Nuke-Mobile

we wanted to ask a rather strange question. Today. We've talked about traditional vehicles of all kinds, post fules, we've talked about electric vehicles. We've talked about fuel cell vehicles. Here's a question that may have sort of an obvious answer, several obvious answers right off the bat, but it's also more interesting than you might expect. Why don't we have nuclear powered vehicles? Now, stay with me for a second. First, we do well, yeah, okay, we have some. We we

will talk about some. But I got this bizarre image in my head of a nuclear powered airplane. Now, the airplanes we have today that we fly, you know, they use jet fuel. And they use a lot of it, and burning all that jet fuel of course comes with some problems we've talked about on the podcast before. I mean, those emissions are not without consequences. And of course the jet fuel is very expensive and it limits the range of the plane. Yeah, you have to refuel basically all

the time. Yeah, and then we've got all these nice little alternatives like these solar airplanes we've talked about, But of course those are great. Not to downplay that at all, Like the solar impulse is a very amazing and interesting achievement in techno coal designs. Sure, but it's a very delicate thing. It's incredibly limited in what it can do. Yeah, it doesn't have a lot of payload capacity it you know,

it's it's got those problems. It's not generating enough electricity for it to do much else than keep it aloft. So it can't it couldn't be something that we would

convert into, say a passenger jet. Right, So what about the possibility of something like a nuclear powered airplane, Because when you talk about nuclear energy, suddenly there you say, Okay, you can generate massive amounts of power, right, you can have lots of range, like you don't need to refuel a nuclear reactor for potentially years, depending on you know what your fuel is and how the reactor is designed

and things like that. You could build the kind of airplane that we always imagine as being the perfect solution to a zombie outbreak on Earth, the airplane that never has to land, at least at least a solution that would allow you to find, you know, a more permanent place to stay, because eventually you would run out of food, but you would definitely be able to fly around until you were able to discover that perfect uninhabited island that

as yet uh completely covered with food generating resources. You could hunt birds, and you could grow crops on the top of the plane. Makes perfect sense, Alane, My objection is withdrawn. Okay, So but extending that beyond airplanes, airplanes, cars, motorcycles, boats, what what is the possibility of actually creating nuclear powered vehicles? And I know you at home are thinking, we'll wait

a minute, what about all the radioactive waste. Yes, we are considering that and we're going to talk about it, but let's just play with this for a second and see if anything comes of it. Sure, and the wacky thing is You're not the first person who this has occurred to, Joe. No. In fact, there have been entire government agencies dedicated to trying to figure out, oh if we could create a nuclear powered aircraft. For example, Yeah, weirdos in the Air Force asked this question way back

in y so, so you know, embrace your fellow weirdos. Uh. Yeah. This This was from a long line and a proud hyt period total. So in n the U. S. Army Air Forces, which would later just be called the Air Force, created the Nuclear Energy for the Propulsion of Aircraft NIPA.

Eventually that would be replaced by a different UH acronym program called Aircraft Nuclear Propulsion or or just A and P. And they were looking at the potential of using nuclear power to generate enough electricity to power and air craft keep it in the air UH, specifically for military purposes. So this was during the the era, the post World

War Two, entering into the Cold War era. We're having the capability of keeping an aircraft in flight perpetually in case you needed to, I don't know, drop bombs on your enemy. Was of a very high priority at the time. So this was predating the Inner Condoo ballistic missile, right you. So people were still very much concerned about the possibility

of using bombers instead of missiles. And uh, the program ended up eventually converting to convey B thirty six aircraft, which were hybrid prop jet engine aircraft bombers, all right, So these these were pre existing aircraft that had been in use already, and then said, well, why don't we go ahead and try and convert one of these to see if it could carry a nuclear reactor and do

so safely. So this was just a test platform. It wasn't the nuclear reactor was not if you think of it this way, it wasn't hooked up to anything, it wasn't powering the planes systems. But it was an air cooled nuclear reactor that was put in the bombing bay of these two different convey B thirty six aircraft and operated to see if it would in fact be safe.

And there they had to obviously drastically alter the aircraft to make certain that the crew would remain safe, and they were shielded by twelve tons of lead and rubber between them and the reactor. Uh. And by the way, this particular type of aircraft is also known as the peacemaker, because of course it is exactly. Uh. You might just

refer back to our double Think episode. Uh. It made forty seven test flights over Texas mainly, and ultimately they decided to not incorporate this as a full design, mainly because the engines that they were using had evolved to a point where it was no longer practical to use that particular approach, so it was abandoned, largely because the surrounding technology of aircraft had gone further while they were still testing out the the viability of having a nuclear

reactor on board and aircraft. H Yeah, yeah, I believe back on text stuff. A long time ago, you and I did a Lockheed Martin uh series, like two or three episodes that talked a lot about the advances that were going on in jet engines in that era exactly, and there was a lot of them coming here after World War Two. People were really interested in it, RAM

jets and that kind of thing exactly. Yeah. But of course, as we alluded to, there are some both obvious reasons and perhaps less than obvious reasons why we don't really have nuclear powered airplanes today. And we'll get to the obvious one. First. Safety sure. I mean, what if a plane crashed and sprayed radioactive material all over the place. That would be very bad. And if it's military, then

