I learned to drive in a 1985 Volvo 240. The Nordic boxcar's 2.3-liter four-cylinder engine deployed one hundred and fourteen horsepower against three thousand pounds of Swedish steel. For reasons best left to Roswell conspiracy theorists, the feds recently re-calculated the 240’s mpg: 19/26 (coincidentally the age of the average 240 driver). That’s not bad for rust, but let’s face it: a used 240 is hardly a Prius driver’s second choice. Even so, the humble Volvo recently inspired an automotive epiphany that could lead to The Mother of All Environmentally Friendly Automobiles.
My [non Honda] insight arrived as I was sitting in traffic, ogling– OK, “observing” a Volvo 240 in the lane next to me. Hmmm. What if you ripped out the 240’s rear seats and installed a state-of-the-art, meltdown proof, South African-made pebble bed reactor? That’s right; it’s time environmentally conscious motorists went nuclear.
I realize that some people won’t immediately embrace the idea of a fission-powered Volvo wagon. Luddites. What’s not to like? Everyone knows nuclear power is safe, clean and cheap. Unlike all the internal-combustionists melting the icepack and drowning baby seals every time they open their car’s throttle body, pilots of a nuclear-powered Volvo 240 would release less carbon dioxide into the atmosphere than a flatulent Guernsey. Yup. Nuclear is the ultimate alternative fuel.
Ethanol? Please. Put that corn juice in your tank and you’ll get fewer miles per gallon than a Sherman tank, and pigs will have to pay supermarket prices for their feed. Are you in favor of more expensive pork chops? That’s un-American. Besides, devoting America's corn crop to E85 production makes about as much sense as reserving Bolivia's most popular export for insomniacs.
Biodiesel? Powering your car on french fry drippings might work if your local diner is willing to tolerate yet another bum lingering around their dumpster, but try running a fleet of FedEx trucks on McDonald’s goodwill. Hydrogen fuel cells? Sounds like a great idea– until you realize it takes more electricity to break water into hydrogen and oxygen than it does to power all the electric carving knives in America.
A few rivet counters will point out that a nuclear powered automobile is nothing new. The 1957 Nucleon concept car was [theoretically] powered by a trunk-mounted mini-reactor. Uranium fission generated steam that drove a set of turbines (one for torque, one for electricity). A cooling loop turned the steam back into water. When the reactor ran out of fissionable material in, say, fourteen thousand years, you just popped down to your local service station and swapped it out your old reactor for a new one.
That said, the Nucleon was Ford’s idea. Frankly, I’m not going to get too worked-up about a nuclear powered car designed by a company that tried to sell me an Aspire. And I’m thinking that it’s no coincidence that The International Atomic Energy Agency was established the same year as the Nucleon's debut.
Anyway, nuclear technology has moved on since then. The new pebble bed reactors consist of a radioactive material surrounded with a graphite coating. This reactor is gas-cooled, rather than water cooled. This breakthrough eliminates the most complex part of conventional reactor designs. Needless to say, the Germans came up with the idea. But the South Africans and the Chinese have started to run with it.
I know you’re all saying “Go with the lowest bidder.” But honestly, if the Chinese government can’t keep lead paint off toys that are going to go into Happy Meals, do you really want to trust that your contractor didn’t take a few shortcuts during the final assembly of your automotive reactor core?
Anyway, we all know that the bathroom is the average American's killing field, and gas is only slightly less explosive than TMZ.com. So a few risks must be assumed. And these must be balanced against the potential rewards, which extend far beyond satisfying the California Air Resource Board.
How many times have you looked around your car and found that you had a cell phone, iPod, radar detector, toaster oven and waffle maker plugged into every available 12-volt outlet? With the abundant electricity produced by a nuclear reactor, you’ll never have to choose between Mary J. Blige and chocolate waffles. In fact, you’ll be able to sell spare juice to the highest bidder. I suspect this capability will come in handy if you live in one of those left-coast states with rolling brownouts (which already sounds vaguely automotive).
