The impossible dream of the nuclear-powered 1958 Ford Nucleon | Hacker News Reader

The impossible dream of the nuclear-powered 1958 Ford Nucleon

thedrive.com

78 pointskjhughes69 comments

Past related threads:

The Nucleon, Ford's 1958 nuclear-powered concept car that never was - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22836272 - April 2020 (93 comments)

Ford Nucleon - a nuclear-powered concept car from 1958 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4745123 - Nov 2012 (47 comments)

At least they covered the energy conversion problem. I've always thought it would be easier to skip the electric step and drive a steam engine to drive vehicle wheels directly. But of course capturing the expended steam to condense back down to water to feed the loop would be a huge problem. And if you don't do that all you did was trade your fuel source and still have a range problem with water tanks.

A nuclear jet engine might be more interesting, directly heating / expanding the air for propulsion with only that single stage of energy conversion. Admittedly whatever is conducting the heat from the core to the air would have to be pretty exotic.

Obviously I'm not an engineer and probably reading a little too much scifi.

Not sure if you're already aware, but attempts at making nuclear jet engines (for the purposes of putting on a jet aircraft) were attempted in the 50s. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aircraft_Nuclear_Propulsion

Allegedly, Russia finally managed to get this working in 2018, with a nuclear powered missile having "infinite range", although there appears to be no real open information besides Russia saying "we have it" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/9M730_Burevestnik

There is no such thing as "too much scifi"...

Now I know where the old Fallout games borrowed their car aesthetics from:

https://fallout.fandom.com/wiki/Chryslus_Motors_Corporation#...

It's always fun seeing younger (or just less experienced) people come off the Fallout games and go "Wait, that was real? That actually happened?"

Indeed it did. That's the fun of Fallout: it's only about 25% satire, and that's bananas.

I wish the new Fallout games got that right so well!

What I like about that era is that companies were brave to think wild. Even if the car and it's workings are close to science fiction,I'm sure it generated absurd amount of press coverage + got lots of people really excited about the future. Look at Ford now: super boring company making ever bigger pickups.. Hardly any excitement could come out of it now.

While certainly focused on larger vehicles, by all appearances Ford is much more exciting and innovative than its traditional domestic counterparts. The new electric F150, electric mustang, the Bronco series, etc. have all seemed to drum up quite the fanfare. I can’t say the same for GM.

You mean you aren't excited by the cheap pushrod v8 GM STILL has in production? /s

I mean, non-sarcastically, lots of people are excited about it, including me.

They're a dime a dozen in junkyards. They all have high flowing aluminum heads, and coil per cylinder ignition. The pushrod design keeps the engine compact. Aluminum blocks are light, not much heavier than cast iron I4/V6 long blocks. All LSes have six bolt mains. The stock bottom end on every LS engine will survive four digit HP. Gen V LT series engines come with direct injection.

That's probably the most exciting thing in the automotive world right now.

I am. Cars are a big hobby for me, a big part of my life. Chevy is the only company not going out of their way to make things too complex and locked down to repair yourself.

Chevy is the only manufacturer with viable aftermarket parts for many varieties of auto and boat racing. Like yeah, you see supras and Hondas and stuff at the strip on weekends. But serious racing is running Chevy Small Block derivatives.

Tech bros lament the death of open platforms for their hobbies, like the continuing lockdown of phones. The same thing is happening with cars.

Thankfully Chevy has proved you can have a modern competitive car that meets emissions standards using 60's engine layouts that are easy to modify and repair.

And pushrod engines aren't that bad. Overhead cam adds a huge amount of weight and bulk to the engine. This is the only reason Chevy is still able to fit 6 liter engines into their small sports cars. Everyone else has transitioned to small turbo engines because DOHC takes up so much space.

And the modern Chevy V8's shut off half their cylinders when you're not using them so they don't waste tons of fuel either

Agreed. Ford has been making some moves over the past year or two that actually made me consider buying one (the Bronco, specifically). I didn’t end up buying one, but I’d never even thought about buying any Ford product in my life. I consider that impressive.

Yes, things are picking up at Ford. Electric pickup trucks are going to be a very big thing. Ford's real innovation is that the "commercial" model, without all the interior luxury, is priced at not much more than the gas version. That price will probably drop as battery prices go down.

>What I like about that era is that companies were brave to think wild.

i'm not usually an advocate for such technologies, but self-driving cars are pretty wild -- at the very least they're a pretty large legal risk for those that are playing in that field.

Self-driving cars were already 'pretty wild' tech in 1950s. The tech might be a little more practical today, but it is a very old concept.

