AHC: Ford's Nucleon becomes model for American automobiles

With a POD of no earlier than 1958, the unveiling of the Ford Nucleon, have an America with at least 25% of all cars on the road powered by atomic energy by 2010. Bonus points if this involves the United States becoming heavily reliant on nuclear energy, and double bonus points if the environmental movement latches on to nuclear energy as a panacea for curing fossil fuel addiction.
 

balom

Banned
It could work, but not with car sized nuclear reactors, but with isotopic batteries. Also, for terrorism, wound't the decreased amount of fossil fuel usage disengage the US from the Middle East and lead to a more "harmonious" relations. The whole war on terror would not exist since America would probably be more insolationinst
 
It could work, but not with car sized nuclear reactors, but with isotopic batteries. Also, for terrorism, wound't the decreased amount of fossil fuel usage disengage the US from the Middle East and lead to a more "harmonious" relations. The whole war on terror would not exist since America would probably be more insolationinst

And why do you believe that the terrorism has any exclusive tie with Middle East?
 
Terrorism against the U.S.

It is largely motivated by meddling in the Middle East for oil and whatnot.

Isotopic batteries are better than actual reactors for things like automobiles, but if you are looking to solve the fossil fuel problem things like distributed production power plants running on fuels like thorium is probably the way to go.
 
Do you think that terrorism is exclusive to the Middle East? Go stand in front of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building and say that. Oh yah, you can't. We have plenty of homegrown wack jobs in this country as well.

If you look in old issues of Popular Mechanics or similar magazines from the forties or fifties there were lots of ideas about the uses of atomic energy. They largely hit a wall in terms of expense, safety and potential misuse of technology. An atomic bomb is really just an uncontrolled nuclear reaction, any atomic reactor no mater how small has the potential to really ruin your day in so very many different ways.
 
New Scientist's latest issue has a similar AH story, in which Nikolai Tesla invents the nuclear reactor, as part of their "Futures that never happened..." story competition...
The winning story Atomic Dreams, deals with the rise & fall of the Nuclear powered car, from Ford's introduction of the Nucleon in 1953, and concludes with a 2005 New Scientist headline titled "Fossil Future...?", in which it speculates that Fossil fuels such as coal & oil, largely abandoned since the 1940's, might reduce "our addiction to Uranium...?".
 
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