Science-fiction fans: Hilbert Schenck’s Steam Bird.
If I remeber Juluis Verns Nautilus used the same type of power mentioned here
USA
http://www.realclearscience.com/blog/2014/07/why_not_nuclear-powered_aircraft.html
Soviet Union
http://www.aviation-history.com/articles/nuke-bombers.htm
No nuclear powered airplane has been built.
Heavy Metal – Nuclear Locomotives vs Diesel Locomotives
I am still waiting for promise of the nuclear locomotive to come true. When it comes, it should come with a real steam whistle instead of an air horn.
Actually, in the Jules Verne novel “20,000 Leagues Under The Sea” Captain Nemo’s “Nautilus” is powered by electricity. Nemo says the electricity is generated using sea water, but doesn’t say how. Understandable, Verne was a great writer but not a scientist himself, so he couldn’t theorize how it would be done.
In the Walt Disney film of the novel (great movie!) it’s strongly hinted that the “Nautilus” is nuclear powered but they don’t come right out and say so, it’s left to your imagination. Although there is a great special effects mushroom cloud when Nemo’s island base self-destructs.
Exactly as I remember it. On the Disneyland TV show promoting the movie and in the movie itself, it was suggested that Jules Verne was foreseeing nuclear power, but when I read the book, it was pretty clear that he was talking about electricity.
It’s here, and the French have quite a number of them, some of which achieve remarkable speed.
Of course, we’re talking about the ‘correct’ use of nuclear power for locomotives, which is a grid of nuclear power plants feeding a constant-tension catenary infrastructure…
Jules Verne was pretty much on the mark with his concept of electric drive for submarines since that is what happened when the diesel engine made submarines practical, using batteries for submerged running and the diesels for surface running and battery recharging.
FWIW, the first generation of subs (i.e. up till just prior to the sart of WW1) used gasolene or distillate engines. Main impetus for using diesels was the much lower CO content in the exhaust than spark ignition engines along with lower volatility fuel and better economy.
As for the original top of molten salt reactors, I have run across a couple of references to some nasty corrosion problems with the materials in contact with the molten salt. IIRC, the salts have ionic and not covalent bonds, and that would imply that the molten salt would be electrically conductive - any dissimilar metals present would be setting up a battery.
It has been a very long time now since I came across some of the older ‘original’ references in the Columbia engineering library, but I think that even by the time of Rosenthal et al. (1969) the engineering issues of conductivity in a working reactor had been addressed. The question, I thought (in the early '80s), was whether alloys that were demonstrably ‘passivated’ at high temperature in contact with other media (notably, for example, Inconel 600 or the Hastelloy-N that I understood had been specifically developed for fluoride-salt use in nuclear aircraft) would remain passivated with conductive salt mixtures passing at high mass flow over the developed oxide layer.
Some of the early reactors used a (nominally conductive) graphite moderator but that was not wetted by the salts used. I have not seen any indication that galvanic corrosion due to conductive electrolyte was observed in these, nor that the metallurgy of the alloys used was point-imperfect in a way that set up for internal grain corrosion.
I believe the modern reactors are using NiMo alloys with SiC particles to reduce creep (and NiSi nanoparticles to anchor the SiC more solidly) and to my knowledge there have been no reports of damaging corrosion with these at all.
The proposals I’ve seen suggest that graphite is still the preferred moderator for neutron economy reasons. Be or BeO would be another possibility, but I’d wonder about how either would hold up to a long sustained neutron flux. Graphite in a molten salt reactor is probably hot enough to sustain the “Wigner energy release” mechanism that was a bugaboo for low temperature graphite moderated reactors (e.g. Windscale).
This is with a molten salt coolant? I’m probably pretty ignorant about recent work with molten salt coolants, with ONRL’s project being the last one that I’m aware of getting a fair amount of run time.
My skepticism about molten salt coolant is derived from the experience with sodium cooled reactors. They worked fine on a demonstrator level, but utility scle plants have had all sorts of problems. As such, it would be useful to have a reasonable size reactor (50 MWth or higher) running more or less continuously for a few years before saying it is the future of nuclear energy.
My knowledge of the Wigner release is that long, cumulative mechanical displacement through neutron collisions at relatively low temperature builds up extensive numbers of Frenkel pairs, which can autocatalytically release generating substantial net heating comparatively suddenly. If the graphite is soaked at around 250C or above, the damage tends to relax nondestructively.
I still happen to believe that the graphite fire at Chernobyl was to a significant degree the result of Wigner release after the very substantial prompt-critical neutron emission. A high-energy neutron can cause many hundreds of defects in the graphite lattice, essentially storing its energy in more locations than, say, Bragg release from a charged-particle event might.
Explicitly, and with considerable metallurgy to back it up. (I might add that some of this factored into the comparative metallurgy of the T1 replica lightweight rods… with the substitution of cerium for silicon carbide microspheres.)
I think there are many similarities between the two (for example, handling cold shutdowns that don’t critically atherosclerose the primary loops) but I think that the original Detroit Edison breeder would have run perfectly well if those last-minute beer-can vanes hadn’t been added. That thing was built like a piece of jewelry. I also think that some of the Soviet developments in NaK eutectics that are liquid at reasonable environmental temperatures represe
So…What they seem to be saying is that Salt Cooled and Fired nuke powered plants seem to work well in that they are more heat effciatate in smaller KW plants and that certain radioactive salts that are used for the coolant can be used for the fuel as well.-----PS- The orginal idea of Nuke Powered air craft Bombers is a dead duck as far as saftey because it would be the end of the world as we know it and that ICBMS have replaced bombers anyway.----BUT-a small scale nuke power system can run a subway or a small university.
Of course, Rickover’s SSN-571 was launched in 1954, just as the Disney movie was released in 1954. But the submarine name was announced in 1951, so it seems unlikely that the movie, rather than the book, influenced the name of the submarine.
However, the knowledge that the nuclear submarine was being built (it was laid down in 1952) probably influenced Disney in the movie script.
The Wikipedia page says that the ships “patch”, the logo worn by the crew, was designed by the Walt Disney Company, which suggests more than a casual relationship.
Well the book does say its gets its fuel from the sea and uses it to generate electrcity. So perhaps a salt generated energy system of some kind like what i am talkng about. Batterys have been around for quite some time and were used in Vernes day.