And just think what a nuclear-powered car could do for football season. Once you get your 75” plasma TV and satellite dish combo running, you’ll be the most popular man at the tailgate. Hey! If GM starts making a nuclear-powered car to run alongside the Volt, then this plug-in hybrid thing might actually take off. And here's hoping there'll be a retrofit for the Volvo 240, so that the old ones can, someday, go out with a bang.
Just after I read the first paragraph of this, I thought of the Nucleon and was going to list all the reasons it failed. But it looks like you did you’re due diligence, so I’ll just list reasons why this will would fail.
First, let me state that I’m a physicist and I love nuclear power. I thing the grid should be powered by small pebble bead reactors in every town. That will give you distributed power with low transmission costs. But back to cars and why this is a bad idea:
1: National security – pebble bead reactors are great for two things 1) producing energy that can easily become electricity and 2) creating weapons grade uranium (or is it plutonium, i forget, but it’s one of them). The 3rd world’s energy could all be supplied by cheap pebble bead reactors, the US just won’t allow it because at the same time they’re generating electricity, the waste is great for bombs. There’s no way that DHS will allow people to drive around in cars that are making materials for nuclear weapons
2: Weight (I think this was the main downfall of the nucleon). To protect us all from the radiation there needs to be a shroud of lead and concrete that’s strong enough to withstand a crash. That plus all the mechanics of the turbines and whatnot make the cars to heavy to drive like normal cars. There are fundamental limits to nature here, so technology isn’t going to make the reactor smaller and lighter as time goes by.
3: More weight. The “throttle” response on a reactor is going to be quite slow (probably measured in minutes or hours), so to make the car drivable, you’ll need to store the electricity in a battery or capacitor. So now you have all the weight of a current hybrid’s electrical system plus the weight of the reactor.
4: Efficiency. If you have a reactor that generates power all the time, you’ll probably want to send that power to the grid when you’re not using it (you could use it to heat your house at night – but that gives Ford another way to burn down your garage). You could also vent the energy to the outside, but there’s gonna be problem in parking garages with all that heat, so you’ll need to do something with the unused energy. But why add that complication? Just have a stationary reactor somewhere and have a simple plug-in hybrid, or replaceable quick change batteries, or use the electricity from that to crack water and run the cars on hydrogen. There’s just no sense in having a mobile reactor. It’s a much better use of research dollars to have a stationary reactor generate the energy that’s transferred to the car some other way.
Side rant: All this talk about alternative fuel and whatnot isn’t where we need to spend our research dollars. We need to find an easy way to get energy. Once we have easy cheap energy, then it’s easy to power other things because we can then convert it to whatever form works in each application.
miked:
Thanks for the insightful followup post. I was all about to praise the original article (I still think it’s really good), but now I see that you’re quite correct. For individual transportation small stationary reactors that charge portable fuel storage devices are the way to go.
I do disagree with you about the problem with the pebble bed nuclear reactor creating weapons grade waste. That’s a _great_ thing! Imagine if every single person in our great country had a supply of weapons grade uranium. The ability for anyone to possibly attack or invade us has just been reduced to nil and we can eliminate our armed forces entirely by making short range delivery system plans available to the public at large. I love it.
(sorry for the off-topic rant)
Hahaha, this is a great article!
Puts me in mind of the “Mr. Fusion” reactor in the Delorean in the “Back To the Future” movies.
Since when was TTAC Jalopnik?
I also neglected to mention the true benefit of having a mobile megawatt electrical generator on board. Having the juice to run a plasma forcefield. You’ll never have to worry about getting rear-ended again.
Andrew, this is a brilliant idea. When you get home, rather than plugging your car into your house to charge batteries you can plug your house into your car to run the A/C, TV and cook dinner.
miked,
Details, details. Can’t you see that if the government got behind this idea (i.e. with tax money) on the scale and urgency of the Manhattan Project that they could make these niggling obstacles go away and provide the world with clean and free energy? How dare you challenge this well intentioned suggestion with reason and contemptible reality. You really do hate the planet, don’t you.
I think that we can meet all of our fuel needs by thermally de-polymerizing unwanted infants. Think about it, increased fuel supplies and reduced population! Its a win-win for everyone!
Miked:(you could use it to heat your house at night – but that gives Ford another way to burn down your garage).
