GO NUKE

GO NUKE

I don’t know about you, but I’m sick and tired of our country being dependent on foreign sources for oil and energy. I guess it’s largely our own fault, mainly because of our hundred year romance with the internal combustion engine. Four cylinder, 6 cylinder, 8 or 12, gas or diesel, they all burn a petroleum based fuel.

I guess I wouldn’t feel as strongly about this, if I felt we did not have an alternative, but we do. Auto makers are only recently beginning to produce cars driven by battery, plant based fuels, synthetic fuel, and now hydrogen. We have the technology; we just haven’t been willing to pay the price.

As strange as it may seem, at least one automaker, had their design team working on an alternative as early as 1958. It was an exciting time as commercial engineers raced to harness the incredible power and energy of the nuclear reaction, that had already been weaponized a few years earlier. Ford motor company had design plans for the first nuclear propelled car, the Ford Nucleon. It looked like a futuristic cross between a space ship and the Bat mobile, with the power source in the rear, nestled between out swept wings. The designers envisioned a passenger automobile based on the same, then emerging technology, that powered the first nuclear submarine, just a smaller version. It was a brave new world, and the genie had been let out of the bottle. Nuclear power was here to stay, and big corporations and manufactures were all too happy to jump on the band wagon and capitalize of this revolutionary and seemingly limitless source of power.

The nuclear core would fuel the car for approximately 5,000 miles of use and then simply be exchanged for a new one, at a type of high tech gas station. (sign reads: Tires, repairs, convenience items, and Nuclear Core replacements)

When they first came out in very limited quantities they were very expensive. Well my Dad, being the techie that he was back then, just had to have one, so he put a second mortgage on the house and plunked down the cash at the local Ford dealer, making him one of the first to own the new technology. I guess he was some what of a visionary back then because he knew that the price of gasoline probably would be heading north of .25 cents a gallon, sometime in the future and he’d have none of that nonsense. To be honest, I don’t think he ever really understood the dynamics that made the car go, but that sucker ran without making nay noise and had tons of wheel spinning horsepower. I think he was pulled over on the turnpike one day doing “Mach One”. In fact, I never got the chance to attend college because Dad is still making payments on the ticket and still trying to get the points off his license. (I think it was a $15.00 ticket plus one dollar for every mile per hour over 40.)

Well, that car took some getting used to, and caused quite a stir in the old neighborhood. Everyone else was driving early Chevy’s and Oldsmobile’s, but our car looked like something from “Back to the Future”. Dad, would take it out of the garage and wash it nearly every day just to show off to the neighbors. That old car took about 45 minutes to warm up and get the reaction going before you could take it out for a spin, making it impractical to use for a quick run down to the corner store for some milk. Dad being the eternal optimist(and cheap skate) that he was, would leave the car running all night long in the garage and figured out a way to hook the car’s jumper cables to our breaker box and we had all the free heat and electric we could use.

We all looked forward to the weekends because Dad would have the car fired up and ready to roll by 8am on Saturday morning. We’d all pile in the car and off we’d go. I think it gave Dad a certain sense of satisfaction as we’d pass gas station after gas station, as he’d count off the miles we had left until the car would need a fresh power source ( only 4,890 miles left before we have to stop he’d say).

Well I’m sad to say that we ended up selling that old car a few years latter because, (wonder what that sucker would be worth today) when it did come time to “fill ‘er up”, their wasn’t a nuclear equipped fill’in station in sight. By that time, Ford had abandoned the idea of mass producing the vehicle, because the United Auto Workers union in Detroit wanted “hazardous duty pay” for building them in addition to the 25 bucks a hour they were already getting. (I think Ford eventually diverted the balance of the car’s development funds to another promising new vehicle named the Ford Edsel) Also, a “refill” of the power source, would have required a team of scientists and a trip to Los Alamos. Besides, new research was suggesting that exposure to the radioactive materials that fueled the car might not be good for the passengers health. (Maybe we should have noticed the reddening of our skin and the radiation sickness). To help salvage part of the loss, I think Ford may have sold the patent, plans, and left over nuclear materials, to the North Koreans.(so that’s how they got started)

You know, maybe after all these years, its time to re-consider mass producing that car again. After all, times have changed, technology has changed and most of all, the price of fuel has gone up a little. (hey, I’d buy one) A model of the car, can still be seen in the Ford museum in Detroit.

P.I.B.