Fun fact: The Ford Nucleon concept car had the dangerous bit in the rear. While never built, it did provide a template for the later Pinto. _Allegedly!_
Pinto was scapegoat because the name was easy to remember. Cars catching fire after a crash happens in the movies but is very rare in reality. About the Pinto: "When all types of fatalities are considered, the Pinto was approximately even with the AMC Gremlin, Chevrolet Vega, and Datsun 510. It was significantly better than the Datsun 1200/210, Toyota Corolla and VW Beetle. The safety record of the car in terms of fire was average or slightly below average for compacts, and all cars respectively. This was considered respectable for a subcompact car." en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Pinto
@@richardgreen7225 the problem with the Pinto that nearly bankrupted Ford was the propensity for the paint to fall off due to incompatible paints being used, the only cure was to strip the car and repaint, the cost of which is enormous, all done under warranty of coarse, little known and not something Ford wanted to make too much of, catching fire on the other hand didn't have the same cost implications because as you have pointed out it was average for its class but it gave the press something to latch onto.
usually you need highly enriched uranium to power smaller reactors (most military ship reactors use 90 % U-235, because of the small size of the reactor, to stretch the time between refuelings). In nuclear power plants you usually use 3 to 4 % enriched uranium, but only the U-235 is used for the fission, the rest (U-238) is not used and would be dead weight. However, this means it's also weapons grade uranium. As long as it's use in military ships it's in safe hands, but if you give it to civilians they could sell it to foreign countries starting a nuclear weapons program with it.
More than one. Most long term spacecraft are powered by RTGs because they can provide hundred of watts continuously for a few decades. They are rather robust as they are solid metal and tiny ones have been used in pacemakers where they offer almost no risk to the user. Unfortunately, the user is likely to be quite old and if the power supply is cremated with it's former user this provides an "environmental hazard". 😈
@Sparky Puddins how so once you have consumed the body with cleansing fire there is nothing left for the demon host, zombie, or vampire to inhabit, come let the sister's purify with fire!!.
The plutonium used in spacecraft RTGs is a byproduct of making nuclear weapons. Because the US quit making new nuclear weapons years ago, NASA is running low on the good plutonium isotope for RTGs. You can use other substances but plutonium 238 has the best power density, reasonable half life and less massive shielding requirements compared to something like strontium 90. The nice thing about RTGs is that they have no moving parts; it's basically just a thermocouple wrapped around an isotope that radiates decay heat. Stick it in a shielded container with some cooling radiator fins and it's basically a battery. The LM Aquarius used by the Apollo 13 astronauts had an RTG aboard for use by lunar surface experiments, but the crew never landed on the moon and used Aquarius as a life boat until just before reentering the atmosphere, so that RTG is at the bottom of the ocean somewhere. The things are nearly indestructible if built right.
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@Chad Cuckmaker the thorium cant melt down but because of relative stability it needs a push from a more unstable element to push its radioactive decay to a usable point.
Simon "Studebaker Packard, I never heard of that last one" Everyone from South Bend "Hey we were relevant once, we still kinda have Notre Dame and....."
I nearly pissed myself !! Nuclear powered, made of plastic, glow in the dark bumpers, could hover over water, and had a force field. More like a glow in the dark driver !! Easily your best video yet Simon.
Shipping contributes how much of world's pollution? So repower these ships wit h methonal produced from green hydrogen ( test completed in Cdn from old oil wells ( 40% energy still left underground Co2 stays underground ) green hydrogen 1 403 830 4124
@@AlanAlan-pb9vl Shipping causes relatively much pollution (they use little emission cleaning technology, because of missing legal regulation for cargo ships), but only 2 % of CO² emissions, compared to 20 % caused by land based vehicles. Simon confound this. In future natural gas, or hydrogen may be a power source for ships.
If you think about it then it's actually surprising for Nuclear reactors not to be used in transport ships. I mean you could technically build a standardized size and fully self-contained modular reactor which, in case of a Ship sinking related emergency, could be dumped into the sea followed by automatically refloating back to the surface to safely recover it afterwards ( similar to how Federation Starships dump their ship Cores into Space should it go critical ). Such a modular reactor would also provide the possibility of transplanting it to a new ship should the old have reached its service time.
Studebaker was a very old company. They built horse-drawn wagons in the 1800's. They built electric cars decades before your parents were born and lasted into the 70's. Packard was a luxury maker, more deluxe than Cadillac for a time. The two merged.
The Studebaker/Packard company was definitely before your time, young man. My aunt had a Studebaker that she drove from the mid 1950s until it became impossible to repair in the mid 1970s. I was never old enough to drive her Studebaker, but I did get to drive the Chrysler she traded it in on in 1976. (My aunt told me about once when her Studebaker died at a stoplight. The person in the car behind her kept honking their horn, so she went back and said to them, "Would you like to go up and try starting my car while I sit back here and honk?" My aunt was a sweet lady, but she was pretty quick on her feet.)
Packard is well known in the US Simon and was an American luxury automobile marque built by the Packard Motor Car Company of Detroit, Michigan, United States. The first Packard automobiles were produced in 1899, and the last Detroit-built Packard in 1956, when they built the Packard Predictor, their last concept car. Packard bought Studebaker in 1953 and formed the Studebaker-Packard Corporation of South Bend, Indiana. The 1957 and 1958 Packards were actually badge engineered Studebakers, built in South Bend.
I'm suddenly thankful that nuclear-powered autos never caught on, seeing that Ford actually made a couple of prototypes. I lived through the eras of Fords that were notorious for catching fire -- I have friends whose houses burned down, due to Ford's cost-cutting, incompetent engineering -- and I can only wonder how many mini-Chernobyl Zones would exist today if they'd succeeded in this endeavor.
Would likely be easier to just have a home reactor and charge your electric car you could have something like an RTG or betavoltaic battery sealed in a car though
Never heard of Packard?? Simon... where have you been?? Packard was an American luxury car marque built by the Packard Motor car Company of Detroit, Michigan, United States. The first Packard automobiles were produced in 1899, and the last Detroit-built Packard in 1956, when they built the Packard Predictor, their last concept car. With sales dwindling by the 1950s, Packard merged with the much larger Studebaker Corporation in the hope of cutting its production costs. ... Though the company would continue to manufacture cars in South Bend, Indiana, until 1958, the final model produced on June 25, 1956, is considered the last true Packard . During world war 2 they produced the Merlin engine licensed from Rolls-Royce for the P-51 Mustang.
