EMISSIONS:Just think of the positives of nuclear- powered cars: zero emissions, top speeds and think of the oil reserves, writes KILIAN DOYLE
I’M AN avid devourer of the archive pages we reproduce in the paper on occasion. The difference in the way we used to report news and the way we do it now never fails to raise a smile.
Take, for example, the front page of August 7th, 1945, two days after those saviours of democracy in the US military dropped Little Boy on Hiroshima.
Bizarrely, not once in the whole report did it mention the 140,000 men, women and children who’d been incinerated in the name of peace.
While not even I can see a funny side to genocide, I had to smirk at the subheading. “Startling New Invention” it proclaimed excitedly, as if this wonderful new discovery was to be the solution to all of humanity’s woes and the obliteration of thousands of lives was a mere byproduct of progress.
Enforcing this notion, there was a short piece further down the page which read: “Commenting on the difficulty of comparing the power of the new atomic bomb with any previously known force, one scientist said: ‘If the force could be harnessed to industry – one might say it would be equivalent to driving the Queen Mary across the Atlantic with a teacup full of fuel!’”
This quaint analogy piqued my interest no end. For I spend most of my waking hours fretting about how we’re going to get about once the oil runs out. Do we go electric? Turn to hydrogen? Biofuels? Start breeding donkeys and building carts in their millions?
Or should we have nuclear cars? I’m hardly the first person to consider this as an option. Indeed, Ford produced a concept car called the Nucleon in 1958 that was to be powered by a teeny, tiny atomic fission reactor.
A sleek, tail-finned beast straight out of Thunderbirds, it was symbolic of the naive optimism of the Atomic Age.
Ford’s boffins reckoned it would’ve been able to drive 8,000km before needing its core recharged, had it been built. Which, of course, it wasn’t – primarily because the clumsy reactors of the day were just a smidgeon too big to be hauled about in the back of a Ford.
But all that’s changed. The relentless march of technology means everything – bar humans and the plasma-screen TVs they watch while expanding – is shrinking.
Mobile phones being a case in point. A mere 20 years ago, they were the size of bricks and as useful as two tin cans tied together with a length of twine. Now, you could run an entire empire from your bed.
As it is, not only are nuclear reactors already driving submarines and aircraft carriers, but they’ve even been used to power satellites. It’s probably only a matter of time before some bright spark designs one small enough to be squeezed into a car.
Bring it on, I say. They’ll produce zero emissions and go like rockets. What’s not to like?
There are, I concede, a few glaring downsides. Perhaps the most obvious is that were everyone to drive nuclear-powered cars, we’d have a planet covered in potential dirty bombs. Any disgruntled nutjob with a persecution complex could wipe out huge swathes of the population by simply ploughing into a wall.
And, rather than having to hand over large wads of cash to shady shaven-headed Russians in wraparound shades and knock-off Armani suits in exchange for the wherewithal to build a Doomsday machine, terrorists could just pop in to their local car dealer and buy one. Marvellous.
But one must look at the positives. Think of the impact they would have on road safety. Other than the aforementioned headcases, how many people do you see driving recklessly when they know they’ve got a 10 megaton device inches from their knees?
The second pitfall is that we’ll probably all get cancer and die. Which is a bit unfortunate. But, as noted earlier, that’s progress for you.