Rather than screwing around with basically unproven electric cars, why doesn’t Detroit go nuclear?
December 17, 2009 in Politics
Did you know that you can save fuel and run your car on water
The Daily Elitist asked:
Now that it seems the automakers will end up in receivership at least, why don’t we skip the stupid electric hybrid nonsense and build nuclear-powered vehicles? I’m dead serious – it would easy to drop a miniature uranium hydride reactor in a passenger vehicle. Ford had the nuclear-powered Nucleon concept all the way back in the 1950′s.
Let the Japanese, Chinese, and Germans mess around with batteries and plug-ins. Let them build go-karts that can travel 200 miles without charging up – we’ll have 500-horsepower Escalades that can go a million miles without refueling or emitting a single ounce of carbon, and which would be vastly safer than riding around with 20 gallons of uber-flammable gasoline in a steel tank a few inches off the ground. Just imagine what that would to revitalize American industry and the economy!
So, do you agree? Is is time to get serious and start building nuke-powered vehicles?
Brains,
There is no source of power that is completely devoid of risk. However, comparing nuclear with fossil fuels like gasoline, there is simply no comparison – the gasoline and diesel we now use is far more dangerous.
buckmark,
I’m sorry to report that you know absolutely nothing about nuclear power, as evidenced by your statement that a collision would result in a nuclear blast. At the very worst, there would be some minor radiation exposure, roughly equivalent to that received in a couple of CAT scans. Even that isn’t likely, as it is entirely feasible to engineer a containment mechanism capable of remaining intact during even the worst auto collisions.
Brains (again),
You wouldn’t need to refill, ever. A 1 kg uranium hydride fuel source would be good for well over 1 million miles.
Did you know that you can save fuel and run your car on water
Nuclear energy is hazardous.
How exactly would you harness it into a car and refill it with it.
If a car crash, they’ll explode and cause much more damage a normal car would do
Well, that would kill all the criminals . . .
Liberals have the uninformed scared of nuclear anything.
i told you the other day why there is absolutely no need for nuclear
ya, how many car wrecks do we have a year?
now that number of wrecks would be mini nuclear blasts with those cars. No wreck would be survivable.
bad idea, subs and ships can run on nuclear b/c they are huge and capable of protecting the core, and also b/c they rarely collide.
Uh, and what exactly happens if you crash? I don’t want to find out.
You have clearly been reading too many 1950s comics. Do you seriously want millions of mini-Chernobyls whizzing around in the hands of fools? And what about their eventual decommissioning?
By the way, for what it’s worth, battery technology is only just taking off, to say nothing of hydrogen fuel cells, and prototypes such as the solar powered passenger launch built at the University of La Rochelle, which could do 17 knots fully loaded, day in, day out.
Believe me, I’m all for promoting nuclear power, but reactors in cars is a bad idea at worst, an immature (as in “an immature technology” one at best.
1. Shielding. You are going to have to shield people (driver, passengers, pedestrians, people in other cars) from neutrons and gamma rays. You can’t effectively scale down the shielding requirements just because your reactor is smaller. A high energy neutron or gamma, for instance, requires a certain thickness of material to be attenuated to a certain degree and that thickness is largely independent of the number of those particles/rays that are actually being created. It requires 4″ of lead *on all sides* to reduce a 6 MeV gamma flux by 99%, or another 2″ to reduce it by 99.9% and even that will probably not be enough. Neutrons are not very effectively shielded by lead, so you would have to use a hydrogenous material such as water or polycarbonate to shield the neutrons. 48″ of polycarbonate would shield 99% of the neutrons; another 24″ would shield 99.9%. Again, even that may not be enough. Now we’re up to 78″ of total shielding. So, just the (questionably effective) shielding would be, at a minimum, a ball that is 13 feet in diameter – and that is with zero room on the inside for something such as a reactor.
2. Contamination in the event of collision. Admittedly, the odds of surviving a crash in a car equipped with a liquid fuel bomb is probably less than a car equipped with a sturdy reactor – but that’s only a short term advantage. What if the crash causes the release of fission products? Yeah, we can clean it up by going to the crash site and loading all of the contaminated dirt and asphalt into dump trucks and hauling it off to…Yucca Mountain.
Oh, geez, now we have to
1. treat the heavy equipment and dump trucks as radioactive material,
2. figure out how much of radioactive dirt and asphalt might be produced annually,
3. worry whether some mush-for-brains might want to grab himself a contaminated “souvenir” from the crash site before the help arrives,
4. ensure the radiation workers clear the site before the EMT’s can get to work
5. shut down traffic to repave the road.
And all of these difficulties I just mentioned don’t even consider gaseous fission products which would be impossible to keep from getting into the environment, or what happens if an accident occurs when it is raining. In that last scenario, the rain would begin to uncontrollably spread the fission products the instant they were released.
The biggest reason it’s not a good idea? Almost no one would buy a nuclear car – certainly not in the quantities that would make them economically feasible. It would be *very* expensive and folks are so irrationally afraid of nuclear power now that the idea of a nuclear reactor in every garage would keep them up at night. (Hey, just read the answers to your question!) If people were unafraid of nuclear power enough that they would consider a nuclear powered car, we would have as many nuclear power plants as we have shopping malls. And, if we had that many nuclear power plants, we might even be able to satisfy all of our energy needs with electricity generated by splitting the atom which would, in turn, make electric cars a lot more feasible.
Only 1 kg of uranium won’t work. You would need *at least* 52 kg because that’s the critical mass of U-235. In reality, the core of the reactor would have to be probably twice as large as the minimum 17 cm diameter sphere a barely critical mass requires. As soon as enough U-235 has fissioned such that the total amount of U-235 in the core is below the 52 kg threshold, the reactor will no longer work. In other words, no intact core, operational regardless of its size can ever have less than 52 kg of U-235.
Oh, and a couple of CAT scans of the head would net me over twice the annual ionizing exposure I received when I was a nuke in the Navy. And that’s using the exposure from the CAT scan that imparts the smallest dose. Said another way, only “a couple of CAT scans” sounds like a lot of exposure to me! Also, because that couple of CAT scans would not actually be due to a medical procedure but an accident, the law concerning legal radiation doses to the general public would have been broken. The legal limit for “members of the general public” is 100 mrem in any one year. A CAT scan of the head imparts 140 mrem of exposure.
If, as you claim, it actually *is* feasible to engineer a containment and shielding structure that can fit on a car and allow room for adequate shielding, I’d be thrilled to see some documentation!
Way to think outside the box, but no cigar on this one. Come up with a way to significantly reduce shielding and make it much more effective, and keep dangerous fission products from being produced and the expense may just cease to be an issue. Also, I think it will take longer for them to come to market than you think it will. See the physorg link below and scroll to the last two paragraphs in the article.
In the interest of full disclosure, I do not work in the nuclear industry, have no investments in the nuclear industry, nor know anyone who works in the nuclear industry. I don’t want to work at a nuclear power plant for the same reason I wouldn’t want to work at any sort of power plant: the hours. They’re on for 24/7 and have to be fully staffed around the clock. I would have absolutely no problem living right next to any American nuclear power plant, or any sort of modern nuclear waste facility. I wouldn’t want to live within 20 miles of a coal plant, though, unless I had to.