Nuclear powered locomotives?

[espeefoamer]

Steam triumphs over diesel.[:)]Modern submarines are nuclear powered.That means they are steamships.Take that,Rudolph![:D]

[Anonymous]

To correct a possible misconception--those big cooling lakes and/or cooling towers you see at a nuke (or for that matter, any other power plant) are there to provide a source of cool condenser water for the steam cycle to run the turbine. All of these plants, regardless of whether they are coal, oil, gas or nuke use a recirculating closed loop for the steam, where it is preheated, heated and superheated in the boiler, piped to and then expanded in a multistage turbine, exhausted at low pressure and condensed in a shell-and-tube heat exchanger which is cooled by the outside water, and then piped as liquid water back up to the boiler. This minimizes the makeup water requirement. A modern power plant of any type must have some source of cooling water for the condenser--a river, cooling lake, cooling tower, etc.--or it will not operate.

All but a very few steam locomotives did not use this type of closed system, instead employing an open system where the spent steam was exhausted up the stack and you had to refill the tender every 30 miles or so in some cases.

While a cooling lake is a great potential source for reactor emergency flood water, that's not what it's there for. And despite the images on The Simpsons, those big cooling towers don't necessarily mean there's a nuke around, nor are they radioactive or contain the reactor.

But I do enjoy the image of a nukey loco dragging a lake around, or maybe a hundred or so tank cars full of cooling and make-up water, in addition to all that shielding. Where's the freight?? Definitely impractical. And imagine the havoc wreaked if they'd had them on the old L&N Gulf Coast line, for example, where trains routinely ran aground and dumped hazmat all over the place. Glow-in-the-dark train, anyone?

[vsmith]

QUOTE: Originally posted by drephpe

To correct a possible misconception--those big cooling lakes and/or cooling towers you see at a nuke (or for that matter, any other power plant) are there to provide a source of cool condenser water for the steam cycle to run the turbine. All of these plants, regardless of whether they are coal, oil, gas or nuke use a recirculating closed loop for the steam, where it is preheated, heated and superheated in the boiler, piped to and then expanded in a multistage turbine, exhausted at low pressure and condensed in a shell-and-tube heat exchanger which is cooled by the outside water, and then piped as liquid water back up to the boiler. This minimizes the makeup water requirement. A modern power plant of any type must have some source of cooling water for the condenser--a river, cooling lake, cooling tower, etc.--or it will not operate.

All but a very few steam locomotives did not use this type of closed system, instead employing an open system where the spent steam was exhausted up the stack and you had to refill the tender every 30 miles or so in some cases.

While a cooling lake is a great potential source for reactor emergency flood water, that's not what it's there for. And despite the images on The Simpsons, those big cooling towers don't necessarily mean there's a nuke around, nor are they radioactive or contain the reactor.

But I do enjoy the image of a nukey loco dragging a lake around, or maybe a hundred or so tank cars full of cooling and make-up water, in addition to all that shielding. Where's the freight?? Definitely impractical. And imagine the havoc wreaked if they'd had them on the old L&N Gulf Coast line, for example, where trains routinely ran aground and dumped hazmat all over the place. Glow-in-the-dark train, anyone?

The proposed Nuke-loco back in the 50's had a condensor system that was ment to recover all the steam from the boiler system. If my memoery serves me right it was never designed as a true "steam locomotive" like a Hudson or a Mikado. It looked for like the experimental coal fired steam turbine units that the Chessapeak & Ohio (?) tested about the same time. The Atomic-train had a streamlined shell like an E unit, it was in an A-B combo with the reactor and the generator system in the front unitt and the steam condensor in the B unit. They discovered as they were designing it that a diesel loco wieghed less and could generate more HP than the proposed Atomic-train could produce. Add the extreme weight of the engine and the fact that alot of HP it would have generated would have gone simply to moving its behemoth self. The issue of reactor fluid spreading after a crash wasnt a big issue in cancelling it. The weight, cost, limited hauling and huge lack of interest by th RR companies did it in before it ever got to the engineering dept.