there's always the possibility it could be shot down. So it's not not just not just a mechanical failure, but you're talking about specifically placing some of these aircraft in harm's way because that is their purpose, right, Yeah, what happens if there's a meltdown? Um, what happens if it leaks in some way like you've seen, Like, it doesn't have to be a full meltdown for there to be

some kind of leak of like water or steam radiated material. Yeah, and then of course there is the issue of passenger safety, like you were talking about in uh in this other aircraft that had actually been created, you'd have to shield the people on the plane to protect them from what was happening in the reactor. And I'm sure that that introduces problems for aircraft design. You typically don't want to be introducing lots of heavy materials like lead and stuff

into your aircraft, especially depending on what it's purposes. If it's for cargo, you are impacting how much cargo you're going to be able to carry, right, because the heavier you make that aircraft, the more powerful it needs to be. And uh, and you know, the design has to change. So when you get to a point where just the power system alone on the aircraft is that heavy, it starts creating the other other things you have to consider before you ever get to the point of actually loading

the plane up and taking off. Yeah, and then of course on top of that, it's got the problems that just come with all nuclear power, right that you have regular, stationary, non flying nuclear right, you end up with this with this hazardous material that you have to find some way of dealing with and hoping that nobody gets into it for ten thousand years. Yeah, we talked about that in previous episodes, and that is I mean, that's that's a

non trivial problem. The solutions of nuclear power where you have lower carbon footprint or non existing carbon footprint depending upon the implementation, and the fact that you don't have

to refuel all the sort of things, are fantastic. But the downside of having where do you put the spent fuel that's still is very potentially dangerous is a big issue, and it's one that that governments have not fully agreed upon, yet there have been a lot of of debates about what's the safest way of dealing with that, and so really that the answer to that question is nobody knows. Yeah, yeah,

there may be. It may be one of those situations where like, well, if if we decide that nuclear power in fact makes the most sense out of you know, all the different arrangements that we could have, we still have to figure out, like what's the maybe the least bad option of dealing with nuclear waste. No one really wants to do deal with that problem. We're in a kind of like ongoing kick the can mode. Yeah, yeah,

so kicked the big old nuclear can't. So, so that is something that has obviously been a deterrent in developing nuclear powered vehicles. It's not the only one. Cost is a big one, sure, yeah, yeah, All of these problems that we're talking about are technically solvable, but at great expense. Yeah, really great expense. I mean, designing a nuclear reactor is not cheap, and then designing one specifically litill fit within a vehicle also not cheap. Outfitting that vehicle so that

it shields anyone from potential radiation not cheap. So eventually you get to a point where the cost of the vehicle may be so high that from a financial perspective, it makes no sense to go with that as opposed to a more conventional style vehicle, whether it's an aircraft, a car, or whatever. So that's the fact that you don't have to refuel for a hundred years balanced out by the fact that it took you more than a hundred times, for example, that the cost of what that

fuel would have been in the first place. Yeah, yeah, uh yeah, that's interesting. The other thing, I think one of you made this note, but I think it's a really good point. How do you like do the work? So you're talking about not just carrying a nuclear reactor on board, but somehow using the the energy created by that reactor to do mechanical work like spina propeller blade, right,

and that that actually. Know, when I was a kid, I just thought, oh, it's just you got the glowing pellet and you put the glowing pellet in this this this chamber, and then you close the door in the chamber and then the wheels move like you know. It just it didn't occur to me, what is the actual process that we you know, what is nuclear power. Doing that allows us generate electricity or mechanical power, and more often than not, this is not the only way, but

it's the main way. We're talking about nuclear fission where you're having adams split up and uh, and those particles end up going on to create more nuclear reactions within the fuel rod. That generates a lot of heat. That heat ends up superheating water, converting it to steam, which then turns turbines. So you've got like a superpowered steam engine. And what it comes down to really at its core, you are to sing the power of the heavens in

order to get a steam engine. Yeah, you're just yeah everything that I mean, it's one heck of a steam yeah yeah, extremely efficient. Yeah. So you know, those turbines are what generally speaking, generate electricity or mechanical motion to turn and propeller that sort of thing. Uh. That's not

the only way. We will talk about some other ways that you can I'm not necessarily you, but that we can use nuclear power to generate electricity in order to do work that is not directly related to nuclear fission. But that's the that's probably the most common way. Well, let's get away from my my nuclear plane fantasy and ground this podcast in some reality first, and we will talk about some more wacky stuff towards the end. But there actually are vehicles right now that use nuclear power.

They exist, yeah, and then they exist for good reason. Yeah. One big example, of course is nuclear submarine. Have you ever seen the Hunt for Red October? Well, you know there is the scene where they have what they believed to be ye don't react well to bush. You remember the scene in it where suddenly they have radiation leaking, or at least they say they do, and they have to evacuate. They have to vent with the outside air and have the crew come outside and stand on top

of the submarine up in the ocean. UM. I mean that's a real concern because the submarines have nuclear reactors inside them. Yeah. First we should stress not all submarines are nuclear powered, certainly not not not all navy vessels are nuclear powered, but a lot of them are. And when you when when you think about the reasons, it

makes sense. Like a submarine's purpose for the military anyway, is it's a it's kind of a stealth vehicle, right, It's able to pass underneath um and to be used in and various uh military applications and including warfare, and you want to limit the number of times you need to surface in order to preserve the safety of that vehicle and its crew. It's kind of like the upside down version of My never Landing Zombie escape Plane. Yeah, yeah, exactly.

