro electric vehicle, Honda FCX Clarity, already leased to a few areas of commuters in Japan and the US, as another attempt to resolve the global crisis of oil and to provide alternative source of fuel aside from the traditional gasoline and diesel. Other giant vehicle manufacturers, such as Mercedes, Toyota, Nissan, and BMW are also spending a lot of money for research in developing their hybrid cars.

In the mid to late 1950's, there is one optimistic attempt to create an atomic vehicle, that will almost answer all problems pertaining to the high cost of fuel and the unfriendly emissions of automobiles. The attempt to build a low cost, efficient, and clean source of energy for vehicles, the nuclear car.

"The Ford Nucleon was a nuclear-powered concept car developed by Ford Motor Company in 1958. No operational models were built. The design did not include an internal-combustion engine, rather, a vehicle was to be powered by a small nuclear reactor in the rear of the vehicle. The vehicle featured a power capsule suspended between twin booms at the rear. The capsule, which would contain radioactive core for motive power, was designed to be easily interchangeable, according to performance needs and the distances to be traveled.

The passenger compartment of the Nucleon featured a one-piece, pillar-less windshield and compound rear window, and was topped by a cantilever roof. There were air intakes at the leading edge of the roof and at the base of its supports. An extreme cab-forward style provided more protection to the driver and passengers from the reactor in the rear. Some pictures show the car with tail fins sweeping up from the rear fenders.

The drive train would be integral to the power module, and electronic torque converters would take the place of the drive-train used at the time. It was said that cars like the Nucleon would be able to travel 8000 km (5,000 miles) or more, depending on the size of the core, without recharging. Instead, at the end of the core's life they would be taken to a charging station, which research designers envisioned as largely replacing gas stations. The car was never built and never went into production, but it remains an icon of the Atomic Age of the 1950s."

See web link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_car.

There are many negative criticisms regarding the radical concept of the automobile because of the historical disasters that we got from nuclear technology and the pessimistic view that we can not create miniature nuclear power source for vehicles like those of submarines. The atomic car with the steam turbine of mobile Chernobyl was referred to us, the driving atomic bomb. Well, the concept car was dismiss too fast and too short because of being too ambitious. With the advancements that we have in modern physics and nuclear technology, we need to reexamine and look at the possibility of the nuclear car, this might be a good solution for the global crisis of petroleum and the environment.