NASA has been working on them for a while and if their light enough to launch they would be light enough to put in a locomotive. Read the paragraph at this website:
http://www.singtech.com/features.html#anchor656032
for more light and interesting reading read their development page.
NOBODY has developed a nuclear fission reactor that will produce more power than it uses to intitiate the fusion reaction. Doing this is one of the Holy Grails of 21st Century power generation technology. That’s why NASA and many other public and private organizations have spent so much money on research over the last four decades.
I agree that we won’t see Nuclear powered locomotives(other than straight electrics getting catenary power from nuke plants). But,for those interested, the Modern Steam Page has some interesting engineering concepts for such units. The Modular pebble bed reactors discussed are a revolutionary new design that offer many safety advantages over the current contol rod systems.
http://www.messiaen.demon.co.uk/trains/newsteam/modern16.htm
Hi Guys,
Ever hear the term LOCA?
The bubleheads and Dan understand already.
Loss Of Coolant Accident.
Besides the control rods that prevent the reaction from becoming a runaway, the water in the reactor also absorbs a tremendous amount of heat, and helps control the reaction.
This water becomes super heated, along with becoming radioactive, and turns to steam in the upper part of the reactor, then, through a heat exchanger, passes its heat to “clean” water, which in turn becomes steam, drives a turbine, which drives a generator/alternator, which drives your motor or charges your battery.
The dirty,and radioactive water/steam in the reactor vessel is cooled, and condensed and returned to the main reactor vessel for reuse.
The “clean” water is cooled and released, or in closed systems, like a submarine, it is also condensed, and reused.
The huge cooling towers you see at land based reactors are not releasing steam from either side of the heat exchange loop, they are cooling the clean water prior to releasing it into a stream or body of water.
The steam you see is the excess heat from the clean water.
Ever note that most land based reactors are located next to, or have on hand a tremendous amount of water?
Because, if things go wrong, (read Three Mile Island) and you lose the coolant water in the reactor, the fuel rods melt, along with everything else, like the control rods, and it all puddles on the bottom of the reactor vessel.
The heat generated makes the surface of the sun seem like a nice place to vacation.
It can and has melted through the bottom of reactor vessels.
Ask the Russians about the China Syndrome, they have first hand experience.
To prevent this from happening, if, by some chance, you do have a coolant loss, the fastest way to stop the reaction before you get a runaway is to flood the reactor vessel with a continous flo
Aw shucks - though bio-gas locomotives were the coming thing. Just feed the crews their daily ration of pork&beans before work & plug-em in…[:-^]
mmmmmm I don’t like nuclear power locomotive very high risk if get radiation from leak anywhere or big accient
What if don’t use this nuclear locomotive where will go ? under ground or other way
It is highly unlikely that a nuclear reactor powered locomotive would be practical – there is, if nothing else, a weight problem from the structure and shielding required.
However, I should point out, if only for the sake of completeness, that it is possible to build a reactor in which a loss of coolant accident results in a complete shutdown of the reactor, rather than a runaway as alluded to above: it is called the CANDU design, and there are a number of them in use in the sunny northland (Canada). If those of you in New England have the lights on tonight and are reasonably warm, you can thank the CANDUs of HydroQuebec.
The primary goal of the Atomic Powered Bomber was ultimatly to produce a plane that could remain aloft for days at a time.
One of the primary reasons the Nuclear bomber failed was that they couldn’t provide enough radiation sheilding for the crews. As they were built the X-39’s could only be flown for I believe two hours maximum before the crews began to be exposed to dangerous (at that time) levels of radiation, and seeing that the round trip time from the US to Russia and back was a bit longer than two hours they idea was scrapped. In order to provide safe radiation sheilding the plane would be too heavy to get off the ground.
The same weight problems with sheilding and safeguarding the reactor core also doomed the Atomic Locomotive, the engine would have been so heavy that alot of the engines power would have gone to moving itself, let alone any cars. There were also concerns by the rail companies about having to reinforce existing right of ways and trackage to support the porky engines.
Nuclear ships and submarines never had to deal with this problem because of the ships and subs were already very huge to start with and the steam boilers and diesel plants they replaced were of a similar weight to start with. The weight of the cores was simply absorbed into the overall displacement of the vessel.
The radiation concerns we mention today simply were not of concern when these were being planned. Dont forget, this was in the 1950’s when A-bomb’s were being tested in the Nevada desert with US troops in trenchs right next to the blasts, and all this a mere 60 miles from Las Vegas. When there were serious plans to use A-bombs to blast a pathway for I-40 thru the mountains along the Arizona/California border. Not a speck of concern by our Government for the troops exposed to sometimes lethal doses of radiation or for all the people down wind of all that fallout.
As far as I know a true “China Syndrome” has not happened yet, even is Russia, Thank God. Though they have had some terribly close calls. Chernobyl has a graphite reactor which did not melt but suffered a catastrophic internal pressure explosion which destroyed the reactor.
Be afraid, very afraid…
A true “China Syndrome” is far worse.
The cooliing system has failed and the control rods have failed to slow the reaction. the core heats and heats and heats until it melts into a molten mass of radioactive metal at about a million degrees, this mass acts like a solid, melting and evaporating everything it touches giving off a massivley radioactive steam. Once the core melts, nothing can be done. This molten mass is pulled by the earths gravity downward melting a hole in the Earth theoriticly until it reaches the center of the Earth. In reality it most likely sinks until it hits the ground water table which instantly vaporizes giving off a geyser of deadly radiation that get blasted into the atmosphere. The water table, supplying water and cooling ever so slowely the core mass but even if there is a lot of ground water it would take a long time to cool down, all the while a deadly radioactive steam pipe is spewing gasses into the atmosphere shrouding the planet and there aint squat they can do to stop it…[xx(]
Mull on that, Kiddies…
I have just heard of the turbo train, like the one that looks like the acela but is jet powered.
