From the company that gave you the Pinto. A car which exploded on contact.Yes, cars.
The Ford Nucleon.
From the company that gave you the Pinto. A car which exploded on contact.Yes, cars.
In all seriousness, if you or I can come up with an idea for something to stick a nuclear reactor in, I guarantee you somebody proposed it in the 50s or, at the latest, 60s. No matter how ridiculous, someone will have at least proposed it and published a paper on it. Nuclear-powered trains, airplanes, cruise missiles, ICBMs, tanks, cars.
Yes, cars. There were several papers published on the subject, which mostly came to the conclusion "this is a really bad idea." It's not just the safety, you see, although God knows that would be enough - it's also the incredible weight of the radiation shielding, the unbelievable cost of a miniaturized nuclear engine, and the fact that, to get it that small, it would have to run on weapons-grade fissiles. (And even then, I'm not sure if they ever built a reactor small enough that could put out enough power.) Imagine that tooling around the suburbs!
I've heard from at least two different places that someone thought it would be a good idea to have a nuclear powered vaccum cleaner
Think it was some physics prof from Harvard.
The only thing crazy about the P6M was trying to make a seaplane work after the war, apart from that it was reasonably conventional.Oh, come on, six pages, and no Martin P6M?
Head of a vacuum cleaner company, actually. To be fair, he may have been talking about radioisotope batteries rather than actual nuclear reactors. Still a very bad idea, mind you.
LOL! Just what exactly is the point of building a nuclear powered vacuum cleaner?