This reminds me of the Chrysler Turbine Car. Whenever a new tech came out it was supposed to "change the world". Jay Leno owns one and there's a vid here on TH-cam. It is pretty cool when he starts it up. It is also a gorgeous bronze color.
I've been curious about the history of nuclear-powered vehicles for some time, but I hadn't gotten around to digging anything up. And now, lo! Whistler and co. have dug for me!
I was always under the impression that the Savanna was a failure. The weight of the shielding and the cost of a crew trained to operate a nuclear power plant, made it impossible to carry enough cargo to make a profit.
More to do with the design of the ship itself, which was a relatively weird half passenger ship and half cargo freighter affair. It's not unlikely that a Nuclear powered Container Ship or OBO Carrier will be revisited in the future; though the crew being armed and trained to repel boarders likely would be a requirement.
@@CrusaderSports250 The first vehicle I drove (I was 16 and learning to drive) was my dad's 1965 F-250 with a 350 or so cuin V8 and no power steering. I was absolutely unable to turn the wheel at a dead stop. The Suzuki is easy.
I used to drive a VW Sirocco with non-power steering. Hard to turn the wheel at a stop but not impossible, but it wasn't a heavy car. It had manual everything, transmission, locks, windows, no A/C, no cruise control, but fun as hell to drive and a kickin' stereo system.
Studebaker and Packard were once big car makers in the US. I went to a car museum in LA once and they had some old Packard roadster type cars from the 30s that were beautiful.
Simon Studebaker and Packard were awesome automotive manufacturers at the turn of the century. You should do a megaprojects on them and some of the automotive manufacturers in America at the turn of the century. We had some incredible and brilliant engineers before WWI and WW2 pushed them out.
Nuclear car designers: we can do this we'll use imaginary technologies that don't exist but we want to exist. Self driving cars using 60s era computers... lol gps didn't even exist yet good luck navigating.
I had a chance to go aboard the Savannah many years ago when it was at the Patriots Point Naval Museum in Charleston, South Carolina. Luxury was its standard. Not as large as normal cargo ships, it was quite a site to behold, almost blinding white. I would have loved to be a passenger sailing on her. she looked out of place beside an aircraft carrier, destroyer and submarine. She was later moved to Baltimore, Maryland.
Can't believe that he has never heard of a Studabaker. Maybe it's an American thing since it was an American car company. One of the many that couldn't afford to retool for new models like the big 3. This left them looking old. You see it today too. Tesla may update their cars often but the appearance hasn't changed. Once they get bigger it may come more often.
Simon is wrong about one thing. Thorium is actually a more reactive nuclear fuel. It generates more neutrons per fission than Uranium or Plutonium. It was just discovered too late to make a dent in the western and Soviet nuclear fuel cycles. However, India is actually developing their internal nuclear reactor designs based on Thorium because India is home to some of the largest deposits of this fuel in the world.
Nope. First, Thorium is really not a fuel, but a fertile material from which you can breed U-233 which is a fuel. It gives more neutrons per fission than U-235 (2.5 for U233 and 2.3 for U235 at least in the thermal spectrum) but not more than Pu239 (2.9 neutrons per fission average). I don't understand what he was referring to in 13:43, probably to chemical reactivity, but I think the advantage for safety in a nuclear powered vehicle using the Thorium-Uranium cycle would be far less accumulation of higher actinides like Plutonium, which is very poisonous chemically speaking. Anyway even when I'm the greatest fan and defender of nuclear energy the idea of fitting any type of nuclear reactor in a car and give the keys to the average driver seems to me utterly idiotic. And the Thorium-Uranium cycle was discovered during the manhattan project, at the same time as everything else, but it was discarded since it was not really practical for making weapons even with the good neutron economy of U-233 and the plentyfullness of Thorium. After that, breeders either using the Th-U cycle or the U-Pu cycle never materialized because uranium ore is cheap enough, and we are still trapped in that loop. India is a rare case with unusually low Uranium deposits and unusually large Thorium deposits, so it has always been a priority for them.
As far as nuclear aircraft go, the atomic bomber the US was working on only created four things: An immense hangar in central Idaho (still in use), a really weird shielded locomotive for use as a tug for the bomber, and two atomic-powered jet engines. The latter three are on display at EBR-1, the first reactor to produce electricity in the world, and the first breeder reactor, and the first metal-cooled reactor. Quite a scoop! I highly recommend a visit. Also, the Craters of the Moon national park is nearby.
I've been on the NS Savannah. It presently resides at the Patriots Park museum in Charleston, SC. Never heard of Studebaker-Packard? Who do you think built the "Packard-built Rolls-Royce Merlin" that powered the P-51? Studebaker was a "budget" automaker from the 1940s & 50s. The two merged in 1954.
12:10 Whoa that's a fantastic point I never thought about! I guess it's just not cost-effective right now, and maybe never will given advances in battery technologies? Still, a transition tech would be great for cargo ships!
2:23 I feel you Simon, we all want flying cars and automated kitchens but sadly is not possible at the moment ... :(...something must have happened from the 50s onwards :D
Another major issue with nuclear-powered cars: nuclear reactors generally produce their energy as heat, and are not notably tolerant of frequent or repeated power level changes. Turning heat into motion tends to require large, heavy machinery (steam plants), and we've been unable to come up with a practical way to provide such a system for a modern car, notwithstanding early steam automobiles. There is also the matter of minimum critical mass; while one pound of U235 might be able to power a car for years, one pound of U235 cannot be made to fission.