"In the 1950s, the Radio Corporation of America (RCA) believed it had the self-driving car buckled up and locked down. The company’s quarterly magazine, Electronic Age , featured its vision of the “highway of the future” in its January 1958 issue."

"About two and a half years later, reporters experienced the highway themselves on a test track located in Princeton, NJ. The cars drove themselves around the track, using sensors on their front bumpers to detect an electrical cable embedded in the road. The cable was equipped with signals warning of obstructions ahead, such as a stalled vehicle or road work, and the cars would autonomously brake or switch lanes, depending on what was up the road. A receiver on the dashboard would also interrupt the vehicle’s radio to announce information about upcoming exits."

https://www.electronicproducts.com/throwback-tech-self-drivi...

I wish there’d be more initiatives to make roads “legible” by self-driving cars: distinctive computer-readable markings, machine-readable codes on signs, etc.

What happens when someone graffitis over the special sign? Or steals it? Or knocks it over?

You fall back to in-car autopilot. I’m sure there’s a “progressive enhancement” way to do this.

For one thing, we already have this issue with the current road signs: if the right sign is defaced, a human driver is likely to make a mistake

Signage could be embedded in the asphalt. It’d probably be easier to read by the car this way, and much harder to remove.

Travel route 66. They had such trouble with people pulling down those signs that they instead painted them onto the road. But that doesn't work so well in bad weather as rain/snow makes such signs difficult to read. Painted road is also more slippery.

I suggested something like embedding RFID tags in the road, not paint signs over it.

If you also embed trackers in the signs themselves, the depredation issue is easier to deal with.

I wonder if you could embed little iron strips in the road in a specific pattern and then put some sort of sensor inside the tires to read the pattern. And then have a warning system to alert people about the transition from “upgraded” to “normal” roads.

this is an interesting and prescient comment for a couple reasons...

1) road sign standardization does exist, it is called the MUTCD [0] and SHOULD be highly usable for this type of training of image systems. I would be shocked (really shocked) if there are people working on this who have not loaded the full size EPS graphics into their software in some way [1]. However, when you install billions (I'm WAGing there are probably billions of road signs in the US?) of signs - variance is problematic. The signs themselves can age, wear, or be wrongly printed. They can also be effected by situational variables such as blocked by a tree limb, installed incorrectly (misaligned), or be temporary, or be affected by weather (snow, ice, rain). Standardizing is very much done but has its limits.

2) Your examples of 'legibility' is really interesting because it presumes human sense - e.g., primarily relying on sight. There are lots of ways to make roads signs legible that rely on senses humans do not possess but computers can. Rather than putting code on signs that relies on vision, it would make much more sense to satisfice other sensing methods for communicating/broadcasting information about roadways. You could put long distance RFID in the signs, hell this seems like an actually good use of IoT. It would help solve the visibility, weather, aging, and temporary signage problems. Prior to the current age of self driving cars, this type of non-vision, non-self contained approach, roads designed for self driving cars was considered the most viable [2, see pages 18-19]. Good maps loaded into your onboard systems make a road more legible - even if they can't be seen. There are already ways to hack non-visible ways of making the road system 'legible' [3]

3) The last piece is that there is a huge difference between making the road signs themselves legible and making roads legible. [2, section 5.1, pg. 107] talks about this extensively and our perception of how we think about sensing as people and how we ontologically categorize vehicles as independent of the road...Its why you some people have laughed at the idea of working to better prepare roads for self driving cars [4], even in ways that were used throughout later 1900's attempts at self driving cars. for purposes of the current US road network that is probably a good assumption. Somewhere like Japan, you can probably assume the roads are much more consistently designed, signed, and implemented. Unsurprisingly, the first actual for sale level 3 car is in Japan [5].

[0] https://mutcd.fhwa.dot.gov/ser-shs_millennium.htm

[1] https://mutcd.fhwa.dot.gov/shsm_interim/index.htm#sas

[2] https://cmsw.mit.edu/wp/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/268475427... footnote 28: In her book Magnetic Appeal, Joyce argues that “seeing does not equal truth or unmediated access to the human body,” but that practices equating these are so common that images are often used to stand for truth despite doctors’ awareness of how social practices shape this evidence [Joyce, 2008,p. 76]. Popular narratives are particularly prone to fall prey to the “myth of photographic truth” [Joyce, 2008, p. 75]. These tendencies are of great relevance when considering other complex, technological projects dependent on imaging and which use images rhetorically, to stand for the “truth” of their ability to perform a task—such as detect a pedestrian in a crosswalk.

[3] https://www.wired.com/story/99-phones-fake-google-maps-traff...

