Can you name a nuclear powered vehicle? Now, most people asked this would be aware that a lot of military submarines are nuclear powered; most Russian, French and British, and
all American submarines, are. Some might also know that there are nuclear aircraft carriers; American and French carriers are nuclear. A few might be aware of smaller nuclear naval ships; the US has nuclear cruisers and the odd destroyer, and Russia has a few enormous nuclear-powered missile cruisers. But this is just scraping the iceberg of the world of nuclear vehicles.
This is a nuclear ship which scrapes icebergs! It's the NS 50 лет Победы, or NS 50 Years Since Victory. As it was launched two years ago, we may assume that the Soviet Union had some great military victory that they didn't tell us about in 1957. Really, if course, the name is wrong due to bad timing; it was meant to launch in 1995. But there are about ten of these things in circulation; they're used for clearing paths for normal ships through Arctic ice, and increasingly also for tourist excursions to the North Pole. Yes, it can
sail to the North Pole.
Then there are the nuclear merchant vessels. These have generally been less successful than nuclear icebreakers and naval vessels; icebreakers use vast amounts of energy (the Arktika class icebreakers produce more energy than the largest of cruise ships or oil tankers) and submarines are expected to operate autonomously for long periods of time. Neither of these apply to standard merchant vessels, so the nuclear reactor has historically been rather expensive compared to normal propulsion.
Anyway, the above is the NS Savannah, built in 1962, with a reactor from Babcock and Wilcox of Three Mile Island fame, as a showcase for 'Atoms for Peace'. It operated for ten years. There was also the Otto Hahn, a German ship which operated for eleven years, and the Mutsu, a Japanese ship which operated for twenty years. Finally, there's the Sevmorput, a Russian ship which is the only one till operating. It's a bit of a marginal case; it's used in the Arctic and has some icebreaking abilities.
This is a nuclear aircraft! It's a (or indeed the; only one was ever built) Tupolev Tu-119, a bomber. The bump on the top is the reactor, protruding a bit. It's unclear whether it ever flew under nuclear power, though it certainly flew with the engines operating. Its flight time was limited only by the radiation dose received by the crew. The US had something similar, the Convair X-6; again, it was tested in flight. All of this madness was obsoleted before it was ever finished, when the Soviet Union and then the US demonstrated ICBMs in the 50s.
Nuclear ramjet cruise missle! This was an
unshielded nuclear-heated ramjet actually ground-tested by the US under Project Pluto. Temperature margins were very tight; it operated at about 100 degrees below the ignition points of some components. It produced over 500 MW thermal power, at the time easily the largest reactor ever operated. This is one of the few crazy vehicles not also developed on the Soviet side; the Soviet Union was then ahead in ICBM technology, and Project Pluto was abandoned when US ICBM technology made it obsolete around the time of the ground-testing.
Project Orion, a spacecraft propelled by actual nuclear explosions. It was developed in the 50s, and conventional explosion tests with scaled-down models were made. The largest variant considered would have been capable of launching
over a million tonnes into orbit at once, and it remains the only vaguely plausible starship technology which has been developed at all thus far; it could potentially achieve a speed of up to 10% the speed of light. The Russians also developed something along the same lines to some extent; all such projects were killed off by test-ban treaties.
NERVA, a nuclear thermal rocket. The large bulge in the middle is a reactor; the spheres are hydrogen tanks. The hydrogen would be super-heated by the reactor, and expelled. It operated at about 1500MW thermal, and would in principle have had about twice the thrust of an equivalent chemical rocket, though in ground tests it only ever achieved about 40% of this. The immediate goal was to use it as an upper stage for an enhanced Saturn V rocket, and so it died with the scrapping of all Saturn/Apollo enhancement projects. The Soviet RD-0410 was an equivalent, and a similar role was envisaged for it. Both countries effectively dropped nuclear thermal rockets in favour of nuclear-electric.
This is a Soviet US/A active radar surveillance satellite. The black bit is a nuclear reactor (
not a radiothermic generator, a device which produces electricity through decay of Pu-240 or other isotope used in interplanetary probes). At end of life, the reactor was boosted into a high storage orbit. In one case, this failed, and the reactor hit Canada, causing the Canadian government to claim compensation from the USSR. About thirty were launched from 1970 to 1988. Some apparently had ion drives for station keeping, making them nuclear-electric propelled. The US also launched one reactor, SNAP10A.
Work on nuclear reactors for space never ended; after the fall of the Soviet Union the US acquired plans and samples of TOPAZ II, a larger version of the reactor used aboard US/A. NASA's Project Prometheus works on space reactors, though its budget was decimated when NASA had to abandon a lot of long-term R&D to pay for Project Constellation (the new manned spacecraft). The cancelled JIMO Jupiter probe would have used a reactor, allowing it to use ion engines for powered flight.
The Ford Nucleon, a concept car presented by Ford in 1958. The space at the back would hold a reactor. At the time, small enough reactors didn't exist, of course, and while they now do (TOPAZ I reactors would fit) shielding and so on would still be an insurmountable problem. The only nuclear cars we're likely to see are electric cars charged with nuclear power.
A subterrene, an underground vehicle which melts its way through rock! The picture is of a conventionally powered model, but nuclear models were tested in the US and Soviet Union. The idea may seem ridiculous, but the idea is being revisited for space exploration applications, along with the related cryobot, a similar device to melt through ice on icy moons.
And that's it. Take a vehicle type, and the chances are that someone has at least considered nuclear power for it. Except for bicycles, obviously.
