If we can manufacture diamonds, presumably to an array of shapes, plus carbon fiber and “bucky balls” etc, and we can create really smallnuclear power plants What else is stopping us from creating nuclear power plants that could fit in a home or car, and really solve the worlds energy problems? Diamonds and other carbon based manufacture provide enormous strength, heat resistance, and insulation capabilities, what else would you need?
Of course, I have no idea what goes into the building of a nuclear plant, but Id like to see the coal fired generators in my region disappear as they should have in the 1950’s or 60’s.
What gave you the idea that diamonds would survive tremendous heat? They will burn like any other thing made of carbon. Also I don’t think carbon fiber is a good neutron arrestor.
Relatively small nuclear plants can be built as they are for navy ships and submarines but the economy of scale makes the energy cost much higher than for a large plant. All that is apart from the decidedly non-trivial task of operating a nuclear power plant safely.
Nuclear power back in the 50’s and 60’s was going to solve all of the world’s energy problems. Poeple were going to put nuclear power plants on cars, boats, airplanes, you name it. In 1958, Ford even came out with a concept car called the Nucleon, which never went into production.
You have to be extremely careful how you design the reactor, and even so if it fails in certain ways you end up with a reaction that goes out of control. I’ve personally experienced a stuck throttle on the interstate. I don’t think I’d like to personally experience a stuck control rod on the interstate.
If there is some sort of leak, your body can’t detect the radiation, so there is no warning that the reactor is killing you.
They really haven’t come up with a good way of disposing of the spent fuel yet. Proponents of nuclear fuel claim that just burying it underground for a really long time is good enough, but opponents strongly disagree with this.
The fuel is nasty stuff and, as previously pointed out, you don’t want it to get into the hands of folks who don’t like you very much.
As for getting rid of all the coal fired plants, I suspect that the folks who live near 3 Mile Island or Chernobyl might disagree with you. I personally would rather live next to a coal plant than a nuke plant, but that’s just my opinion.
What does that mean? There was a concept car? Does that mean there was an actual working nuclear car? I tried googling, but I couldn’t verify if it ACTUALLY worked. Do you know?
For that matter what makes you think that diamonds are strong? Diamond would be just about the worst material to use in a car. It’s hard, but only about as strong as glass and almost as brittle. One solid rap with a hammer and you have instant diamond dust. The thought of making any part of a nuclear reactor out of diamond and then putting it in a car makes me shudder. Shattered glass at an accident scene is bad enough, shattered reactor material is unthinkable.
You are shown how auto design happens, with scale models of the Lincoln Futura, the Packard Predictor, and The Ford Nucleon, powered by an atomic reactor. Full sized dream cars include Ford’s X-100 50th Anniversary model from 1953, with an electric shaver and Dictaphone as standard equipment.
It seems it never got more real than than the model in the photos.
There’s few technical obstacles, quite apart from the political and safety issues.
The main one is, a fission reactor depends on sustaining a chain reaction. This means that when a fissile atom splits and releases a few neutrons, one of those neutrons must hit another fissile atom and make it split. If you have too small a pile of fissile material, too many of the neutrons escape and the reaction stops. So there is a lower limit to the size of reactor you can construct.
The self regulating design with the expanding columns of lithium is a neat concept that may well be incorporated into the next generation of reactors, but scaling it down to power a vehicle is probably not going to be feasible. It makes more sense to use large nuclear power stations and battery vehicles that recharge using the non-peak electricity.