[4] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/innovations/wp/2014/03/1...

[5] https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a35729591/honda-legend-lev...

I sort of intend a more general sense of “legible” here: something like the sense used in Seeing like a State.

But, in general, I think the sorts of in-road things you’re suggesting are really valuable: “upgrading” our roads this way should pay dividends in terms of the amount of capital it takes to get a new self-driving-car system off the ground: embedding such tech into the roads seems like a public good that would benefit anyone trying to make a public car by lowering the R&D cost and centralizing some of the intelligence necessary for such a system.

ha! one of my favorite books...just made a slide for a workshop to help engineering academics understand the difference between legible and legitimate.

Forget signs. An auto-drive car needs to respond to hand signals from people like crossing guards and road crews.

Ultimate test: a self-driving capable of loading itself on/off a car ferry. It will have to actively disregard signages/road lines to obey hand signals and announcements from the ship's crew. Will a tesla park itself within 6" the car ahead?

yup! signs are one component of information that a self driving car needs to operate in an uncontrolled space.

Even for a human, city/uncontrolled driving is hard mode.

A self-driving car needs to read human body language...people do it all the time while driving. Is that driver looking at their phone? is that homeless person going to do something aggressive or are they just pan handling?

There's some interest in that in China. The US has assumed that self-driving cars get no support from the highway. With some minimal support, it's easier. Volvo wanted to drive magnetized nails into roads to mark them under snow.

Not sure this is an example a company thinking wild.. I mean all they did was create a model of how something could _look_.

Ah yes, those wildly innovative do-gooder car companies of the 50s:

"The “smog conspiracy” was revealed in 1968 when the US Department of Justice filed an anti-trust case against the Big Three. They were accused of colluding to withhold the installation of catalytic converters and other technologies to reduce pollution. “Beginning at least as early as 1953, and continuing thereafter,” alleged the Department of Justice, “the defendants and co-conspirators have been engaged in a combination and conspiracy in unreasonable restraint of the aforesaid interstate trade and commerce in motor vehicle air pollution control equipment.”

https://www.counterpunch.org/2015/10/28/automakers-and-their...

So a typical nuclear reactor in a car is a terrible and unworkable idea. But what about an EV powered by nuclear batteries?

Could that be economical or safe? You'd have pretty much unlimited range.

http://www.bristol.ac.uk/news/2016/november/diamond-power.ht...

My gut feeling is it can't compete with lithium ion batteries in terms of rate of discharge or economics. But if money was no object, I think it may be possible.

"Nuclear batteries" aren't, strictly speaking, batteries. They're RTGs, and they have very low (and constant) power output relative to other energy sources.

It would take days to fully charge an EV from a typical RTG and there's no way an RTG could put out enough power to even keep an EV rolling on a flat highway at highway speeds. They are good for remote, unmanned stations but not much else.

An RTG powered electric car may not be able to drive cross country at highway speed, but most cars spend the vast majority of their time parked. Having a RTG constantly top off the battery of an electric car would probably work quite well, assuming you worked out the many, many issues surrounding the RTG itself first.

A "large" RTG puts out a few hundred watts of electrical. A very efficient electric car might consume 25 kWh/100 miles, so about 250 watt-hours per mile. If your car sits parked 6 days per week, it might work.

Also: RTGs are typically 3-7% efficient, so your trunk will put out thousands of watts of waste heat continuously. Hope you live in a cold climate.

So if you're charging at a rate of 2 miles per hour you can drive 48 miles a day on average, which is a fair bit more than most cars do. Even a 1 mile per hour charge rate would be enough for some people, although at that point you'll probably supplement with solar panels or something.

One advantage over solar charging is that this won't be affected by the weather and works all night long. The excess waste heat is a problem, but it is way down the list of problems with running a RTG.

That still sounds incredibly optimistic. The most modern RTG:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-mission_radioisotope_the...

Puts out 125W electrical, 2KW thermal, and costs $109M each (!)

Most cars could support 600w of solar panels. Even in bad weather you'd still come out ahead.

The price is almost meaningless. We don't have enough refined plutonium available to build more than three MMRTGs right now.

You wouldn't use a plutonium based RTG in civilian use for obvious reasons.

> Also: RTGs are typically 3-7% efficient, so your trunk will put out thousands of watts of waste heat continuously. Hope you live in a cold climate.

Ouch. It might be possible to harness some of that with e.g. Thermal to electric circuits to improve the efficiency.

The RTG is a thermoelectric generator -- it's already doing all it can with that thermal energy.

RTGs also avoid having moving parts or working fluids. More efficient energy recovery systems are available if you're willing to accept some maintenance items.