That is a really great line! And, yes, cheap nuclear (or newkuler) energy is a great idea that is not getting the attention it deserves here in America.
KBW; brilliant. That was better than any Jonathan Swift joke I could come up with.
Hey, nuclear reactors worked for Tom Swift, Jr. I think the Triphibian Atomicar had a very small one behind the seat.
The Sheva guns in John Ringo’s Posleen books used multiple pebble bed reactors, but these were self propelled 16″ cannon the size of a city block, that used an M1A1 tank as an escape vehicle.
I think you mean TMZ.com.
I hope the Chinese come up with some good pebble bed reactors soon. Then they can stop burning so much damn coal.
Pebble bed reactors could also be used instead of diesel engines for the container ships hauling goods to North America and Europe, like NV Savannah. Those ships burn a lot of diesel.
How about instead of pebble bed mini reactors for your neighborhood/subdivision, we use strontium piles like this city in Alaska has (or at least was getting, last I heard, and I’m too lazy to Google it) to generate power. Sure, it’s inefficient but you don’t have to worry about it making eeevullll Plutonium. I could also point out that energy independence (or at least reduced dependence) could allow us to regard the Mideast less like a dealer holding our fix, but this is not a political blog, thank god, and I shan’t try to turn it into one.
You know, I bet you could build an auto reactor vehicle, try to get it to the size of an RV or bus. Adventures in motoring, indeed.
@ Slow_Joe_Crow
Yes, and the “high-tech redneck” at UT wanted to develop anti-matter as a car fuel, if you recall.
I want a Matter-Anti-Matter engine. That would be AWESOME.
Damn, the market’s closed. I wanted to go out and buy a shoots load more uranium stock!
This one belongs in the TTAC Fantasy Editorial Library. Brilliant.
P.S. Does anyone else here wear a radiation detection device to work everyday?
One of my engineering students (undergrad level) didn’t know what a Mr. Fusion was. Does that make me old?
Honestly, I don’t think that either fuel cells or plugin hybrids make sense without nuclear power. We’d have to burn a LOT of coal to generate the electricty to seperate enough hydrogen to run a country’s worth of fuel cell cars. Ditto with the electricty requirements for plugins. I don’t see how burning one fossil fuel to replace burning another fossil fuel is good policy.
I learned to drive in a ’87 240!
@Paul Milenkovic:
That gives you an excuse to show the vintage educational filmstrip “Back to the Future” in class. Every modern engineering student should be informed about the benefits, drawbacks, and especially the input power requirements of flux capacitor-driven circuitry. It may be dull, but every modern computer comes with one or more, and it’s a serious career limitation to remain ignorant about them.
Nuclear energy is not “limitless” energy. At the moment it depends on Uranium which like oil is a scarce commodity we have to extract from the ground.
Every single discussion on alternative fuels for cars – nuclear, bio-fuel, hydrogen, leccy and so on – just goes to confirm what simply brilliant fuels Petrol and Diesel are.
The advantages:
– Relatively easy to make
– Easy to store
– Easy to transport
– Easy to deliver (insert nozzle into tank, squeeze trigger)
– Energy dense, a lot of power in a small amount
– Quick and easy to refill.
The last 2 are the death-knell for the plug in leccy car.
Disadvantages:
– Emissions, lets agree to disagree on which ones are worse
– Efficiency, still only in the low 20s% even today
– Scarcity, we’ve had two world wars and two middle east wars in the last 100 years because of it.
Pinning our hopes on Hydrogen is like Hitler relying on synthetic fuel during WW2.
http://web.mit.edu/pebble-bed/background.pdf
I have made a small fortune in Uranium over the last couple of years so GREAT article Andrew!
Taxed and Confused: It’s true that nuclear power is not limitless, however we have greatly improved our technology since the 50’s and 60’s when the first nuclear power plants went in. The neat thing is that the nuclear waste from those old power plants is ideal for new plants. In fact, what we have stored in Yucca Mountain right now is enough to power the _WORLD_ for 14,000 years at current demand. So even if all the 3rd world countries come on, Yucca Mountain is good for at least a thousand years.
The NRA could totoally make this happen.