So the nuclear reactors aboard submarines allow for the generation of electricity and the propulsion of the submarine so that you don't have to surface unless you need to resupply or uh, you know, the a tour of duty or whatever is over. So during the Cold War, the United States was looking at developing this technology because before they were all diesel powered submarines, so they would eventually have to reservice to refuel and then they could go back

down again. Uh. So they started looking at developing nuclear propulsion systems specifically for submarines, and the first one was the U. S. S. Nautilus, which was launched in nineteen fifty five. Uh. It was also the first submarine to uh to to reached the North Pole underwater. Obviously, I mean, you wouldn't think it would fly over the North Pole it's a submarine, but I don't know. They get some

great airtime Yeah, they can. You know, if you've seen if you've seen a Hunt for October again, the captain has forced them out of the water. Um. In the early nineties sixties we started seeing other navy vessels used nuclear fission to power propulsion. The first aircraft carrier to do so was the U. S. S. Enterprise, which is

actually the second Enterprise. UM. And if you want to hear more about that, Scott Benjamin and I did an episode of tech Stuff on how aircraft carriers work and we talked about the the transition from the traditional steam powered submarine aircraft carriers, i should say, to the nuclear powered ones. So that was that was pretty cool. Another benefit of putting this type of engine on a submarine is that it's it's really easy too cool nuclear engines

using water. Yeah, that is in fact, how many nuclear power plants cool there reactors. Right, You'll often see a nuclear power plant right next to a body of water, and submarines are in the water. Yeah, it's so the naval reactors use very similar methodology to the power plants that you would see on land. And you know you have a nuclear core. Um, you've got nuclear rods that are able to once once you initiate a nuclear reaction, they're able to sustain it. You have some material that

can absorb neutrons. That's one of the things that are given off in nuclear reactions, So you put the absorbing material down to help dampen the reaction. That's what allows you to have a controlled reaction as opposed to an uncontrolled reaction, which is bad. Yeah, uncontrolled reaction is essentially an atomic bomb. That's what you get with an uncontrolled reaction. So this allows to prevent things like a melt down it and then the water cools the system as well.

And plus the water gets superheated remains in pressurized lines. So because the line are pressurized, it keeps the the water under such pressure that it doesn't boil off into steam. It stays in liquid form, but it's superheated. It then goes to an area where it will be able to turn turbines. At that point it's allowed to expand, so the pressure is removed. That means it immediately boils off

into steam. Very high powered steam turns these turbines. Now, the turbines may only be used to generate electricity, or they might do two things. They might generate electricity and they might have a gearbox associated with them that can translate the rotation of the turbines into a rotational force for the actual propellers the middleman. Yeah, so you could have you know, some vessels use essentially a giant electrical motors to turn the propellers and then you just generate

the electricity with the nuclear power. And some have this combination where you're generating electricity for the ship, but you're also generating mechanical energy for the propellers. Uh, it's pretty neat. So those are the vehicles that use new clear power right now as propulsion systems. And again some you know, it's not that every nation uses this, but many do, so it's not it's not rare. What I want to

know is when I can get a nuclear powered luxury sedan. Uh. Well, you know there's there have been some some talk about nuclear powered cars. Talk yeah, sure, talk practical. The practical answer to your question is never. Sorry, this was the thing that when I had this hair brained idea for an episode. This was the thing that made me say, okay, well we have to do this because I looked it up and I was like, oh, somebody thought it would be funny to actually design a forward concept car with

a nuclear propulsion system. Not just funny, but but an effective marketing tool for the Ford Motor Company. Right, I gotta say that thing looked like a major boat. Oh man, it looks it looks like it looks like the Batmobile if the Batmobile had been designed for George Jetson. I'm fine with the design. I love the design. I just think, yeah, finding a parking space for that thing would be a nightmare.

We are talking about the Ford Nucleon board Nucleon Okay, so first things first, it should come as no surprise to anyone that this car was never actually built the concept. It never made it out of the three eights size model stage. Yeah, what was the deal with this concept? So well, it's a little little complicated in the sense that, you know, it was such a concept that they didn't

really define a lot of things. It was supposed to be nuclear powered, um, and they said that you could drive five thousand miles, which is more than eight thousand kilometers before needing to refuel or recharge, which is interesting. I mean, actually, according to Stanford University, if you really had a nuclear powered car, you might be able to go between three to five years before you have or needed to refuel, which sounds pretty nice really, Uh, but

of course you still have radio activity. You still have to shield everybody from the nuclear core itself. So that would end up adding a lot of weight to your car.