I hate to nit pick, but there are a few flaws in this. First, the NS Savannah was not the second nuclear-powered ship. By the time she was launched, we already had about a dozen or so subs, including the Nautilus, Seawolf, and boats of the Skate, Skipjack, and George Washington classes. In fact, even the first nuclear-powered surface ship, the USS Long Beach, was launched about a week before the NS Savannah. Nuclear power is great for large vessels, like ships and subs. Ships have long been powered by steam turbines, and the primary loop basically just replaced the boiler (and was much safer). However, for smaller things, such as cars, they make no sense at all. The small, fairly efficient engines of today run on the expansion of the combustion products of gasoline or diesel. This is direct mechanical energy; the only thing left is to turn it into rotary motion. Reactors, on the other hand, release thermal energy - from the slowing down of fission products, or the decay of isotopes (either fission product daughters or as fuel, itself, such as in the Radio-Isotope Thermal Generator). Converting thermal energy into mechanical energy tends to require heavy, complicated equipment, such as boilers and steam turbines. The weight and size of the secondary side of the power plant would be prohibitive, even if you remove the boilers by going with the less-safe Boiling Water Reactor... let alone the weight of the shielding, which you mentioned. Also, while the weight of the fuel loaded is much less than the weight of gasoline or jet fuel, it's also there for the life of the core. The longer time you have between fuelling, the more you need to load in. And, unlike the exhaust in your car, the fission products remain in the core for its life. Just as a gut feel, I think a locomotive is the smallest vehicle that could sensibly be done with nuclear power... but I still wouldn't recommend it.
An atomic jet engine was developed. The problem was the air accelerated through it became radioactive. The design did not use steam or the associated heavy equipment. It was essentially a normal turbojet with the combustion chamber replaced with controllable fuel rods.
Simon: *mentions that Uranium 235 is a extremely potent nuclear* Me, Spiffing Brit, and others in the Energy production fandom: *Deep fry meme mode activated* THORIUM IS THE BESTIUM.
The Chevrolet Corvette has been manufactured since the 1950’s and is largely made of fiberglass. Quite a few have been in crashes and many of those have been repaired and returned to the road.
I think a video on the internet and how much content is uploaded to the world wide web every day would be cool. Also, look at just how massive server centres and data storage centres are and how many of them there are and how many we're going to need to build in order to store everything that is being created.
Finger tip steering was a way to advertise the new wonderful invention of power steering. See back in the olden days, you didn't have hydraulic or electric motors to assist in steering.
Nuclear energy is only 'clean' in short terms. As soon as the half way depleted and now dysfunctional core has to be removed and stored until infinity, things become much more complicated. One of the issues with Fukushima was, that their cooldown pools lost their controls, too, and the water evaporated, with all the radiation it had absorbed...
Just a suggestion for one of your many highly entertaining & informative channels. Why aren’t there loads of solar powered de-salination plants in Australia? De-salination, I’m told, takes an awesome amount of electricity & sea water & as far as I can tell, Australia has more sun than they can handle & they’re surrounded by sea, so, er...see my point? I’m sure there’s a mind numbingly obvious reason for it but there you have it.
"Fingertips steering" = hydraulic or electric servo power steering. Gotta remember the era, power steering was still in its infancy, and driving a car without it can be quite a workout.
And in "Today I Found Out" tomorrow, we find out about **Simon's** little internal nuclear generator that keeps him able to pump out awesome content to a bazillion channels! He **must** be nuclear-powered, eh Simon............ :)
I like how the reactor is placed well away from the driver in the Ford car. Is this telling us something? I was hoping for some technical info on small reactor designs. Someone below mentioned the Mars rovers. I thought they ran using solar panels, but imagine the minimal sunlight they get, often dust covered.
The main problem I would see: All currently used nuclear power reactors are essentially somewhat refined steam engines, and steam engines are too heavy to be used in most vehicles. An alternative approach would be to use nuclear batteries instead, which are not reactors, but generate energy from the decay of radioactive isotopes (which should not interact with each other and so avoid any chain reaction). But this aggregates are either not very efficient (RTG: up to 7%) or rather short-lived due to internal radiation damage (RPV: efficiency up to 20%, but only at start). The other thing: The energy density of uranium is way higher than that of coal, but if you sum up the amount of uranium on Earth usable in such devices and multiply it with the highest efficiency nuclear devices have today, the result will be far smaller than if you do the same with coal or even gas. There is simply not enough uranium (regarding only the isotopes usable in nuclear devices) on our planet to satisfy our hunger for energy for more than a little above 25 years. We would likely have to harvest the other planet in our solar system. Since there is three times more Thorium than Uranium, this could prolong the time of use - but it's still a finite resource like other fossil fuels. (It may not biological produced like other fossil fuels but meet the definition nevertheless.)
The Ford nucleon was the inspiration for the nuclear powered time machine circuits on the back of the dolorian in the "back to the future" movie series
USS Enterprise CVN-65 and USS Bainbridge CGN-25 were nuclear powered USA Naval warships launched in 1961, which pre-dated the NS Savannah's launching date.
I don't think car accidents would be the main danger; these power units would likely be nearly indestructible bricks of shielding material with the nuclear parts inside and be built to withstand all manner of collisions and fires. I think the bigger danger would be having hundreds of thousands of these things scatter around the world, in garages and junkyards, unaccounted for, and having grease monkeys and tinkerers cracking them open to play with them, resulting in orphaned radioactive sources popping up in random places causing lots of radiation injuries and deaths. This happens today with old X-ray machines and other hospital gear containing isotopes from time to time, and those are far less numerous and mostly tracked.
This is such a useful concept. Not because it could work. It could not for many reasons. It is useful because we can can observe that instead of an acceleration in progress we are living in a time of deceleration in progress. If you divide the aircraft into two halves from 1903 to say 1960 and 1960 to present the greatest leap was in the first half. In 1960 we had jets. Today the flight engineer has been retired because of improved electronics and safety has improved but a plane today is basically the plane of 1960. The jet of 1960 is nothing like the first plane flown by the Wright Bros. There was supersonic flight for a few decades but it never became a ubiquitous mode of transport for the masses as predicted. Even the silicon chip is not developing as fast in the last couple of decades as previous decades. Moore's Law is slowing down and may stop in the next 10 years. Gordon Moore himself died this year and his law may soon follow. Then there was space travel. The last man on the moon walked there over 50 years ago. And don't mention nuclear fusion. The joke is that fusion is the energy source of the future and always will be. Yes, the future is not as good as it used to be. The optimism of the past turned out to be a delusion. But it was more than that. It was a pill which gave us a dopamine fix. People are likely to become angry with withdrawal symptoms. We can use this knowledge to grow and mature such that we do not need these pills of delusion but can find deeper meaning in life other then cheap dopamine thrills. The secret is not that we benefit from the new toys. We benefit from the problem solving and the euphoria in overcoming obstacles. It is the glory we like. The toys themselves get old and become commitments of maintenance. All glory fades as a slave would whisper into the ear of a triumphant general in a triumphant parade in Ancient Rome. And we can add that all progress stops.