In fact, what we have stored in Yucca Mountain right now is enough to power the _WORLD_ for 14,000 years at current demand.
If that is the case, why are we worrying about Hydrogen not being used then ? True it means that we “lose” some efficiency when splitting the Hydrogen out but who cares, we have all this abundant energy available.
If that is the case, why are we worrying about Hydrogen not being used then ? True it means that we “lose” some efficiency when splitting the Hydrogen out but who cares, we have all this abundant energy available.
NIMBYs and Politics. Everyone is afraid of nuclear power. The technically correct solution is rarely the solution that gets implemented.
Truely elegant solutions involve materials in abundance combined with existing technology. Wouldn’t it be a lot easier to just clone um, “calory efficient” humans, lock them in a McDonalds for a few weeks, and then render them?
In fact, what we have stored in Yucca Mountain right now is enough to power the _WORLD_ for 14,000 years at current demand.
If that is the case, why are we worrying about Hydrogen not being used then ? True it means that we “lose” some efficiency when splitting the Hydrogen out but who cares, we have all this abundant energy available.
Right now the breeder reactors which can do that are maintenance nightmares. Most of them are cooled with lovely substances such as liquid sodium. A substance which ignites upon contact with air. If the coolant solidifies in your pipes, then congratulations, your reactor is now useless until the pipes can be replaced. It also happens to be the perfect reactor type to create weapons grade materials.
I just don’t get all this energy stuff. Didn’t Reagan solve all this when he tore down his wall? I wish you science people could just make up some more of that Volvonium for my 240…or maybe that ‘Fhar-feg-noogen’ crap you put in VW’s. Wouldn’t that work in a Volvo? Same country, right?
Shouldn’t all us good common folk have our own aeroplanes by now?
It appears your research for this article consisted of reading the Wikipedia entry on pebble bed reactors. I have to disagree with Wikipedia’s assertion that the Germans invented the pebble bed reactor. The idea for a pebble bed reactor can be traced to the Manhattan Project. In 1943 Enrico Fermi’s team at UChicago initiated the world’s first man-made nuclear chain reaction with a pile of uranium blocks. From this Manhattan Project scientist Farrington Daniels conceived of a reactor design that used enriched uranium “pebbles” called the “Daniels pile”. Oak Ridge National Lab was to build a proof of concept Daniels pile reactor in 1945 when the US Navy derailed the project by focusing Federal dollars on the rod-fueled water-cooled design favored for packaging concerns associated with powering warships. Our current fission power plant designs are derived from the requirements for powering a boat. It hasn’t worked out so well. We’ve mostly just been generating a lot of heavy water and other radioactive waste we’re unsure how to transport or dispose of. It is true that German scientist Rudolf Schulten further refined the ideas behind and design for the pebble bed reactor, but the idea originates with the American Manhattan Project.
I hope Ford doesn’t read this; they’ll be searching for Tom Swift’s formula for “Tomasite”…
For some reason some of you continue to think that there has to be one silver bullet that will solve the energy problem. And that silver bullet is almost inevitably nuclear. Dream on. There are no silver bullets. There is one steel bullet–efficiency measures, a lot of lead bullets (PV, wind, ocean tech, biofuels, maybe nuclear, maybe not) and a bunch of buckshot.
If the US government had put as much money into renewables and efficiency over the years as they’ve put into nuclear, we’d probably be getting most of our energy from renewables.
I think somehow in a lot of peoples’ minds nuclear is the John Wayne of energy sources. But the world doesn’t work like the movies.
“Renewables” suck. They don’t even make it into the basic catapult of solutions let alone becoming a bullet of any description.
One of the reasons I get annoyed about the man-made global warming thing is that we are attempting to “convince” the 3rd world that they should use them when upgrading their lives. The UN is actively encouraging african nations to purchase and accept power supplies based on wind and solar power.
But they are unreliable, expensive and inefficient compared with anything else. You can’t “store” energy once generated, only transmit it.
So people in these countries still don’t get power they need to use to prepare food or make sure medicines are kept at an appropriate temperature or to ensure hospitals are clean and equiped.