So your car being incredibly heavy, um, possibly so heavy that you would have to worry about certain elements of infrastructure like old bridges, things like that, things that you might not want to you know, you might not otherwise consider because you'd be you'd be in a car that might not seem that big, but would be really heavy and could potentially outweigh like your giant Mac trucks or

at least be on an equivalent weight. And also, I mean with that weight comes problems with the momentum, right, I mean, if you're traveling at a certain speed in your car is a certain weight, then your brakes need to be extra good. You know, there's some problems there. But yeah, like like Lauren was saying, they never they never build a full one, and they never really defined how the nuclear power worked. Yeah, since they never really

intended for it to be a production car. It was really just a just a concept published in a brochure in or so, uh, they weren't even interested in the sticky details of whether this thing would be powered by nuclear fission or nuclear fusion. They were kind of like whatever, whatever scientists on the power of the atom, right, totally.

The last line of the brochure is is such a kicker, it said, and I quote cars such as the Nucleon illustrate the extent to which research into the future is conducted at Ford Motor Company and point up the designers unwillingness to admit that a thing cannot be done simply because it has not been done. Right. Yeah, so this this is right there in the smack dab middle of the the atomic age, where where atomic was going to be considered the solution to all our problems energy and otherwise. Yeah,

it was. It was also that that crazy nifties car boom where everyone in America was buying different cars so that they could have so much freedom. Of course, it was also right in the middle of when every movie plot was well, there's a regular animal that's been made into a giant, dangerous animal because of nuclear atomic radiation. Yeah, yeah, there was there was a not a consensus on the matter, and so it turns out in pr terms. Also, uh you know, I think they talked about it just being

like it would be powered by an atomic pellet. That's about as close as they got to explaining how it was working. So, you know, with since this was such a concept when you when you talk about a concept car, you can't get much more conceptual than this very vague description. But the design is pretty pretty sweet. It was pretty sweet, and you know, but so yes, I would pause it that it is really just an artifact of the atomic age and that no one would obviously take anything like

that seriously outside of that contemporary culture. Yeah, yeah, clearly we left all that behind the nineteen fifties, right, Uh yeah, no, not at all. What why? In two thousand none, at the Chicago Auto Show, GM via Cadillac presented a concept car that looked like a Ford Nucleon designed for modern Batman. Actually, uh no, George Jetson in this one. No sorry, Uh yeah,

this is the Cadillac World Thorium Fuel. I'm looking at a picture of this now, so it's so so the so the nuclear engine idea here had been updated to a proposal for a thorium based system, which we've talked about previously on the show not for cars, but but you can check out our full episode on it from March one, two thousand and fourteen, if you would like. But basically so, thorium is a radioactive material that's more abundant than uranium and has a greater energy yield, possibly

two times greater. And it's hypothetically safer than a uranium reactor because it won't melt down when you lose power. The process just stops naturally, all right, So you don't have to worry about lowering that that material I was telling about that soaks up those neutrons sure, and the materials and byproducts are not quite as easy to weapon

to weaponize as a normal uranium reactor. The design for this concept car from Cadillac was done by one Lauren Clessus, who created it with the idea that it could go largely without maintenance for a hundred years, which seems just optimistic to me. That this was partially due to having backup systems for everything in case of failure. I think the engine itself was the only thing that didn't have

a primary backup. And this is my favorite part. It included these these really like weird looking deep well wheels that actually consisted of six mini wheels, each powered by its own induction motor, so you never have to change the tires, only take them in for realignment every five years or so. I'm looking at this picture. I can't imagine it having that many backup systems because this thing in certain areas looks like it's paper thin. I don't know,

So I don't know, you know. Even though even though Klissus thought the idea through maybe a little bit more than the Nucleon designers, GM was not really planning on taking the concept any further. Top Gear nicknamed the concept the Cadillac W T F, which, to be fair, is the acronym classic top Gear. So you know, again, like who would possibly try to make a thorium engine? No one would actually be working on that. I sense that you're going to say they are. You know, someone's totally

working on that. Charles Stevens with the Massachusetts Connecticut R and D firm Laser Power Systems around two thousand eleven started hyping this model of a thorium based motor that they had been developing. They the concept is this, you use the thorium to create a laser to create steam to turn a turbine to generate electricity, need to power a vehicle. So this is a steam powered car using a thorium laser to to generate the steam. Yes, wow, this is so Dr Evil drives his cars while I'm here.

I'm pretty sure. Uh. And and Charles Stevens, who's who's the CEO of this company, said that it would weigh about five hundred pounds, which is the approximate weight of a regular car engine, so that checks out. And could He said that it could run on eight grams of thorium for about a hundred years a k a. Some three. According to their website, they're working on scaling the system, which, by the way, they call the max Fee Laser. I

think I'm saying that right, Wow, max f laser. Max Flazer for use in all kinds of vehicles, you know, boats and airplanes and spaceships and etcetera. And also for powering homes and businesses. Huh well, I mean, of course, the idea of some sort of thorium based power for homes and businesses is not on your usual No, that's the more common way of thinking about thorium fueled where we stand on this well. Digital Trends reached out to Laser Power Systems back in and they responded that Stevens

didn't and I quote have time to comment. Wow, that's how busy that cat is. Huh. But Laser Power Systems is still soliciting to investors through their website to help them create and test their designs for the system, of course they are. Yeah, I mean he's not too too busy. Ticks some money, right, Yeah, I guess I'll have to register my skepticism not knowing that much more about it, but I mean, at least sounds interesting to read more about that. I don't know that. I don't know that

the proposed system is implausible. I do wonder more. Again, I mean, we still have some of the same issues that we have with the other examples we've talked about about. You know, you do have to still we are still talking about radiation. We are still we'll talk about the need for shielding and all that kind of stuff. So um, you know, it's it's the question I have ultimately is assuming that actually goes forward, what will the law have

to say? But we're still not there yet. Oh yeah, yeah, way back from the law needing to worry about it. Is it legal to possess enriched uranium and the trunk of your car? Are you asking for a reason? No, I mean because if you're about to tell me that we need to go and unload your car, I'm going to say I am not going there. I'd have to check, but I suspect not. I consider you all friends, but y'all aren't those friends for me. I've got other friends