Along come carpet baggers like Elon Musk to "make it all better" and make the technological miracle happen again. He will sooth our disappointment, a disappointment so deep that most people have buried it deep in their psyche, where it can be manipulated by fast talking self promoters like Elon. He is like Trump who wants to sooth the pains of empire gone into overreach. There will be more Trumps and more Elons in the future. They have been called to centre stage.
Nuclear powered planes were a thing too. The Soviet Union and the US tested them. They discovered the planes had one slight flaw, they were very efficient spreaders of radioactive contamination.
Unfortunately, the aircraft carrier pictures around the one-minute mark is not nuclear powered....... there are 11 nuclear-powered carriers in the world.... I'm sure any other search would yield a proper result. Love your content.....
Many Science Fiction writers of the 1950s through about the mid to late 1960s frequently referred to passenger and cargo vehicles, not to mention combat vehicles, as being powered by "micro piles" in their books and short stories....Yeah I'm that old.
There have been a bunch of weird alt fuel cars. before hydrogen electric cells there were hydrogen combustion engines. GM once tried a coal powder turbine engine. A concept of an air compressed powered car. And that time the president of mexico drove the Chrysler Turbine using Tequila as fuel. Not to mention biofuels, you can make methane out of almost anything, like hemp and chicken poop.
Side or mega projects idea: The Object 279, the Soviet tank designed to withstand nuclear explosions
I thought it was object 239, I guess because of plutonium 239. Very cool topic though! 🍻
Sponsored by World of Tanks.
Or war thunder why not both
Note... The tank was designed to withstand the nuclear blast at a closer range than the crew inside the tank would survive.
Probably not enough info on it. Most of it still classified.
"Lead and concrete are often extremely heavy" That's what I like about Simon's channels - I always learn something I've never known before
the sun is hot
@@jayraz9869 water is wet.
"One pound of it could power a nuclear submarine for a long, long, time!"
Wow! Bloody amazing factoid today, Simon! hahaha
"The future of the past was so much better than the future of the future"😂😂😂
Yes.
Theirs was the jetsons ours is the rapture n zombies
Well stated. The future looked fab: then came hijacks, nuclear threats, shuttle explosions, Jim Jones, mass shootings...
Not even funny, one of the most poignant quotes I've come across
I've played enough Fallout to know where this is going...
I was thinking the EXACT thing! One well placed bullet and you have yourself a mini atomic explosion!
Repent, brethren! The Great Atom will cleanse all!!!
Walk in the glow
Blame Vault-Tec. It's always their fault.
don't shoot the f cking car!
Fun fact: The Ford Nucleon concept car had the dangerous bit in the rear. While never built, it did provide a template for the later Pinto. _Allegedly!_
Pinto was scapegoat because the name was easy to remember.
Cars catching fire after a crash happens in the movies but is very rare in reality.
About the Pinto: "When all types of fatalities are considered, the Pinto was approximately even with the AMC Gremlin, Chevrolet Vega, and Datsun 510. It was significantly better than the Datsun 1200/210, Toyota Corolla and VW Beetle. The safety record of the car in terms of fire was average or slightly below average for compacts, and all cars respectively. This was considered respectable for a subcompact car."
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Pinto
No, like in any other car the most dangerous bit sits right behind the steering wheel.
My sister had an early 70's Pinto. It had a rag hanging out of the bumper like a wick.
@@richardgreen7225 have you ever seen a 4-wheel drive Gremlin? A friend's brothers made one. Funniest thing ever.
@@richardgreen7225 the problem with the Pinto that nearly bankrupted Ford was the propensity for the paint to fall off due to incompatible paints being used, the only cure was to strip the car and repaint, the cost of which is enormous, all done under warranty of coarse, little known and not something Ford wanted to make too much of, catching fire on the other hand didn't have the same cost implications because as you have pointed out it was average for its class but it gave the press something to latch onto.
The problem with building a safe nuclear car is that we have never been able to make a truly safe car to begin with
😂😂😂😂😂😂
The problem isn’t that we don’t have safe cars we just have unsafe drivers instead.
usually you need highly enriched uranium to power smaller reactors (most military ship reactors use 90 % U-235, because of the small size of the reactor, to stretch the time between refuelings). In nuclear power plants you usually use 3 to 4 % enriched uranium, but only the U-235 is used for the fission, the rest (U-238) is not used and would be dead weight.
However, this means it's also weapons grade uranium. As long as it's use in military ships it's in safe hands, but if you give it to civilians they could sell it to foreign countries starting a nuclear weapons program with it.
Look at modern f1 cars. Probably the safest vehicles on earth. Nearly impossible to die in.
100% correct
Not technically a car but one of the rovers on Mars is nuclear-powered, and about the size of a car.
More than one. Most long term spacecraft are powered by RTGs because they can provide hundred of watts continuously for a few decades. They are rather robust as they are solid metal and tiny ones have been used in pacemakers where they offer almost no risk to the user. Unfortunately, the user is likely to be quite old and if the power supply is cremated with it's former user this provides an "environmental hazard". 😈
Mars or the uninhabited island in Canada? Since they are an exact match in every way. Even the rocks are shaped and positioned in the exact same way.
@Sparky Puddins Zombies, it's zombies. Vampires only come back in (about) three days, zombies can be raised at any time.
@Sparky Puddins how so once you have consumed the body with cleansing fire there is nothing left for the demon host, zombie, or vampire to inhabit, come let the sister's purify with fire!!.
The plutonium used in spacecraft RTGs is a byproduct of making nuclear weapons. Because the US quit making new nuclear weapons years ago, NASA is running low on the good plutonium isotope for RTGs. You can use other substances but plutonium 238 has the best power density, reasonable half life and less massive shielding requirements compared to something like strontium 90. The nice thing about RTGs is that they have no moving parts; it's basically just a thermocouple wrapped around an isotope that radiates decay heat. Stick it in a shielded container with some cooling radiator fins and it's basically a battery. The LM Aquarius used by the Apollo 13 astronauts had an RTG aboard for use by lunar surface experiments, but the crew never landed on the moon and used Aquarius as a life boat until just before reentering the atmosphere, so that RTG is at the bottom of the ocean somewhere. The things are nearly indestructible if built right.
