I know that Ford had the Nucleon concept car. With modern day tech, what sort of HP would we be able to get out of a car of similar size/weight as the Bugatti Veyron?
The concept of a fission-reactor powered car is so ridiculous that I have to think that either it was a publicity stunt or else the executives at Ford had no technical understanding of how fission reactors worked. Where to begin listing the problems with the concept: Adequate shielding for the passengers and everyone around them? Safety, including the possibility of a meltdown/ fizzle subexplosion? Nuclear proliferation? Cost? And all that for a lousy 5,000 mile refueling range?
Well the concept might have not been practical, but that doesn’t mean it’s not realistic. The world’s smallest nuclear submarines are at least in the same order of magnitude of mass and size as tractor-trailers. It’s not inconceivable to imagine a fission powered bus or RV with adequate shielding and safety mechanisms as being possible using current technology, and it would probably have a much longer range than 5000 miles between refueling. The downsides like waste, proliferation, accident management and requiring a skilled crew of multiple people, etc. make it completely impractical, but THAT doesn’t really have anything to do with the OPs question.
The kind of horsepower you could get would depend significantly upon your choice of propulsion technology and the kind of reactor you could pack into your car. Since this is all purely hypothetical let’s assume your tiny reactor manages to get a 20 MW thermal output of your reactor and use propulsion/drive train that is overall 30% efficient. That would be about 8000 HP at the wheels. On the other hand if you make up other numbers, like a 200 MW reactor and 80% efficient system you get about 215,000 HP. 
Edit: Forgot to add → a fission reactor is not going to fit in a Veyron-sized car using modern technology. Just won’t happen if you want any kind of shielding. Probably even if you don’t.
You could probably make a workable car powered by an RTG. But its power will probably be conspicuously low compared to similar conventional automobiles.
These guys got it to work. Just don’t forget extra plutonium.
No, there are huge compared to a tractor trailer in both size and weight:
http://www.navysite.de/ssn/ssn688.htm
But, the reality is that you are not moving as much weight around so it is possible for a tractor-trailer. There was a company that had designed small, modular, self-contained, reactors that could be stacked to provide power for a neighborhood, small city, etc. So, depending on how big it actually is and the efficiency of the generation and motors who knows.
so lets imagine that after SkyNet becomes self aware our machine overlords start building nuclear powered cars and they don’t care about radiation safety or shielding in any way since they’re largely immune to it.
if we ditched all the safeties how small could we make a nuclear powered engine?
Im not sure how you could power it considering most RTGs that would fit into a car or even a bus really would only give about 1/10th of the power an electric car requires.
I was thinking more along the lines of this. A few times bigger than a semi but definitely the same order of magnitude.
I forgot about the NR-1!!!
I tried to get orders to it but that was in 2007 which was shortly it was about to go through the process of decommissioning.
With that in mind, it may be possible for a train to be nuclear powered. I only suggest a train as that sub is slow. It’s a fraction of the speed of its bigger brother’s. I think although that a semi would have an easier time as it is not cutting through water that you might hit the max weight allowed in order to make the reactor safe for the highway. Whereas with a train, you can have multiple reactor cars to make up for their smaller size.
But, this is the smallest reactor that I could find that created a lot of power:
It’s mega heavy though for a semi. I also remember of that research facility up in Greenland where they used a small reactor for power and heat. I think that was actually really small.
eb
If you had some REALLY high level nuclear “waste” you could generate enough heat that you could have a steam powered car. Or just use air for your working fluid.
You could probably get the power to weight ratio to an acceptable level and maybe even a good level.
One problem would be dumping ALL that constantly generated heat when the car wasnt in use. Shielding might be workable if you are only trying to shield the passengers. And of course some “waste”/nuclear materials that produce much heat might not give off hard to shield against radiation but off the top of my head I dont recall one way or another.
Some polonium would do the trick power density wise. Even small specks of the stuff glow a dull red from all the heat it produces.
[Geek Hat On] No they didn’t – they explicitly state that Mr. Fusion only powered the Time Machine. They still needed the Internal Combustion Engine to power the car itself. That’s why they needed toi hijack a railroad engine for Back to the Future III [/Geek Hat Off]
Did a back of envelope calc.
You need approximately 1 kilogram of polonium to generate about 40hp of power assuming a 20 percent conversion efficiency.
Given that only about 100 grams a year are produced, it might be pretty pricey for a whole kilo. The up side is its very easy to shield. You don’t even need shielding probably. Just make sure the stuff stays physically contained (or in otherwords dont get ingested or inhaled) and you are good to go.
Note, this is polonium, NOT plutonium.
According to this (dunno if it can be believed) Toshiba designed a small nuclear reactor that is 20’x6’ and produces 200 kilowatts. They say it is fully automatic and fail-safe.
You could certainly fit that in a semi.
When you get home plug your car into your house to power your house (or the neighborhood).
200kW is only 268hp, according to Google’s conversion. A little wimpy for a highway tractor.
Actually 268HP is in the ball park for a semi-truck engine.
Newly extracted spent fuel rods from reactors are so full of short-lived fission fragments that they have to be kept in water until they are no longer boiling hot. It’s a pity that there’s currently no practical way to use those as a secondary energy source.
Polonium is some nasty stuff. I thought plutonium was bad. Looks like it has nothing on polonium.
According to the Wiki page, in theory, 1 gram of polonium could poison 20 million people! :eek:
Yeah…want that in my car!
This was a suggestion if we ever get fuel-cell cars; use it as a power source once you get home. Plug it into the house. Feed it stored H2 or natural gas and get electricity directly. Maybe have solar cells on the rof making H2 all day for you.
The big problem with this sort of tech is - do you really want a million little reactors running around the country, hard to secure and keep track of. A dirty bomb is just standard explosive and fine-ground radioactive dust. let one off in the right place, and it may be a long time before you wash all the radioactivity away (to where??) so it’s safe to go back. Don’t feed the squirrels.
What’s safer - the radiation source in front of you, or behind, or underneath? Yikes!