I don't see how you can have it both ways. Either there isn't much waste heat, or there is lots of it and you can potentially harness that still.

Let me make an analogy: Your petrol car has a heat engine. It converts about 20% of the heat energy released by combustion into mechanical energy. The rest goes out the tailpipe. Yet harnessing that remaining energy is not so simple because the temperature gradient is (relatively) small.

The thermoelectric effect also requires large temperature gradients, and efficiency is proportional to the gradient.

I think the car is a bad example because the temperature gradient is high and it should be possible to harness some of that waste heat. We just don't try. With hybrids we could definitely put that electricity to use, so I'm surprised no attempt is made to harness it. Especially for long haul trucking it could be worth it, but they're aren't diesel electric hybrid trucks that I'm aware of. Or at least they're not common.

I do understand your point though.

We do try! Some power plants and ships pipe turbine exhaust through a boiler and steam engine to increase fuel efficiency:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combined_cycle_power_plant

Might be tough to fit all that under the hood though.

I was talking about in cars specifically. It would seem to me that adding some kind of TEG around the engine and part of the exhaust system might be worth it on a hybrid vehicle. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermoelectric_generator

I guess it would depend on if you can make it cheaply enough.

Sounds like folks are working on it:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automotive_thermoelectric_gene...

The numbers being floated about seem to be 4-5% fuel efficiency gain. Significant, but as you say it depends on the price.

A thermoelectric generator is to heat what a hydroelectric plant is to water. Neither one of them consumes its respective resource; they just capture some energy as it naturally flows from one space to another. Seeing water at the bottom of a dam, or heat on the exterior of the RTG, doesn't mean that any energy has been wasted; it just means it's reached its resting point.

Yeah, that makes sense. If the heat at the bottom of the dam, to mix your metaphors, has no further to fall, that is the temperature gradient compared with the external environment is low, then you're right, you can't really do anything useful with it in a practical way.

The work required for moving the RTG up a slight hill might just negate the energy you gain from it. An RTG is not really meant to move itself very fast. Consider the Mars rovers, they move extremely slow but benefit from the stable, long term power supply.

Any fission material in a consumer vehicle is unacceptable due to drastic consequences of a crash.

That's not how nuclear batteries work.

The one I linked is radioactive carbon 14 formed into diamonds. That'd be fine in a crash.

It also has power density on the order of 1 µW/cm^3 (= 1 W/m^3), which is incredibly low. An entire truckload of those batteries wouldn't even be able to power the truck's headlights.

That's a good point.

I seem to recall the Soviets and US thinking about nuclear powered bombers during the cold war.

Sanity prevailed as they realized how to deal with crashes and protecting the flight and ground crew from getting irradiated.

Ballistic missiles soon made use of bombers a moot point.

How did they plan on preventing core exposure in the event of a high speed collision?

They didn't. They just made a model

I know, but surely they had to consider the possibility. There’s no mention of it in this article or the car’s Wikipedia article.

One of the things I wonder every time this car gets brought up is what the fallout (heh) of an accident would actually be. I'm sure it would be bad, yes, but HOW bad exactly? The dose makes the poison after all, and a car-sized reactor is a lot smaller than a Chernobyl-sized one.

There were plans in 1954 for an atomic powered locomotive.[1]

[1] https://books.google.com/books?id=bVMEAAAAMBAJ&lpg=PA78&ots=...

Radioisotope thermoelectric generators are used to build car sized rovers, so the idea did have some practical application.

Today, I am re-reading "Tom Swift and His Triphibian Atomicar".

http://www.tomswift.info/homepage/atomicar.html

It's my favorite of the Fabulous Swifties. Keeping the dream alive.

If only we had thermocouples with solar panel like efficiency...

> If only we had thermocouples with solar panel like efficiency...

Thermocuples are still heat engines converting thermal energy (heat) into zero-entropy energy (electricity in this case). Second Law of Thermodynamics limits efficiency of all heat engines as per Carnot theorem [0]. No free lunch (aka perpetual motion machine of the second kind)

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnot%27s_theorem_(thermodyna...

Not looking for perpetual motion only a compact solid state heat engine on par with others in effciency that would allow a small nuclear battery to work without the steam engine complexity issues.

The mars rover uses a RTG that puts out 2000 watts of heat and only 100 watts of electricity. Get it to 20% efficiency like solar panel and you're talking 400 watts, 40% like a steam engine would be 800 watts.

Exactly - and for about a million other purposes also!

This [0] seems like a good survey - some progress is being made raising the efficiency into the mid-teens...

[0] https://www.intechopen.com/books/green-energy-advances/therm...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com