"Here are the keys to your nuclear powered car. Also, we HIGHLY recommend not getting into an accident"
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@Chad Cuckmaker thorium needs a uranium or plutonium catalyst to keep the reaction going
@Chad Cuckmaker the thorium cant melt down but because of relative stability it needs a push from a more unstable element to push its radioactive decay to a usable point.
Oh and sign here here and here,
Acknowledging that we are not responsible for any nuclear exposure caused by car accidents
You're gonna need a long and wide car
Simon "Studebaker Packard, I never heard of that last one"
Everyone from South Bend "Hey we were relevant once, we still kinda have Notre Dame and....."
This might help Simon; Packard was the American partner Rolls Royce decided to work with to co produce the Merlin aircraft engine during WW2.
No way a fellow hoosier what's up
there's a reason studebaker was in 'we didn't start the fire'
@@valleyofiron125 That's right, Fozzie bear drives a Studebaker....
@@fredericrike5974 Something I was about to point out as well.
I nearly pissed myself !! Nuclear powered, made of plastic, glow in the dark bumpers, could hover over water, and had a force field. More like a glow in the dark driver !! Easily your best video yet Simon.
2:00 - Chapter 1 - Nuclear concept cars
3:50 - Chapter 2 - Ford Nucleon
4:40 - Chapter 3 - Arbel symetric
5:45 - Chapter 4 - Simca fulgur
6:30 - Chapter 5 - Studebaker packard astral
7:25 - Chapter 6 - Ford seattle it XXI
8:20 - Chapter 7 - Nuclear powered ships
9:00 - Chapter 8 - The USS Nautilus
10:20 - Chapter 9 - The NS Savannah
11:25 - Chapter 10 - Advantages & drawbacks
”Where are all the nuclear powered cars?”
Just play Fallout and you’ll know😂
They all survived the bombs yet blow up when you shoot them 200 years later?
And you can't salvage anything from it...
"...becoming the latest car accident to claim over 100,000 lives"
Shipping contributes how much of world's pollution? So repower these ships wit h methonal produced from green hydrogen ( test completed in Cdn from old oil wells ( 40% energy still left underground Co2 stays underground ) green hydrogen 1 403 830 4124
@@AlanAlan-pb9vl Shipping causes relatively much pollution (they use little emission cleaning technology, because of missing legal regulation for cargo ships), but only 2 % of CO² emissions, compared to 20 % caused by land based vehicles. Simon confound this.
In future natural gas, or hydrogen may be a power source for ships.
nuclear accidents havent caused that many deaths, your about 99k off
@@guamazolopez6456 congratulations on having absolutely no sense of humor. My condolences
@@anonymousrex5207 i have humor but that is way too high
Chryslus and Corvega, the kings of nuclear powered cars.
BTW, you don't need a fancy automated kitchen, just buy a Mr Handy.
Imagine being outside washing your Corvega while Codsworth comes serving you a cold beer😎🍺👌🏻
Untill the Chinese start hacking them with their Liberators 😆
I prefer my Mr Gutsy!
Sir! Youd better come see this!
"Good morning! Vault-Tec calling!"
If you think about it then it's actually surprising for Nuclear reactors not to be used in transport ships. I mean you could technically build a standardized size and fully self-contained modular reactor which, in case of a Ship sinking related emergency, could be dumped into the sea followed by automatically refloating back to the surface to safely recover it afterwards ( similar to how Federation Starships dump their ship Cores into Space should it go critical ). Such a modular reactor would also provide the possibility of transplanting it to a new ship should the old have reached its service time.
Studebaker was a very old company. They built horse-drawn wagons in the 1800's. They built electric cars decades before your parents were born and lasted into the 70's.
Packard was a luxury maker, more deluxe than Cadillac for a time.
The two merged.
K19 - we saw how well that turned out...
I just want the flying car from the Jetsons.
"Hey, did you see my friends nuclear powered car? He said it's the bomb😉"
I like how Simon says powah instead of power. It sounds so much more powahful. Almost as if Gandalf were saying it. Bless the blaze
I hope that this innovative vehicle could succeed so that I can invest in this☢️🏎️🚀
Trim your hair into a mowhawk first
And grow a goatee.
😵☢️
I wonder if you squeal like a pig or just look like one. .
invest in it before it succeeds if you want riches.
The Studebaker/Packard company was definitely before your time, young man. My aunt had a Studebaker that she drove from the mid 1950s until it became impossible to repair in the mid 1970s. I was never old enough to drive her Studebaker, but I did get to drive the Chrysler she traded it in on in 1976. (My aunt told me about once when her Studebaker died at a stoplight. The person in the car behind her kept honking their horn, so she went back and said to them, "Would you like to go up and try starting my car while I sit back here and honk?" My aunt was a sweet lady, but she was pretty quick on her feet.)
Packard is well known in the US Simon and was an American luxury automobile marque built by the Packard Motor Car Company of Detroit, Michigan, United States. The first Packard automobiles were produced in 1899, and the last Detroit-built Packard in 1956, when they built the Packard Predictor, their last concept car.
Packard bought Studebaker in 1953 and formed the Studebaker-Packard Corporation of South Bend, Indiana. The 1957 and 1958 Packards were actually badge engineered Studebakers, built in South Bend.
I'm definitely renaming this channel "Side Blaze" in my head
I won't be surprised if Simon creates another channel with that name.
I would guess "Blaze Projects". It would have nothing to do with projects.
Side blazed right now 😎
Mini-blaze
First displayed at an art show, and relies on "forcefields" hmmmm, sounds legit
...And it even looks like The Emperor's New Car as well!
sounds like the claims on kickstarter *coughs* solar roadways
Now sold by GOOP. They bought the force field tech at the same time they bought the Nasa hologram stuff.
Maybe they were thinking of magnetic shielding... for the radiation.. don’t know how that would work on a car accident
Nook-you-lar powwa cahs, like the famous "Homer"!