I called to help dispose of my enriched uranium. That's fair, thank you, Joe. Okay, But while these concept cars are not a real thing, and maybe we shouldn't never expect them to be a real thing. Nuclear powered rolling vehicles there are actually nuclear powered rolling vehicle is just not so much on planet Earth. Are you referring to the Curiosity rover? Well, yeah, and just generally the idea of

using some form of nuclear based propulsion in space vehicles. Sure, because that's really clever because again, like you can't there's no gas stations on Mars that we've found, and if you're sending a probe out to the deep reaches of space, they are on any rest stops. So that we found that we found, right, So I remember back in the day, I think years ago, we were recording a podcast about the Curiosity Rover and I made a mistake. I just assumed.

I was like, Okay, well, it's powered by solar panels like all, you know, like rovers are. But then I was like, better check that, and I went back and checked it out. It turns out that was not true. It was powered by it. It has a nuclear based power source, but it's not like the nuclear reactors that power our homes, right, It's not based on fission. It's based on just radioactive decay. Uh. So you can think of it kind of like a battery in nuclear battery. Uh.

It's five kilograms in mass or about ten pounds in weight. Uh. And it is consists of plutonium, one of my favorite plutonium. Absolutely lovely, isn't it? Is it not? And it uses what's called a thermocouple, which is something that you will find in a lot of electronics here on Earth, specifically

digital thermometers. Uh. And it's principle is pretty cool. So you take two different metals, all right, and you join them in a couple of different places, and the difference in temperature from one joining to another creates voltage, which is a difference in charge. Difference in charge means electrons can flow, you can create a current. Now, with digital thermometers, we use this to UH to indicate what the temperature

is in a room. So the temperature difference between the two joints ends up creating this vole digit electricity flows and the amount of electricity that flows indicates what the temperature is, which is told to you in a little digital readout, because clearly just saying it's this much electricity would be meaningless to us, but it would end up translating that into saying it is seventy two degrees in this room. I'm using the example in room it is

four pies hot. So anyway, a thermocouple is used in the Curiosity rover as well. So the plutonium to thirty eight ends up generating heat, and that heat is used to heat the one of the joints on the thermocouple and the other one is unheated, so that you get this difference in heat that creates the voltage, which then allows electricity to flow, which allows the UH, this nuclear battery to provide electricity to the Curiosity rover system, and

it's called a radioisotope thermoelectric generator or RTG. Right, And it's not just the Curiosity Rover that has used this as a power source for space right. In fact, we've used this since the Apollo program. We've used also on things like UM the Voyager probes. But in the case of Apollo, it was not the device that created electricity for the actual capsule. Uh. This is still dealing with a radioactive material that is decaying over time. It was used, however,

on the Moon's surface. So you know, Apollo's twelve through seventeen, they had lunar landers that were designed to UH to create operations on on the Moon. They used RTGs to generate the electricity they needed for the experiments they did on the Moon's surface as well as the lunar rovers I believe to charge them. So out of all the ones that we created for the Apollo program, five of them are on the surface of the Moon. One of them is in the Pacific and that's thanks to Apollo thirteen.

So if Tom Hanks never made that movie, we wouldn't have had the RTG. And actually I don't think it works that way, uh, Buddy. At the bottom of the Pacific is enjoying a plutonium snack at this very moment. Yeah, have you seen the host? I think this is how it starts at any right, No, No, obviously I am making light of what was really a very serious situation. RTGs clearly like again, you've got plutonium there. There is

a concern. In fact, there were a lot of concerns about using RTGs in the space program, specifically because there was a fear that if there were a launch issue, then you could potentially spread a radioactive material over a very large space, depending upon how high in the altitude you were when that problem happened. It's similar to the one of the concerns about flying a plane with the

nuclear reactor. Right. Uh. Now, we have still used RTGs, including the hygens probe, which was sent to Titan, Saturn's moon. Titan I did an episode of Forward Thinking about that where we talked about what the hygens probe did and the images that sent back. The Cassini hygens probe used an RTG for it's electrical power, So it's something that's still being used. And again it's using radioactive decay, not the process of fission, in order to generate that power.