We need to invest in energy now, nuclear is a quick and easy option to get power without using oil or coal – its still produces CO2 and water vapour (also a greenhouse “gas” apparently) so its not perfect. And it does have a bad reputation despite overall safety being quite good. But it gives us time to get something else up and running.
That is of course if you believe in man made global warming and the potential scarcity of the supply of oil. There are loads more websites out there on these subjects, some of them make you want to build a bunker in the hills…
According to today’s New York Times, non other than rock legend Neil Young is converting a 1959 Lincoln Continental convertible to a bio-diesel/electric hybrid…that he plans to drive from the Bay Area to Detroit to demonstrate to auto execs. To be continued…
taxedandconfused: “renewables suck.”
Presently, wind power is being added to the grid worldwide six times as fast as nuclear power, in terms of absolute capacity.
Denmark gets about six percent of its electricity from wind. Massachusetts will be getting more than that soon from Cape Wind, if the NIMBYs would get out of the way (such as Senator Kennedy). Texas actually has the most wind power of any state because our pres was enlightened on energy when he was governor of that state, but a number of other states, and countries, have substantial wind power contributions. Wind is less expensive than nuclear and coal in a lot of places. PVs are coming down rapidly in cost, and ocean energy technologies will undoubtedly do so in the next ten years. As for storage, it’s not needed for wind until wind is supplying 10% of the electricity in a grid (Denmark could actually supply 20% of its own energy from its current wind turbines, but it has to send the rest to Norway, Germany, and a couple of other countries that can absorb the current surplus). But storage technology is here. go to http://www.ehponline.org/docs/2007/115-7/innovations-abs.html.
Ocean technologies are also likely to become substantial contributors pretty quickly. (Check the December issue of Environmental Health Perspectives when it comes out, at ehponline.com.)
PVs are also likely to become competitive in the next ten years or so.
I should point out to the advocates of a single source of energy that a major downfall of communism was that you had bureaucrats figuring out what goods to produce, and how much to produce, what the cost should be, etc. This is why there were chronic shortages. The US gov’t basically took a similar approach with nuclear, starting with Eisenhower’s Atoms for Peace program, while offering numerous subsidies to oil, and all but ignoring renewables. This is how we got where we are today.
This is probably one of the best ever TTAC articles, if, for nothing else, the ensuing “War of the Worlds” reactions. “The reactors are coming!!!!!!!”
Congrats A.H., you are now the Orson Wells of TTAC.
Denmark gets about six percent of its electricity from wind
There is an obvious joke there, must resist….
In Denmark there is a government backed campaign to encourage wind power – People got a grant or tax break to install windmills on their houses. It has caused some Danes to question this policy as almost everyone has one.
Here in the UK if your house produces more than it takes from the grid then the power companies have to pay you the cost of that energy, so some people have done the same with wind generators and solar panels. Not many though – the payback period for these is about 20 years.
Seriously however Wind and Wave power have a major issue – unpredictability. When that soap opera or football (soccer I mean) game finishes and everyone goes off to put the kettle / coffee maker on, the power grid has to respond.
If the wind isn’t blowing you can’t make it when you want it to. The tides are regular and predictable obviously but the times when the ebb and flow are taking place may not coincide with tea / coffee time.
You can’t store this energy easily until its needed without losing a load of it.
…that a major downfall of communism was that you had bureaucrats figuring out what goods to produce…
The actual downfall was caused by cheap oil – oil being Russia’s main export earner – partly caused by the US Govt’s encouragement to OPEC to keep production high and prices low, so the Russians just ran out of cash.
Now that oil and gas are expensive, well, go google stories about Putin and how he wants to rebuild the “Russian Empire”, develop new Nukes and is sending his “Bear” bombers over western europe again.
Until quite recently power generators in Europe tended to be state owned. Now they are private we have an issue getting any of them to commit to new generating capacity. The future is too unpredictable for oil and coal, nuclear too expensive and renewables limited as described above. Hence the government has to prime the system by making an energy policy – so even though we have a private system we have civil servants deciding on which system to use. In other words the worse of all worlds.
I blame Thatcher, she did invent man-made global warming after all.
Arguably the former soviet union was communist in name only, it was just really another name for an authoritarian government of the type which became “popular” in the 1930s, see Germany, Italy and Spain for other examples. It had much in common with the government of Franco in Spain and he wouldn’t have liked you to call him a communist.