I'm suddenly thankful that nuclear-powered autos never caught on, seeing that Ford actually made a couple of prototypes. I lived through the eras of Fords that were notorious for catching fire -- I have friends whose houses burned down, due to Ford's cost-cutting, incompetent engineering -- and I can only wonder how many mini-Chernobyl Zones would exist today if they'd succeeded in this endeavor.
Would likely be easier to just have a home reactor and charge your electric car
you could have something like an RTG or betavoltaic battery sealed in a car though
🎶 I don't want to set the wooooorld, on fireeeee. I just want to start a flaaame in your heaaaart... 🎶
War, war never changes.
This is Three Dog at Galaxy News Radio. Bringing you the truth no matter how bad it hurts.
🤘😆
Patrolling the Mojave almost makes you wish for a nuclear winter.
Simon: "Where is all the neclear power?!"
NIMBY's: *REEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE*
"For a Long, long, time" Love the precision.
Never heard of Packard?? Simon... where have you been??
Packard was an American luxury car marque built by the Packard Motor car Company of Detroit, Michigan, United States. The first Packard automobiles were produced in 1899, and the last Detroit-built Packard in 1956, when they built the Packard Predictor, their last concept car. With sales dwindling by the 1950s, Packard merged with the much larger Studebaker Corporation in the hope of cutting its production costs. ... Though the company would continue to manufacture cars in South Bend, Indiana, until 1958, the final model produced on June 25, 1956, is considered the last true Packard . During world war 2 they produced the Merlin engine licensed from Rolls-Royce for the P-51 Mustang.
This reminds me of the Chrysler Turbine Car. Whenever a new tech came out it was supposed to "change the world". Jay Leno owns one and there's a vid here on TH-cam. It is pretty cool when he starts it up. It is also a gorgeous bronze color.
He has an amazing collection, don't pull up behind that car. 😆
I thought it was a Chrysler Turbine
@@dongiovanni4331 it was! I will edit my comment. Thanks. Have a great day.
I've been curious about the history of nuclear-powered vehicles for some time, but I hadn't gotten around to digging anything up. And now, lo! Whistler and co. have dug for me!
I was always under the impression that the Savanna was a failure. The weight of the shielding and the cost of a crew trained to operate a nuclear power plant, made it impossible to carry enough cargo to make a profit.
More to do with the design of the ship itself, which was a relatively weird half passenger ship and half cargo freighter affair.
It's not unlikely that a Nuclear powered Container Ship or OBO Carrier will be revisited in the future; though the crew being armed and trained to repel boarders likely would be a requirement.
“Fingertip steering”. Apparently Simon’s never driven a non-power-steering car..... 😆
It's those Czech nuclear football suitcase cars he has to drive there or a LADA 😂
I drive a Suzuki Samurai, and when I told a guy it didn't have power steering, he asked, "My Gawd, how can you drive a car without power steering?"
@@CAMacKenzie try a series Land Rover for a good upper body workout every day!☺.
@@CrusaderSports250 The first vehicle I drove (I was 16 and learning to drive) was my dad's 1965 F-250 with a 350 or so cuin V8 and no power steering. I was absolutely unable to turn the wheel at a dead stop. The Suzuki is easy.
I used to drive a VW Sirocco with non-power steering. Hard to turn the wheel at a stop but not impossible, but it wasn't a heavy car. It had manual everything, transmission, locks, windows, no A/C, no cruise control, but fun as hell to drive and a kickin' stereo system.
Studebaker and Packard were once big car makers in the US. I went to a car museum in LA once and they had some old Packard roadster type cars from the 30s that were beautiful.
Simon Studebaker and Packard were awesome automotive manufacturers at the turn of the century. You should do a megaprojects on them and some of the automotive manufacturers in America at the turn of the century. We had some incredible and brilliant engineers before WWI and WW2 pushed them out.
"never heard of Studebaker Packard"? Whoa.
or EDSEL!
Is "finger tip" steering a term used prior to the standardization of "power" steering?
Nuclear car designers: we can do this we'll use imaginary technologies that don't exist but we want to exist. Self driving cars using 60s era computers... lol gps didn't even exist yet good luck navigating.
Imaginations and perspectives is a human’s most powerful weapon
Simon got a buffet of different channels. Never go knowledge hungry.....😎👍✌️
I had a chance to go aboard the Savannah many years ago when it was at the Patriots Point Naval Museum in Charleston, South Carolina. Luxury was its standard. Not as large as normal cargo ships, it was quite a site to behold, almost blinding white. I would have loved to be a passenger sailing on her. she looked out of place beside an aircraft carrier, destroyer and submarine. She was later moved to Baltimore, Maryland.
Simon, you should look up the Packard Merlin engine, esp as regards the P-51 fighter. I think you may have heard of that.
Can't believe that he has never heard of a Studabaker. Maybe it's an American thing since it was an American car company. One of the many that couldn't afford to retool for new models like the big 3. This left them looking old. You see it today too. Tesla may update their cars often but the appearance hasn't changed. Once they get bigger it may come more often.
Simon is wrong about one thing. Thorium is actually a more reactive nuclear fuel. It generates more neutrons per fission than Uranium or Plutonium. It was just discovered too late to make a dent in the western and Soviet nuclear fuel cycles. However, India is actually developing their internal nuclear reactor designs based on Thorium because India is home to some of the largest deposits of this fuel in the world.
Nope. First, Thorium is really not a fuel, but a fertile material from which you can breed U-233 which is a fuel. It gives more neutrons per fission than U-235 (2.5 for U233 and 2.3 for U235 at least in the thermal spectrum) but not more than Pu239 (2.9 neutrons per fission average). I don't understand what he was referring to in 13:43, probably to chemical reactivity, but I think the advantage for safety in a nuclear powered vehicle using the Thorium-Uranium cycle would be far less accumulation of higher actinides like Plutonium, which is very poisonous chemically speaking.
Anyway even when I'm the greatest fan and defender of nuclear energy the idea of fitting any type of nuclear reactor in a car and give the keys to the average driver seems to me utterly idiotic.
And the Thorium-Uranium cycle was discovered during the manhattan project, at the same time as everything else, but it was discarded since it was not really practical for making weapons even with the good neutron economy of U-233 and the plentyfullness of Thorium. After that, breeders either using the Th-U cycle or the U-Pu cycle never materialized because uranium ore is cheap enough, and we are still trapped in that loop. India is a rare case with unusually low Uranium deposits and unusually large Thorium deposits, so it has always been a priority for them.