So it's very different. Right, So these RTGs are going to be great to do something like drive around and power electronics on the Curiosity River, but you probably wouldn't use something like this for a vehicle here on Earth. Probably not. I mean you are still talking about radiation again, that's an issue. Also, radioactive decay over time is like you have a certain amount of radioactive material, right as a decay is less of that is going to decay,

thus giving you the ability to create electricity. However, whatever method you're you're playing on using um and the decay itself, we've talked about this, you know, we talked about truly random. So the decay itself is something that is not necessarily going to be consistent over the entire lifetime of the nuclear battery or whatever you want to call it. So for a vehicle, it's not necessarily going to produce an enough electricity to power something like a spacecraft uh for

uh an an indefinite amount of time. Nor is it going to be something that's always going to be dependable. And if you think your car is undependable, now, yeah, yeah, this is a long slow burn of it's it's stronger's engine whether yeah, every morning, I don't who knows if it's decayed enough for me to drive? I don't know. Okay, I've got a crazier and dumber idea. Yeah, I can't wait to hear it. What if we just basically use

nuclear bombs to sort of push us through space? Well, you know, Joe, you say that's a crazy idea, as if you were the first person to have it. I know, I'm not. No, Uh, this was something and and it's funny because just before we started recording this, we were chatting with Joe, and I were chatting with Jason, who's our our kind of our head hauncho here at how

stuff works. And we were talking about a particular project called Project or Ryan, which before it was Project or Ryan, was just this crazy idea some guys had about, you know, a tom of reactions create there's so much energy associated with them, right, I mean, you see an atomic bomb, you realize that's an enormous amount of energy that's released. Um, And we talked about that being like the uncontrolled release

of energy from an atomic reaction fission specifically in that case. Well, also you could do it with fusion like a hydrogen bomb, and there were some folks who were looking at hydrogen bombs and thinking, so much energy is being released, what there were a way for us to harness that, not in a reactor, but to actually use that to propel something. One of these guys name was A Theodore Taylor, who

had worked on weapons programs at Los Alamos and UH. He, along with several other physicists, started looking at the possibility of using hydrogen based explosions to propel as spacecraft into space. We call it project orion. This was this was an idea that was brought under the auspices of DARPA, which was ARPA at the time, UM in the nineteen fifties, and essentially the idea was that you would drop behind you a pellet of some sort and a hydrogen bomb.

The bomb explodes, it ends up plasma ifying the pellet, and the combination ends up propelling you further along your path. They called it pulse propulsion nuclear clear pululse propulsion, meaning we're talking a series of hydrogen bombs, not not you drop one bomb like a whole bunch. You know, I've seen geeks on the internet discussing this is one potential way to get a spacecraft to keep accelerating towards the speed of light as you you have nuclear pulse propulsion

continually blowing up behind it. Yeah, clearly this would be a dangerous thing to uh for lift off, you know, but if you were using I don't know, chemical rockets to get into orbit and then switch to this method of propulsion, and that would be one thing. If you were using one dangerous thing, it's less dangerous than an actual nuclear explosion on the planet's surface. But yeah, um so yeah, that mean it is an interesting idea that

no one has really pursued since that time. But there were people, I mean like top scientists really working on the potential of using this as a means of getting getting into space. Well, this again was in the middle of that atomic age where everyone was like yes, yeah, Then again, I don't know, I don't know if this has necessarily been discredited as a future potential propulsion system.

I mean, it's well, the only thing I would imagine it being uh discredited would be in the sense of arms treatise, because you would have to build huge numbers of hydrogen bombs as your propulsion system. Meanwhile, the rest of the world, I hadn't thought about that. Yeah, the rest of the world has to sit there and say, oh, it's fine for you to build an arsenal of hydrogen bombs that could destroy the world three times over because

you're just going to Mars. Sure, and there's also I'm pretty sure international laws against putting hydrogen bombs in space. Oh sure, Yeah, the weaponization of space is completely against the rules. There was a space treaty. Weapons of mass destruction are not allowed in space, let alone a whole bunch of them. So I think that for I mean, also, just just the material science of trying to build out a spaceship that could withstand multiple hydrogen bombs going off

right behind it into perpetuity sounds difficult. I mean, I mean, I'm sure like years will have it worked out. It also makes me think like one of the one of the byproducts of atomic explosions tends to be an electromagnetic pulse, which generally speaking, is not good for electronics. So I'm curious as to how that gets avoided to Okay, that's fair, that's fair, But how about a different version. How about the thermal nuclear drive. It's another proposed method of propulsion

using nuclear power. Right, Well, this would be using nuclear reactions to generate heat, yeah, to trigger a reaction engine. Right. Essentially, you are superheating a gas and then you have a nozzle that that allows you to exhaust that superheated gas. You know, by superheating it, you are increasing its volume, right, but if you have it pressurized so it can't increase beyond the confines of it. The pressurization increases increases, you

open up a nozzle, allows the gas to escape. It creates an opposite force on the you know, in the opposite direction, equal but opposite reaction type deal like fire extinguish in a cartoon, yep, exactly, and then you just you know, you go super fast. That's actually the technical terms it actually is. It's it's very difficult to spell.

