Tuesday, October 17, 2006

FUTURE MOBIL


During the 1950s, much of the world was quivering with anticipation over the exciting prospects of nuclear power. It seemed that there was no energy problem too large or too small for the mighty atom to tackle during the glorious and modern Atomic Age.
It was during this period in 1957 that the Ford Motor Company unveiled the most ambitious project in their history: a concept vehicle which had a sleek futuristic look, emitted no harmful vapors, and offered incredible fuel mileage far beyond that of the most efficient cars ever built. This automobile-of-the-future was called the Ford Nucleon, named for its highly unique design feature… a pint-size atomic fission reactor in the trunk. It was designed to use uranium fission to heat a steam generator, rapidly converting stored water into high-pressure steam which could then be used to drive a set of turbines. One steam turbine would provide the torque to propel the car while another would drive an electrical generator. Steam would then be condensed back into water in a cooling loop, and sent back to the steam generator to be reused. Such a closed system would allow the reactor to produce power as long as fissile material remained.Designers anticipated that a typical Nucleon would travel about 5,000 miles per charge.
It seemed inevitable that the internal combustion engine would fade into obscurity, becoming a quaint relic of a pre-atomic past. But the Nucleon's design hinged on the assumption that smaller nuclear reactors would soon be developed, as well as lighter shielding materials. When those innovations failed to appear, the project was scrapped ; the bulky apparatus and heavy lead shielding didn't allow for a safe and efficient car-sized package.
The Ford Nucleon sans tail finsFord never produced a working prototype, nevertheless the Nucleon remains an icon of the Atomic Age. Their reckless optimism demonstrates that one shouldn't consider a task impossible just because nobody has tried it yet– some ideas need to be debunked on their own merit. With today's looming energy crisis and slow migration to alternative fuel sources, we may not have seen the last of the atomic automobile concept. Perhaps one day fossil fuels will wither under the radioactive glare of the mighty atom, and our highways will hum with the steam turbines of mobile Chernobyls. It could be a real blast.

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