As far as nuclear aircraft go, the atomic bomber the US was working on only created four things: An immense hangar in central Idaho (still in use), a really weird shielded locomotive for use as a tug for the bomber, and two atomic-powered jet engines. The latter three are on display at EBR-1, the first reactor to produce electricity in the world, and the first breeder reactor, and the first metal-cooled reactor. Quite a scoop! I highly recommend a visit. Also, the Craters of the Moon national park is nearby.
I've been on the NS Savannah. It presently resides at the Patriots Park museum in Charleston, SC.
Never heard of Studebaker-Packard? Who do you think built the "Packard-built Rolls-Royce Merlin" that powered the P-51? Studebaker was a "budget" automaker from the 1940s & 50s. The two merged in 1954.
I toured the NS Savannah When it came to Portland, Maine in the early 1960s.
Excellent. Liked the subject.
Thank you
12:10 Whoa that's a fantastic point I never thought about! I guess it's just not cost-effective right now, and maybe never will given advances in battery technologies? Still, a transition tech would be great for cargo ships!
3:10 oh how I remember when that was under construction. I had to double take and sure enough it's the high 5 mix master, 635 and 75 interchange.
Reversing the flow of the Chicago river would be a cool video!
2:23 I feel you Simon, we all want flying cars and automated kitchens but sadly is not possible at the moment ... :(...something must have happened from the 50s onwards :D
Paccard was the company that made the American-made Merlin engines during WWII. They are the parent company behind Kenworth and Peterbilt
Another major issue with nuclear-powered cars: nuclear reactors generally produce their energy as heat, and are not notably tolerant of frequent or repeated power level changes. Turning heat into motion tends to require large, heavy machinery (steam plants), and we've been unable to come up with a practical way to provide such a system for a modern car, notwithstanding early steam automobiles. There is also the matter of minimum critical mass; while one pound of U235 might be able to power a car for years, one pound of U235 cannot be made to fission.
Never Been so early & Awesome video Simon
I hate to nit pick, but there are a few flaws in this.
First, the NS Savannah was not the second nuclear-powered ship. By the time she was launched, we already had about a dozen or so subs, including the Nautilus, Seawolf, and boats of the Skate, Skipjack, and George Washington classes. In fact, even the first nuclear-powered surface ship, the USS Long Beach, was launched about a week before the NS Savannah.
Nuclear power is great for large vessels, like ships and subs. Ships have long been powered by steam turbines, and the primary loop basically just replaced the boiler (and was much safer). However, for smaller things, such as cars, they make no sense at all. The small, fairly efficient engines of today run on the expansion of the combustion products of gasoline or diesel. This is direct mechanical energy; the only thing left is to turn it into rotary motion.
Reactors, on the other hand, release thermal energy - from the slowing down of fission products, or the decay of isotopes (either fission product daughters or as fuel, itself, such as in the Radio-Isotope Thermal Generator). Converting thermal energy into mechanical energy tends to require heavy, complicated equipment, such as boilers and steam turbines. The weight and size of the secondary side of the power plant would be prohibitive, even if you remove the boilers by going with the less-safe Boiling Water Reactor... let alone the weight of the shielding, which you mentioned.
Also, while the weight of the fuel loaded is much less than the weight of gasoline or jet fuel, it's also there for the life of the core. The longer time you have between fuelling, the more you need to load in. And, unlike the exhaust in your car, the fission products remain in the core for its life.
Just as a gut feel, I think a locomotive is the smallest vehicle that could sensibly be done with nuclear power... but I still wouldn't recommend it.
An atomic jet engine was developed. The problem was the air accelerated through it became radioactive. The design did not use steam or the associated heavy equipment. It was essentially a normal turbojet with the combustion chamber replaced with controllable fuel rods.
South Bend used to be a totally happening place. Bendix Aerospace in Mishawaka has numerous items in the Smithsonian Air & Space Museum in DC now.
Fission fragment reactors check out them .
1: invent them .
2: make them smaller.
3:?
4: install into car.
5 : profit.
and I'm once again down the Simon Whistler rabbit hole. Thank you for producing such interesting videos.
Simon: *mentions that Uranium 235 is a extremely potent nuclear*
Me, Spiffing Brit, and others in the Energy production fandom: *Deep fry meme mode activated* THORIUM IS THE BESTIUM.
The Chevrolet Corvette has been manufactured since the 1950’s and is largely made of fiberglass. Quite a few have been in crashes and many of those have been repaired and returned to the road.
I think a video on the internet and how much content is uploaded to the world wide web every day would be cool. Also, look at just how massive server centres and data storage centres are and how many of them there are and how many we're going to need to build in order to store everything that is being created.
I like this guy! I only wish he had more content on youtube ;)
Did you do a megaproject on fusion including JET and ITER? Fusion should solve a lot of issues mentioned here,,, if it ever reaches net power.
With a Thorium molten salt reactor, hydrocarbon based fuels could be synthesised as a direct replacement for oil fuel.
Simon powers his router via nuclear power in order to support all his channels. Allegedly.
Ahh. I thought they were powered by magic spoon cereal and cocaine. Allegedly. Thx
i always thought he’s got danny on a giant hamster wheel 24/7 to power it?
The opening picture features water cooling towers which are quite a stretch on a nuke topic . Reminds of Daily mail.
Finger tip steering was a way to advertise the new wonderful invention of power steering. See back in the olden days, you didn't have hydraulic or electric motors to assist in steering.
How many channels does this guy need seriously!
Do the recently destroyed Arecibo radio telescope please
Well technically we have nuclear powerd cars , just the reactors are in the powerplants and the cars are electric .
If you're going that technical, might as well say its a steam powered car. Really blow some minds lmao.
Nuclear energy is only 'clean' in short terms. As soon as the half way depleted and now dysfunctional core has to be removed and stored until infinity, things become much more complicated. One of the issues with Fukushima was, that their cooldown pools lost their controls, too, and the water evaporated, with all the radiation it had absorbed...
FORD Seatle-ite looks a lot like Lady Penelope's Rolls Royce , Fab-1, in the " Thunderbirds " series.