There's like a p in like fourteens is um. So the the information I've read has suggested that this approach, which by the way, would still be using nuclear fission for the actual reaction. So you'd have a nuclear reactor the way you would on a power plant here on earth, except obviously designed for spacecraft. Um, but it would be in theory twice the would give you twice the performance

of chemical rockets. However, it would also necessitate a much heavier UM spacecraft because you would have to have all the things we've talked about before, the shielding and the nuclear um fuel itself, and also the gas that you're going to be using as the propellant. All of that would still be consideration. But the US began exploring use

of nuclear propulsion for spacecraft in the nineteen fifties. They formed the Nuclear Engine for Rocket Vehicle Application called also called NERVA to explore the possibilities, and they proved the feasibility of such a propulsion system. There was even talk of using it in a manned mission to Mars back in the seventies, but it never very never went very far. By then, the space race was starting to wind down. People had essentially said, we've proven what we need to prove.

Congress was cutting funding, so UH programs are being canceled, and this was one of the ones that got canceled.

But I had heard some interesting stories about how using this we could get to Mars much faster than if we were using traditional chemical rockets, like within three months instead of eight, which is you know, pretty pretty significant um and and by that significance it also means that you expose astronauts to to radiation for much less time except for the radiation that they're being exposed to from

the vehicle itself. That's a fair point. I was thinking specifically cosmic radiation, but sheer terrestrial radiation is still a very fair concern. But yeah, it's it's one of those things that you know, maybe in the future will be explored again. But anytime we get to nuclear propulsion, there's also always the concern about could that be used for other purposes? Sure, and and actually I'm sure that if you were shielding a nuclear propulsed I'm just gonna hearb

that now. And yeah, totally U vehicle like that, you would come up with really great shielding for cosmic radiation as well. Sure. Yeah, I mean, uh, we're talking about protecting ourselves against very high energy particles, whether it's from you know, the again, a radiation from a nuclear reactor or cosmic sources. Uh. There are some other means of generating electricity using nuclear processes that don't require you to

undergo fission. Uh. There are these things things that are in development called nuclear batteries, not like the one on the Curiosity rover. That's a slightly different approach, but they again would also generate electricity through radioactive decay. But we're talking about harnessing beta particles, which are kind of midpowered, essentially electron They have a negative charge, they have very little mass, but they are expelled from the nucleus of

radioactive isotopes. Yeah, so like in beta decay. For example, when carbon fourteen decays back into nitrogen fourteen, it has beta decay at objects a beta particle, and then suddenly

it's got one more proton inside the nucleus. Yeah, yeah, and uh, you know, you can use all sorts of different isotopes and clean things like heavy hydrogen as and hydrogen three, a couple of different versions of heavy hydrogen, but this is specifically hydrogen three we're talking about, and if you harness those using semiconductors, then you can actually

use that as a source for electricity. But similar to what we were talking about before, since you're depending on radioactive decay, it could be too slow to provide the

electricity needed to power a vehicle. However, this might be something that eventually ends up recharging your cell phone without you needing to plug your phone in, like your phone is constantly charging using a nuclear batter that could just be generating enough electricity to recharge your your traditional battery to keep your phone going so you never have to

plug it in. Like your phone, your phone's battery would essentially last as long as you wanted to use that phone, keeping in mind that most of us end up upgrading our phones after a few years. Anyway, for me, that is worth putting a nuclear thing on my face. I just hold it right up to your brain pan. That's that's where I like to put nuclear things. Well, they always said I had the brain pan of a stagecoach tilter.

Is that what they always say? Okay, Well, on that note, let's let's take one look at another possible use some nuclear power. Yeah, we have been talking all of this time about radioactive decomposition and also fission. Right, the only time we mentioned fusion at all was using hydrogen bombs to propel a spacecraft. But what about fusion reacts. We've

we've mentioned that about them there. Okay, so this is one of the things that you know we we have them yet kind of yes, yes, we do a fusion reactors, okay, and that's the thing we've done entire episodes about this,

and they do work, just not efficiently at all. Right, it takes more energy to make them go than you get out of them, right, Or if you if you are able to get enough energy out where it's equivalent or more than the energy you put in, it's still only consumes a tiny percentage of the fuel, which means you end up with a bunch of unused fuel at the end of your reaction. And it's not it's still

not efficient. You're you're getting more energy out than you're putting in, but you're not you're not using efficient use of the fuel itself. Uh. So we've seen some very dramatic improvements in the technology because for the longest time it was like you would pour in a energy and get six back from the reaction. Clearly, that's not going to be sustainable. You're just it's an energy loss at that point, right, Right, It's not an engine so much

as it is an interesting science experience. It's it's a sinkhole, that's what it is. But we've gotten much better about that. So fusion could actually be far more um powerful than chemical rockets. Fusion powered rockets. Uh, you would be like the name sounds. You fused two nucleus is together to create a new one, and in the process that releases a lot of energy um and it could potentially make things like a trip to Mars take much less time than what it does now. So we talked about this.

When the Curiosity was sent to Mars, it took about eight months I think, from the point where it launched the point where it's set down on Mars. And that's because again we have to wait for the ideal amount of time where Earth and Mars are going to be close to being in alignment to share the best window. And then I mean, obviously it's a rover. It's not

traveling at the speed of light. It's traveling at the speed of rover, right right, So, and then if we want to send people there, the big concern was that, well, they're going to have to wait for two years before we get to that point where the Earth and Mars are getting close together again, because we won't have enough fuel to send them there and then have them come back and have that trip last a really long time.