[adrianspeeder]

I say build nuke locos.[}:)][}:)][}:)] I live right down the road from TMI and if i have a nuke in my backyard, everybody should.[:D][:D][:D]

Glowin' green on my speeder,
Adrianspeeder

[vsmith]

Found this on the web while looking for a photo of the atom-loco..

Fallout from the `peaceful atom'

By Peter Montague

In 1953 US President Dwight Eisenhower announced plans for the "peaceful
atom". The shining star of this program was to be thousands of nuclear-powered electricity-generating plants, worldwide, making electricity "too cheap to meter".

Electricity was not the only promised benefit. According to author Catherine Caufield, news articles soon began appearing with headlines such as, "Forestry Expert Predicts Atomic Rays Will Cut Lumber Instead of Saws", and "Atomic Locomotive Designed".

Between 1946 and 1961, the US Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) spent $1.5 billion to develop an atomic airplane. (The entire Manhattan Project to develop the atomic bomb had cost $2.2 billion.) Problems with the atomic airplane were obvious from the beginning. The nuclear reactor powering the plane had to be shielded, but shielding is heavy, so an atomic-powered airplane could never get off the ground. According to New York Times science-columnist Peter Metzger, for a time the AEC considered reducing the shielding and employing only older pilots who wouldn't be planning to have any more children.

Another problem was that radioactivity would build up inside the nuclear engine: after running for a year, the engine would contain 20 times as much radioactivity as was released by the Hiroshima bomb. A plane crash would leave a major legacy of radioactive waste spread across the countryside. The project was abandoned.

Staged accident
Atoms for Peace spawned other expensive schemes. NERVA (Nuclear Engine for Rocket Vehicle Application) was developed at a cost of $1.4 billion. On January 16, 1965, the AEC staged a nuclear accident in the Nevada desert; a NERVA rocket was launched and a portion of its engine was purposefully burned up so that AEC scientists could study environmental effects of radiation. Six million residents of southern California were showered with radioactive debris by this event. Glenn Seaborg, head of the AEC, concluded that NERVA would be too dangerous to launch from earth because of radioactive releases. The project died a public death in 1972, but in 1994 it was revealed that the Department of Defense had gone ahead and developed a nuclear-powered rocket using its "black budget" (secret funds), as part of Star Wars program.

The keel of a nuclear merchant ship, the Savannah, was laid in 1958. The ship toured the world, aiming to improve the USA's image abroad. The Savannah was deactivated in 1971, and the project was abandoned.

In the mid-1960s, the whiz kids at the Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory in New Mexico began promoting nuclear-powered pacemakers to be implanted in the chests of patients with heart problems. The nuclear-powered pacemaker took advantage of a natural characteristic of plutonium-238, which is so radioactive that it gives off heat, which can be used to make a "nuclear battery" producing electricity. Los Alamos scientists spent several million dollars and several years on the nuclear pacemaker before they realised there was no way to keep track of such pacemakers and that plutonium-238 would soon be wafting out of the smokestacks of crematoria.

The military developed a "man-pack" plutonium-powered battery for use by troops. The device never went into service because, if one were blown up, a large area would have been permanently contaminated by plutonium dust. Nevertheless, in 1970, newspaper writers optimistically predicted that within three to five years campers would be carrying their own plutonium-powered man-packs into the woods. The project was abandoned.

The Bulova watch company in 1969 announced it was developing a plutonium-powered wrist watch, but the project was abandoned.

Plutonium underwear
The US Navy developed plutonium-impregnated "long johns" to keep divers warm in cold waters. One set of nuclear long johns contained enough plutonium to provide 1 trillion "maximum permissible lung burdens" of plutonium (333 maximum permissible lung burdens for every human on earth in 1970). The project was abandoned.

The Monsanto Research Corporation, which operated the lab where the diving suit was developed, promoted a nuclear-powered coffee pot. Such a pot would perk for 100 years relying only on its self-contained plutonium-238 heat source. Each pot would contain enough plutonium (5.67 grams) to provide 10 million lethal doses. The project was abandoned.

Even the crown jewel of the program -- nuclear-generated electric power -- fell upon hard times. Despite billions of dollars of subsidies, a multitude of problems beset the industry from the start. Since 1975, no new nuclear power plants have begun construction in the US.

