Yes, and many terrorists are working feverishly on as I write so that they can bring one to your garage as soon as possible.

Yes, Ford had a concept car called the "Ford Nucleon" back in the heady days of the 1950's when atomic power was new and not a great deal was known about the safety issues.

http://www.defensetech.org/archives/003004.html

Fortunately they never put it into production. With the huge push for keeping car costs low I don't know how it could possibly have been made affordable, even if it was perfectly safe in a rear-end collision.

No, there is no way of making it safe, hence no way it will ever go into production as a vehicle power source. Miniaturisation issues also mean it would be rather large, hence why it is only used in large ships and submarines.

I believe the original Batmobile used atomic batteries.

Interesting to ponder.

Would it not still be just a steam car in the end? Steam turbine or piston engine, or hot-air engine. The latter not being very throttlable. A reactor the size of a matchhead would be plenty, would it not? Seems like there is ohter safer ways to produce heat.

Not necessarily, it could be a nuclear-thermo-voltaic reactor, like the type used on deep space probes. Heat is converted directly to electricity. Of course, they run on plutonium.

Yes it is possible

The reasons why not

drunk drivers, Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, Radiation Poisoning the environment instead of green house gases, cell phone users(same as drunk drivers I guess), bridge collapses, floods, earthquakes, hurricanes, tornadoes ....

The biggest reason is the allowance of every Tom, Dick & Harry that would have a grievance with some one to be able to easily place his hands on nuclear material.

Tom, Dick and Harry !!

One should rather worry about Jack. (Hi Jack).

Apparently, the US Air Force Research Laboratories have developed a betavoltaic battery. This battery emits beta-radiation (electrons if I'm not mistaken) onto a semiconductor, acting as a diode, converting it into electrical power.

They developed the technology for laptops, a charge could last 30 years. It is said to be very small and doesn't produce a lot of heat, so in theory it could be quite efficient.

There would be no radiation hazard because of the type of radiation (beta). It could come available on the market somewhere in the next two years.

No reason why it should not be possible for cars.

My only question is how this thing could be recharged, or how they produce the radioactive isotopes containing the energy. Adding to that, I wonder what kind of material they are using and whether there's enough of it to power cars, laptops, appliances...

Refueling it could be a problem, since it's highly unlikely any government would want radioactive material to fall into the hands of people not specially trained to handle it, let alone terrorists.

Quite. There's enough trouble with carbon dioxide in the exhaust discharges these days, never mind plutonium!

French trains are nuclear powered. It's just that the fuel supply is not carried on the trains; it is converted to electricity and carried to them via a transmission system while they are on the move. Now, if the power could be diverted to road-going vehicles in a similar way....

Before any reader shouts "Scalextric", Sweden has a zero tolerance to road accidents, forcing traffic to travel down fixed single lanes in places with no scope for turning and overtaking. Now, what if the forced lane roads had a vehicle battery recharging system that is fed from a [nuclear] power station while the vehicle is on the move?.........

And what if a hybrid road/rail vehicle were available that could pick up a battery charge from the overhead traction current, using a high-speed rail line to do the bulk of its journey, switching to local road at the end of the high-speed link?......

Thank you for a thought-provoking post, Guest. Please consider registering!

... you mean street cars, right?

If Im not mistaken there was a car built sometime in the 80's that was an atomic energy/gasoline hybrid, initially using plutonium but later was converted to run on an array of matierials. Real sharp looking car - stainless steel body, gullwing doors, and though it topped out at around 88 mph, it could still light the tires up. Must've been the 1.21 GW of power it produced. I seem to recall the car's designer was a guy named Emmet Brown. Im sure if you google him you can find out more about the car...

Avery Montembeault

I think the french modell is the only safer nuclear car model. Would be horror if everybody got a nuclear power resource in the car.

http://www.mizpah.tv

Can you reduce a nuclear power station to the size of a black-box including all the safety issues concerning with it?

As someone pointed it out already it still comes down to generating steam power.

I assume you meant this question as a joke, didn't you? So, knock it off.