We have to make the best use of physics in order to conserve fuel and give them a chance to to get there. And get back. But we've mentioned this before, Mars is totally trying to kill you. Mars is not a nice place, is not going to be a cake walk for anyone who goes there, So you don't really want people to spend a long time there if you can prevent it. So one of the possibilities is using fusion based rockets, which could get you to Mars in

around three months. In fact, the the UH the estimation I saw was that a proposed mission would take eighty seven days to get to Mars. You could spend thirty days on Mars and then it would take It would be like a n ady three day trip back to Earth. So you would end up having much less exposure to things like cosmic radiation UH, at least during the trip. Once you're on the surface of Mars you gotta figure out something there. But on the trip there you would

be UH. You would spend less time in space. Therefore you would have less of a risk of being exposed to things like cosmic radiation, which is bad news. UM so interesting proposal. It would be fusing things like UM. The two different versions of heavy hydrogen UH, deuterium and tritium. The hydrogen two and hydrogen three in other words, and that would create a plasma. So you get these bubbles that are in this plasma. And this is the super weird way that I I think it's fascinating, uh weird

way to actually create fusion. You got these bubbles in the plasma. You then capture the bubbles, you surround them with metal rings, and you use a magnetic field to compress that bubble. And the magnetic field is powerful enough to compress that bubble to the point where fusion takes place.

The release of the energy from fusion is so great that it vaporizes the metal that has surrounded that bubble, and that metal is then that vaporized metal is then released in a nozzle to create the propulsion that pushes the spacecraft forward, which is kind of crazy. Vaporized metal

as you're propelling can propelling exactly. Well. It makes me think it's kind of like a super souped up version of what the cylinders in a car engine do, like they compressed the gas and pelod ignites, except now we're we're talking about a different level of ignition. Well, and another interesting point is that when you get to the moment where that compressed gas ignits within a cylinder. Typically you're talking about a temperature that's higher than the melting

point of the engine of your car. But because it happens so quickly, it's such a short amount of time that it is that temperature, it's not enough to actually melt anything. That's the same principle of this fusion approach, like, yeah, we don't have anything on Earth that would withstand the temperatures were talking about, but it happens so quickly, but it doesn't need to. Don't worry about it. Put it

inside a twinkie. So there are other other ways to create fusion rockets that would that would propel the spacecraft in a in a way different than the metal rings being vaporized and injected into space method I just talked about. But they didn't sound as science fiction, awesome crazy as the method I described, So that was the one I focused on. Fair enough. Yeah, I mean, you know, you gotta have you gotta have your standards, So you know, we didn't even mention I don't think ice breakers, No,

I think icebreakers are cool. That I mean, I don't have the research sitting in front of me, so it wouldn't make sense to talk about. Are you talking about gatherings where like a bunch of people get together and then is kind of try and have casual conversation in a very forced environment. You know very well what I'm talking about, Jonathan. They're talking about ships that probe the icy reaches of the poles when they have to they've got a pound through some ice because that stuff gets thick.

So how do they generate enough thrust to crack the ice shelf and move through it? Well, they have these nuclear powered engines. I don't think all of them do, but some of them do it. Certainly the one that that found Franking Science Monster didn't obviously, No, but yeah, that there are some other, you know, vehicles that are

similar to that. Were largely talking naval vehicles. Whether we ever see any other vehicles that that rely heavily upon nuclear power, Uh, I'm a little more than a little skeptical. I mean, it may end up being that you could argue there are going to be plenty of vehicles that will be indirectly powered by nuclear power in the sense that nuclear power will generate the electricity and you plug your car and sure, yeah, when you when you think

about it, that way all. I mean, many electric vehicles right now are nuclear power, right right, But as for direct nuclear power, I am skeptical, but never seen never Well, if we want to go down that route, we could just say that all of our things are big bang powered. That's true. You just go back, go back far enough,

like yeah, we're all related. If you go back far enough, eventually you have to you have to sit there and say, like, all right, for practical purposes, for this conversation, we're going to have to just ignore that and move forward. Yeah. I agree. I'm also kind of skeptical, at least at least for the near future. I don't see how it could be economically or or safetly feasible to. I'm so good at English words, you guys, I'm yeah, I have a degree in this. It would also be politically difficult to.

I mean, there's so many a lot of barriers. But but I can certainly envision a future hundred tw years out wherein it becomes feasible due to material science and etcetera. Well, one day I'm going to live on a nuclear powered fan boat and I'm going to dominate the swamps of southern Louisiana. I can't wait to hear about how you wrestled the Great robo Gator and uh claimed dominance of all your domain. I don't believe in your future, Joe,

but I like it better than mine. Well, on that note, I want to hear about what our listeners have to say about this, about this or any other topic, really, anything that you're you wanted to hear more about. Maybe you've heard an episode that we've done in the past. You think that we need to do an update. Because here's the crazy thing about the future. It keeps coming and then turning into the present, and sometimes we get

things totally right, and sometimes we get things totally wrong. Uh. If you have anything you want us to revisit, or you've just got a new topic that you would love us to talk about, you should get in touch with us. Let us know what that is. Send us an email our addresses FW thinking at how Stuff Works dot com, or drop us a line on Facebook, Google Plus or Twitter. At Google Plus and Twitter, we are FW thinking at Facebook.

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