Just a suggestion for one of your many highly entertaining & informative channels. Why aren’t there loads of solar powered de-salination plants in Australia? De-salination, I’m told, takes an awesome amount of electricity & sea water & as far as I can tell, Australia has more sun than they can handle & they’re surrounded by sea, so, er...see my point? I’m sure there’s a mind numbingly obvious reason for it but there you have it.
"Fingertips steering" = hydraulic or electric servo power steering. Gotta remember the era, power steering was still in its infancy, and driving a car without it can be quite a workout.
And in "Today I Found Out" tomorrow, we find out about **Simon's** little internal nuclear generator that keeps him able to pump out awesome content to a bazillion channels!
He **must** be nuclear-powered, eh Simon............ :)
I like how the reactor is placed well away from the driver in the Ford car. Is this telling us something? I was hoping for some technical info on small reactor designs. Someone below mentioned the Mars rovers. I thought they ran using solar panels, but imagine the minimal sunlight they get, often dust covered.
The main problem I would see: All currently used nuclear power reactors are essentially somewhat refined steam engines, and steam engines are too heavy to be used in most vehicles. An alternative approach would be to use nuclear batteries instead, which are not reactors, but generate energy from the decay of radioactive isotopes (which should not interact with each other and so avoid any chain reaction). But this aggregates are either not very efficient (RTG: up to 7%) or rather short-lived due to internal radiation damage (RPV: efficiency up to 20%, but only at start).
The other thing: The energy density of uranium is way higher than that of coal, but if you sum up the amount of uranium on Earth usable in such devices and multiply it with the highest efficiency nuclear devices have today, the result will be far smaller than if you do the same with coal or even gas. There is simply not enough uranium (regarding only the isotopes usable in nuclear devices) on our planet to satisfy our hunger for energy for more than a little above 25 years. We would likely have to harvest the other planet in our solar system. Since there is three times more Thorium than Uranium, this could prolong the time of use - but it's still a finite resource like other fossil fuels. (It may not biological produced like other fossil fuels but meet the definition nevertheless.)
The Ford nucleon was the inspiration for the nuclear powered time machine circuits on the back of the dolorian in the "back to the future" movie series
USS Enterprise CVN-65 and USS Bainbridge CGN-25 were nuclear powered USA Naval warships launched in 1961, which pre-dated the NS Savannah's launching date.
Hover craft exist. The Navy calls them "LCACs" and t6hey had them at least as far back as my time, in the 1980s.
How about doing a segment on thorium now that you brought it up. I think it needs to happen, and yes maybe in a car.
I don't think car accidents would be the main danger; these power units would likely be nearly indestructible bricks of shielding material with the nuclear parts inside and be built to withstand all manner of collisions and fires. I think the bigger danger would be having hundreds of thousands of these things scatter around the world, in garages and junkyards, unaccounted for, and having grease monkeys and tinkerers cracking them open to play with them, resulting in orphaned radioactive sources popping up in random places causing lots of radiation injuries and deaths. This happens today with old X-ray machines and other hospital gear containing isotopes from time to time, and those are far less numerous and mostly tracked.
This is such a useful concept. Not because it could work. It could not for many reasons. It is useful because we can can observe that instead of an acceleration in progress we are living in a time of deceleration in progress. If you divide the aircraft into two halves from 1903 to say 1960 and 1960 to present the greatest leap was in the first half. In 1960 we had jets. Today the flight engineer has been retired because of improved electronics and safety has improved but a plane today is basically the plane of 1960. The jet of 1960 is nothing like the first plane flown by the Wright Bros. There was supersonic flight for a few decades but it never became a ubiquitous mode of transport for the masses as predicted. Even the silicon chip is not developing as fast in the last couple of decades as previous decades. Moore's Law is slowing down and may stop in the next 10 years. Gordon Moore himself died this year and his law may soon follow. Then there was space travel. The last man on the moon walked there over 50 years ago. And don't mention nuclear fusion. The joke is that fusion is the energy source of the future and always will be.
Yes, the future is not as good as it used to be. The optimism of the past turned out to be a delusion. But it was more than that. It was a pill which gave us a dopamine fix. People are likely to become angry with withdrawal symptoms. We can use this knowledge to grow and mature such that we do not need these pills of delusion but can find deeper meaning in life other then cheap dopamine thrills. The secret is not that we benefit from the new toys. We benefit from the problem solving and the euphoria in overcoming obstacles. It is the glory we like. The toys themselves get old and become commitments of maintenance. All glory fades as a slave would whisper into the ear of a triumphant general in a triumphant parade in Ancient Rome. And we can add that all progress stops.
Along come carpet baggers like Elon Musk to "make it all better" and make the technological miracle happen again. He will sooth our disappointment, a disappointment so deep that most people have buried it deep in their psyche, where it can be manipulated by fast talking self promoters like Elon. He is like Trump who wants to sooth the pains of empire gone into overreach. There will be more Trumps and more Elons in the future. They have been called to centre stage.
The cost of safely storage of waste is $Trillions!!! if possible at all. Enjoyed the history of such ideas. Thanks
Simon's business blaze side is strong in this video.
Glass reinforced plastic? Oh. You mean fiberglass 😆
Actually, glass-filled nylon is actually a real thing and considered different than fiberglass.
Nuclear powered planes were a thing too. The Soviet Union and the US tested them. They discovered the planes had one slight flaw, they were very efficient spreaders of radioactive contamination.
Studebaker and Packard?! classics!
IN the end its all about economics, i remember the hype about flying cars back in the 1960's.
the untold story of how life in traffic went about in the prewar Fallout universe.
Unfortunately, the aircraft carrier pictures around the one-minute mark is not nuclear powered....... there are 11 nuclear-powered carriers in the world.... I'm sure any other search would yield a proper result. Love your content.....
Many Science Fiction writers of the 1950s through about the mid to late 1960s frequently referred to passenger and cargo vehicles, not to mention combat vehicles, as being powered by "micro piles" in their books and short stories....Yeah I'm that old.
Good video 👍
There have been a bunch of weird alt fuel cars.
before hydrogen electric cells there were hydrogen combustion engines. GM once tried a coal powder turbine engine. A concept of an air compressed powered car. And that time the president of mexico drove the Chrysler Turbine using Tequila as fuel.
Not to mention biofuels, you can make methane out of almost anything, like hemp and chicken poop.