Since Franco died and Spain went democratic its economy has boomed too, so maybe its not that communism is bad for business but authoritarianism instead. Who’d have thunk it.
So maybe, just maybe, we shouldn’t be encouraging democracy in China too quickly, we may get what we wish for.
I got a kick out of this editorial. Reminds me of when I thought Ford should team up with Universal Studios and make a “Mr. Ford Fusion” time machine for the SEMA show.
But still…crash tests anyone? A multi car pileup on the freeway will turn into a Three Mile Island!
Where’s the part where we eat babies?
Jonathan Swift lives!
We’re all still waiting for cold fusion. But then, I’ve always wanted a batmobile.
Getting back to economics, the rise of the Canadian dollar has a lot to do with the oil reserves in Canada. Canada also happens to have uranium reserves.
On the other hand, there is the dilemna of most nuclear capable nations on what to do with the nuclear waste. Hmmm let’s see, global warming, “nuclear waste management”. I guess there really is no free energy.
I see one huge, major, all-important issue that must be dealt with before we start “seriously” discussing increased nuclear power, portable nuclear power, or home fission/fusion generating plants.
Ladies and Gentlemen, we have to do something about terrorism.
First.
Look what they are willing to do with commercial airliners, bus bombs, car bombs, and explosive vests. Do you really think that easier-to-obtain nuclear materials would not be desirable to terrorists?
If so, you are dreaming.
Sorry to be a wet blanket, but in my opinion, we can’t do “distributed nuclear” unless we first get rid of terrorism.
Ladies and Gentlemen, we have to do something about terrorism.
I suggest we stop funding the “freedom fighters” and perhaps the other side will stop funding the “terrorists” and we all learn how to get along with each other.
Taxedandconfused:
re the unreliability, go reread my post, and then go to the link I provided.
California also requres utilities to buy power people feed the grid with wind and solar. It’s a great policy, encourages renewables, and reduces the need for new centralized power plants.
Re the downfall of communism, there’s an old joke which I will try to summarize. It’s the annual celebration at the collective farm, where progress has been great this year. The head tells the people, to cheers, that within five years they will all have bicycles at the current rate. And in ten years, they will all have cars. AND, in 15 years, they’ll all have airplanes. A collective farm member raises his hand. Why would we want airplanes, he asks. Well, says the head of the collective farm, if they have shoes in Moscow, you can fly there and be first in line.
Where did you get this funny idea about cheap oil being the USSR’s downfall? I happen to know a lot of the foremost US experts on the Soviet economy. Cheap oil was not the issue. Their products stank. Their planning stank. Their downfall was inevitable, as one or two particularly prescient experts predicted a couple of decades before it happened.
re the unreliability, go reread my post, and then go to the link I provided.
I did earlier but not fully – I have now. Interesting article you wrote ;-). I didn’t know about those “batteries” and storage on that scale. This is essentially the part I meant.
“Wind farms [without storage] are like a power station out of control,” says John Ward, director of Sorne Wind Energy and Tapbury Management in County Donegal, Ireland
It will be interesting to see how they scale and whether the cost predictions work out. I’ll keep an eye on that, thanks for the link. You would need a lot of these to maintain supply over an extended period for a large population though, and it still isn’t as totally reliable as being able to turn on the additional oil/gas/nuclear option and spin the generators faster/harder when the wind doesn’t blow for a while.
In times of climate change we can’t rely on wind being where we think it will be now.
Where did you get this funny idea about cheap oil being the USSR’s downfall?
I don’t dispute their planning and everything else stank, absolutely, but I believe the drop in prices and therefore revenues pushed them over the edge especially when combined with increased expeditions abroad – Afghanistan for example.
I got it from a number of articles but this is one.
The timeline of the collapse of the Soviet Union can be traced to September 13, 1985. On this date, Sheikh Ahmed Zaki Yamani, the minister of oil of Saudi Arabia, declared that the monarchy had decided to alter its oil policy radically. The Saudis stopped protecting oil prices, and Saudi Arabia quickly regained its share in the world market. During the next six months, oil production in Saudi Arabia increased fourfold, while oil prices collapsed by approximately the same amount in real terms.