Some railroad history magazine – was it Railroad History Quarterly? – did an article on this not long ago. Nuke-driven hogs were an idea so utterly stupid that someone just had to assemble a task force and spend scads of money imagining it. That not even one prototype was ever built shows the poor potential of the scheme. Simply shielding the crew from radiation added too much dead weight. The environmental consequences of railroad accidents were horrible to contemplate. Most importantly, there was no reason to think an atomic locomotive would perform any better than a common diesel. Trains don’t need to operate for extended periods far from resupply points like ships and subs do. They can stop frequently for fuel. Without stops for loading and unloading, a train has no usefulness. It wasn’t like they were out on patrol duty! The whole concept seems more valuable today, just as something to laugh at.
Steam triumphs over diesel.[:)]Modern submarines are nuclear powered.That means they are steamships.Take that,Rudolph![:D]
To correct a possible misconception–those big cooling lakes and/or cooling towers you see at a nuke (or for that matter, any other power plant) are there to provide a source of cool condenser water for the steam cycle to run the turbine. All of these plants, regardless of whether they are coal, oil, gas or nuke use a recirculating closed loop for the steam, where it is preheated, heated and superheated in the boiler, piped to and then expanded in a multistage turbine, exhausted at low pressure and condensed in a shell-and-tube heat exchanger which is cooled by the outside water, and then piped as liquid water back up to the boiler. This minimizes the makeup water requirement. A modern power plant of any type must have some source of cooling water for the condenser–a river, cooling lake, cooling tower, etc.–or it will not operate.
All but a very few steam locomotives did not use this type of closed system, instead employing an open system where the spent steam was exhausted up the stack and you had to refill the tender every 30 miles or so in some cases.
While a cooling lake is a great potential source for reactor emergency flood water, that’s not what it’s there for. And despite the images on The Simpsons, those big cooling towers don’t necessarily mean there’s a nuke around, nor are they radioactive or contain the reactor.
But I do enjoy the image of a nukey loco dragging a lake around, or maybe a hundred or so tank cars full of cooling and make-up water, in addition to all that shielding. Where’s the freight?? Definitely impractical. And imagine the havoc wreaked if they’d had them on the old L&N Gulf Coast line, for example, where trains routinely ran aground and dumped hazmat all over the place. Glow-in-the-dark train, anyone?
The proposed Nuke-loco back in the 50’s had a condensor system that was ment to recover all the steam from the boiler system. If my memoery serves m
I say build nuke locos.[}:)][}:)][}:)] I live right down the road from TMI and if i have a nuke in my backyard, everybody should.[:D][:D][:D]
Glowin’ green on my speeder,
Adrianspeeder
Found this on the web while looking for a photo of the atom-loco…
Fallout from the `peaceful atom’
By Peter Montague
In 1953 US President Dwight Eisenhower announced plans for the “peaceful
atom”. The shining star of this program was to be thousands of nuclear-powered electricity-generating plants, worldwide, making electricity “too cheap to meter”.
Electricity was not the only promised benefit. According to author Catherine Caufield, news articles soon began appearing with headlines such as, “Forestry Expert Predicts Atomic Rays Will Cut Lumber Instead of Saws”, and “Atomic Locomotive Designed”.
Between 1946 and 1961, the US Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) spent $1.5 billion to develop an atomic airplane. (The entire Manhattan Project to develop the atomic bomb had cost $2.2 billion.) Problems with the atomic airplane were obvious from the beginning. The nuclear reactor powering the plane had to be shielded, but shielding is heavy, so an atomic-powered airplane could never get off the ground. According to New York Times science-columnist Peter Metzger, for a time the AEC considered reducing the shielding and employing only older pilots who wouldn’t be planning to have any more children.
Another problem was that radioactivity would build up inside the nuclear engine: after running for a year, the engine would contain 20 times as much radioactivity as was released by the Hiroshima bomb. A plane crash would leave a major legacy of radioactive waste spread across the countryside. The project was abandoned.
Staged accident
Atoms for Peace spawned other expensive schemes. NERVA (Nuclear Engine for Rocket Vehicle Application) was developed at a cost of $1.4 billion. On January 16, 1965, the AEC staged a nuclear accident in the Nevada desert; a NERVA rocket was launched and a portion of its engine was purposefully burned up so that AEC scientists could study environmental effects of radiation. Six million resident
vsmith:
I know. The last paragraph was meant to be facetious. Couldn’t resist the wisecracks–I’ve had to handle a lot of serious people with major misconceptions over the years, particularly at the University level. Besides, think about how many headlight and ditch light bulbs you’d save with the glow-in-the-dark concept… Probably a RR acct somewhere that might go nuts over the idea (save a nickel, spend a million- hey, it works for the hwy people). But I really do think you provided some more very good info for all the folks, particularly the younger ones. I think you did a great service posting the article. Remember when nukie electricity was going to be so cheap they were going to give it away?
And, by the way, isn’t it amazing that almost every artist’s conception of a sexy new RR technology looked like an E? What are we missing?
I’d like to see Nuclear Powered Locomotives and I belive the ARMY is testing one