To quote L.P. Heartly's 1953 book "The G-Between",
"The past is a different country
they do things differently there". That's
definitely something that could be
applied to our attitude to the newly
discovered atomic power in the late
1940s and 50s. Within just a few years
after the first atomic bombs have been
dropped on Japan it seems as though the
atom would be the cure-all for 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, yes and
indeed automobiles. The first idea of
using a radioactive power source for a
car in this place radium dates back to
1903 and in 1937 Further analysis of a
concept thought that it would need 50
tons of shielding to protect the driver.
But with the development of small scale
self-contained reactors for ships and
submarines in the 1950s the idea of
atomic cars was back on the table. In
1958 Ford unveiled a uranium powered
concept car called with a typically
1950s 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 steam which will then
drive two turbines. one to power the wheels
any other to drive an electrical
generator. Ford engineers anticipated
that it would have a range of around
5,000 miles before you would need to nip
into your local Ford dealers and have
uranium core swapped out for a new one.
The passenger compartment was situated
over the front wheels allowing for the
bulk of the reactor and a heavy
shielding to be more centrally placed
and keep you as far away from the
reactor as possible. As was the optimism of the 1950s
and the naivety of the general public, it
was believed that nuclear power would
eventually replaced petrol power in the
future. Something which doesn't really
bear thinking about if you imagine a car
crash returning to a major nuclear
incident. Ford only ever made scale
models of the Nucleon as they
anticipated the miniaturization of the
reactors and lighter shielding materials.
aAs these didn't appear
and with the increasing public awareness
around 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 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 that
communicated via a control tower. At
speeds of over 150 kilometers per hour, 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 to
the Arbel Symetric was proposed with
either a gas generator or 40 kilowatt
nuclear reactor called the "Genestatom".
This would use radioactive
cartridges made from nuclear waste however,
the French government disproved the use
of nuclear fuel in cars and the development
that was 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 have not
been done. In the U.S. 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 had created the
first atomic bomb. The X-12 would use
liquid uranium-235 oxide dissolved in
sulfuric acid in a three foot by one
foot container surrounded by 200 tons of
shielding. The reactor would then create
steam to power turbines to drive four
electrical generators. These would create
the 7000 horsepower of
electricity to power the motors. This was
about the same as a four loco unit with
each loco having 1,750 horsepower but
would only need refueling once a year
although it did cost about twice the
price of a four loco unit. The whole
locomotive would be 160 feet long and
weigh 300
tons and would have an articulated rear
section where all the cooling radiators
and condensers would be placed. But the
cost of developing such a locomotive
without government subsidies and the
highly enriched Uranium-235 together
with the huge cost of liability
insurance in case of an accident made
the X-12 uneconomical and it was not
pursued by any of the train companies.
However in 1950 Soviet Russia money was
not the same issue as it was in the U.S.
In places like the North Far, East and
Central Asian desert it was thought that
electrification of newly built railway
lines was not advised at the time. So in
1956 the Ministry of Transport for the
USSR came up with a plan to make
super-sized nuclear trains which would
run on tracks three times the width of
normal ones. The train could be used in
areas where there was little in a way of
supplies or infrastructure to support
normal railways and whilst it was
stopped it could also serve as a small
power station and generate electricity
and hot water heating for weeks or
months if required in remote locations.
The train would use the super-sized
tracks to accommodate the extra weight
of all the radiation shielding but
whilst that might be enough to protect
the drivers and passengers in front and
behind the loco, the sides and the
underneath might still irradiate the
environment. The other problem is that
infrastructure like embankments, bridges,
tunnels would all have to be enlarged
for the extra wide track over thousands
of miles in some of the world's coldest
and toughest environments. This and the
radiation problem put an end to the
super-sized Soviet nuclear train.
And so we finally come to planes. The
idea of nuclear power planes in the
1950s was that bombers carrying
atomic bombs could be kept permanently
on standby flying around the Arctic
circle for days or weeks at a time
without the need to refuel and ready to
attack at a moment's notice. Both the U.S.
and the Soviets worked on nuclear
powered planes. There were two methods of
making nuclear powered jet engines. One
was simple and lightweight and this was
the direct cycle engine. In place of a
combustion chamber, the air comes into
the jet and in his directed through the
reactor core, this would cool the corel
and heat the air which will then be
directed back into the jet exhaust as
thrust. The problem with this method is that
if the shielding is not good enough then
the air could become irradiated so you
would leave a trail of radiation behind
a plane. The second method used an
indirect way of linking the air via a
heat exchange to the reactor, so that the
air could not get irradiated but it also
meant a lot of extra heavy plumbing and
complexity which would make the plane
heavier and slower and more susceptible
to attack. The biggest problem that both
the U.S. and the Soviet faced with nuclear
powered planes was getting enough thrust
from the engines and the extra weight of
the shielding to protect the crew.
While no actual flights were made by
nuclear powered engines in the U.S. they
did use a highly modified Convair B-36
peacemaker with a real reactor to test a
distributed method of radiation
shielding. By the time president Kennedy
was elected in 1961, the direct cycle
engine developed by General Electric was
regularly making high levels of thrust
under nuclear power in ground-based
tests. Work on what was to be the WS-125
long-range nuclear bomber had continued
from 1954
1961 but when new intelligence from the
U-2 spy planes and satellites showed the
the Soviets had much less in the way of
bombers when the U.S. thought and that
the Russian nuclear power bombers just
didn't exist, Kennedy scrapped the WS-125
bomber program in favor of more missile
submarine development. But after the fall
of communism in Russia in the late 1980s
it was revealed that the Soviets had
actually flown a nuclear-powered version
of a Tu-95 "Bear" long-range bomber 40
times between 1961 and 1969. Under
pressure in believing that the Americans
were close to creating a nuclear bomber
the Soviets flew tests with direct cycle
nuclear powered engines. However the
engines were inefficient and spewed
radiation into the air. The plane also
had to fly with no shielding to protect
the crew otherwise it would have been
too heavy to take off. Although it worked
within three years some of the crew had
died due to the radiation exposure on
the test flights and this was the real
Achilles heel of the nuclear power
planes. Whilst the engines may work the
shielding was still a major problem. Today
we could with new technologies which
have arisen since the 1950s build
smaller and safer nuclear reactors. We've
already done this a spacecraft like the
Voyager probes of the 1970s which are
still going in deep space and for
Landers like the Mars Curiosity rover
2012. Already nuclear-powered
surveillance drones that don't need crew
or heavy shielding that could fly for
weeks or months and nuclear powered trains
in Russia are being proposed once more.
So the future may well glow bright with
portable nuclear power
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