As a result, the Soviet Union lost approximately $20 billion per year, money without which the country simply could not survive
It also links a number of other factors, I would be interested in learning others views. But maybe thats something for email or a different forum.
ZoomZoom Wrote:
Ladies and Gentlemen, we have to do something about terrorism.
TaxedAndConfused Responded:
I suggest we stop funding the “freedom fighters” and perhaps the other side will stop funding the “terrorists” and we all learn how to get along with each other.
If only it were that simple. We could stop funding everything today, but it won’t stop the hate from being embraced and taught. And learned. And passed on to the next generation.
I believe the root is education. They’re being educated and indoctrinated at a very young age to hate those who are not like themselves.
Terrorism will be with us for at least a couple generations AFTER the hateful education stops. History is filled with examples here. And mind you, hate-indoctrination has shown no signs of abatement as yet. If anything, it is being exported to countries in Europe and even to the US.
So as funny and/or intriguing as the concept may be, I sincerely hope we don’t see “Mr. Fusion” in any of TTAC’s readers’ lifetimes. It would simply be too tempting for hate-filled hearts.
taxedandconfused: from the article you quoted, I’d say oil was a major–perhaps the major–catalyst of the collapse. But the USSR wouldn’t have been vulnerable to oil prices collapsing without communism’s fundamental flaws.
David Holzman
But the USSR wouldn’t have been vulnerable to oil prices collapsing without communism’s fundamental flaws
Yep, Agreed – …their planning and everything else stank, absolutely, but I believe the drop in prices and therefore revenues pushed them over the edge…
I don’t think its a factor of communism itself but more a factor if central planning which is arguably a part of communism, but not just communism.
zoom zoom
I believe the root is education. They’re being educated and indoctrinated at a very young age to hate those who are not like themselves.
I agree with this also. But is it just “them” ? One persons terrorist is another persons freedom fighter.
I suspect if I went to Boston I would find quite a few instances where my definition of “terrorist” is seen in their eyes as a definition for “freedom fighter” in a particular context. That was terrorism committed on my soil, funded from the US, which killed innocent people including children.
You are correct, but we need to look at ourselves as well.
Anyway, back to cars ;-)
“Do you really think that easier-to-obtain nuclear materials would not be desirable to terrorists?”
What would a terrorist do with even 20% U235? Throw is up in the air? One would need at least 80% U235 to make a bomb go boom.
http://web.mit.edu/pebble-bed/background.pdf
One doesn’t need to make nuclear material “go boom” in order to acheive the goal of the terrorist: To bring terror, to kill, and/or to make their enemy capitulate to their religious views.
And that makes them different from us.
I’m dismayed that we apparently have not learned anything about this terrorist mindset in all these years. These are not mere “guerrilla fighters,” and comparing them to us or putting them in a favorable light is giving them more credence than they deserve to have.
Oh yeah, lest you begin to wonder, this is STILL about cars. I just offered a very good reason for not making nuclear power more freely available (or portable), that’s all. And I stand by my assertion, because it’s supported by the reality of the world we live in.
So called “dirty bombs” are 100% the invention of the US media for the purposes of scaring the public. There has never been one destonated, there has never even been one found which means there has probably never been one made. Getting ahold of materials to make one would be realativly easy for those so inclined, a trip into Chernobyl with a shovel and some lead pants would suffice. No, the main argument against nuclear powered cars is simple, it’s a stupid idea because it would be nearly impossible to implement and more cost prohibitive than putting 22″ solid gold spinners on every car.
no the dirty bombs are a fact.-us troops have found plans on ideas of how and where to use them effectively–granted it wouldnt probably kill many but it would mess up the area for a long time and scare a lot of people . as for the nuclear powered car they could use the magnetic lift idea from the trains in japan and put it into the road ways and have that powered from nuclear reactors but thats probably a pipe dream.
@ Slow_Joe_Crow
Ooh, now I want a nuclear-powered VW Rabbit with the license plate “BUN BUN”.
I’ll probably have to settle for mounting a smaller cannon than the SheVa though.