Food
Despite these many failures, one part of the peaceful atom program has been kept alive. In the late 1950s, the AEC began promoting a new way to preserve food -- zap it with large doses of radiation. By zapping food with 100,000 to 3 million rad of energy, insects and bacteria could be killed, reducing food spoilage. (This is a large dose; 600 rad is sufficient to kill half of the humans thus exposed.)

Unfortunately, it became clear from the earliest days that a dose of radiation sufficient to achieve complete sterilisation would also cause profound changes in the food: unpleasant, unfamiliar and dangerous degradation products formed. Therefore, the program used less radiation than could achieve complete sterilisation, thus scaling back the benefits from "long-term preservation" to "possibly extending the shelf-life of some foods". To this day, no study has ever added up and described the benefits to be derived from irradiated food.

Lack of quantified benefits has not slowed the program, however. In 1967, a truck-mounted food irradiator built by the AEC criss-crossed the US promoting the benefits of irradiated food. In the late 1960s, the army produced irradiated ham, to provide ham sandwiches for front-line troops. However, in 1968, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) declared that the irradiated ham could not be considered safe. Despite this setback, in 1986, the FDA issued a mystifying and scientifically controversial decision, approving the irradiation of spices, pork, fruits and vegetables. The data that the FDA relied upon have been challenged.

Despite immense effort by government to create this new industry, no market for irradiated food has developed. The public just doesn't seem interested. Therefore, food irradiation is legal in the US but largely unused, except in the case of a few spices. Still the government keeps pressing on.


Caesium
Originally, food irradiators used cobalt-60 as the source of radiation. But in recent years the US government has been urging a shift to caesium-137.
Some critics suspect that food irradiation proposals are a way to use up the nation's limited supply of caesium-137 and thus create a need to produce more of it. Evidence for this is the fact that the government is willing to lease caesium-137 at bargain prices (0.83 cents per curie per year), compared to cobalt-60, which sells for $1 per curie on the open market.

If a food irradiation industry can be created, it will soon sop up all available caesium-137, and thus create a demand for more. This would require the government to start reprocessing nuclear waste. If wastes were reprocessed to extract the caesium, two things would follow automatically: the caesium would become the responsibility of states, thus relieving the federal government of an
enormous waste problem. Secondly, plutonium could be extracted from the wastes simultaneously -- a dream that the atomic establishment has savoured since 1950.

In sum, the government wants to create a food irradiation industry, thus requiring waste reprocessing to extract caesium-137, in order to revitalise a dormant plutonium-extraction program, critics argue.

We see the pressure to create a food irradiation industry in a somewhat different light. Now that the world's scientific community has reached consensus that global warming is upon us, and that humans are causing the problem (at least in part) by burning oil, gas and coal, pressure will mount steadily to shift to new energy sources. There are only two alternative sources of energy: nuclear and solar. The public's distaste for radiation has been, and still is, the ultimate barrier to nuclear power.

What better way to undercut distaste for radiation than by putting irradiated food on our plates? If we can all be convinced to irradiate our food, then our great respect for, and fear of, radiation will dissipate and ultimately vanish. By this means -- and probably only by this means -- can the way be cleared for deployment of the global nuclear power industry envisioned in Eisenhower's day.

Trillions of dollars -- and major issues of global political control and environmental contamination -- are at stake.

[From Rachel's Environment & Health Weekly.]

[Anonymous]

vsmith:

I know. The last paragraph was meant to be facetious. Couldn't resist the wisecracks--I've had to handle a lot of serious people with major misconceptions over the years, particularly at the University level. Besides, think about how many headlight and ditch light bulbs you'd save with the glow-in-the-dark concept.. Probably a RR acct somewhere that might go nuts over the idea (save a nickel, spend a million- hey, it works for the hwy people). But I really do think you provided some more very good info for all the folks, particularly the younger ones. I think you did a great service posting the article. Remember when nukie electricity was going to be so cheap they were going to give it away?

And, by the way, isn't it amazing that almost every artist's conception of a sexy new RR technology looked like an E? What are we missing?

[Anonymous]

I'd like to see Nuclear Powered Locomotives and I belive the ARMY is testing one