Why don't nuclear-powered locomotives exist to haul heavy loads?

Power plants on moving vehicles have to be able to move their own weight first. A nuclear power plant would be incredibly heavy for a locomotive compared to the currently used engines, resulting in a net loss of payload weight. In addition, nuclear power plants are heavily regulated and expensive to both build and run, so they wouldn't be cost effective.

Besides, can you imagine the outcry the environmentalists would make about the potential dangers?

Shultz, what does that have to do with the question? Please remember to rate answers by how well they answer the question that's been asked.

Locomotive are either diesel-electric or electric. In a diesel-electric, the diesel motor turns a generator that provides electricity to traction motors mounted on the axles of the locomotive. Electric locomotives pick up power from an overhead caternary or a third rail. Direct mechanical and hydraulic drive systems have been tried with only limited long-term success.

Nuclear power generates heat, which is used to boil water, which drives a steam turbine to generate electrcity. This is a very complicated and expensive system to install on a locomotive. Reactors are already used - they generate some of the electricity in the land-based electrical system that powers electric locomotives. It's far more efficient and safer than putting reactors and all of the ancilliary hardware right on the locomotive.

Merry, nuclear reactors couldn't be extra heavy because it was light enough to fit in the trunk of an atomic, experimental car.

Thus, if engineers were capable of fitting a reactor on a car, then they certainly are capable of fitting a reactor on a train. A reactor wasn't too heavy for a car, so "nuclear trains" can work too.

But not politically. I won't argue with that. We'd hate for a derailment to cause a Chernobyl on rails. We'll just have to wait to get Fusion, a much safer power source (allegedly). Then again, that might be by the time we start to teleport cargo and not need trains anymore anyway.

It's now been tested in Montréal (QC) by CAD Railway industries, I don't know who the client is...

In a free market, nuclear power is too expensive compared to less expensive alternatives like diesel and diesel-electric. In regulated markets, mobile nuclear power would be impossible or prohibitively expensive. In such regulated markets it has proliferated only to navies in the marine market except for a single Russian non-military ice-breaker. Emmissions regulation as well as explicit government laws, nationalisation of railways, and government investment in rail infrastructure has resulted in the proliferation of electrified railways as well as a significant portion of the electricity being derived from nuclear reactors. In the less regulated US market, diesel-electric has proliferated. One of the reasons diesel is because diesel is more versatile: two locomotives can pull a heavy freight train across a plain, two to four more locomotives can be added to the consist to haul it over a pass. A nuclear locomotive would either be so underpowered as to be ineffective, or if it were high-powered the asset would be wasted as it traveled across the plain at some fraction of its capacity.

It's now been tested in Montréal (QC) by CAD Railway industries, I don't know who the client is...

The smallest power-generating nuclear reactors in current use are those powering nuclear submarines. Their size, roughly, determines the minimum size of these submarines - which is large. Since the Navy would almost certainly like to have smaller submarines (as well as the big ones - nobody wants small only), it is reasonable to assume that this is the smallest that a safe, fully shielded, nuclear reactor can be built with today's technology. But, thought they are far smaller than civil power reactors, are big - twelve or fifteen feed across - and heavy - hundreds of tons. They are therefore too big to put on a locomotive on existing rails - or probably on any land transport. They only make sense for marine transport. A more interesting question is why the new generation of huge container carriers, which seem to be bigger than they US's nuclear powered aircraft carriers, are not nuclear powered. I guess the answer would be public acceptance.

They could. There are available commercial nuclear reactors that are very light, small (the size of a large refrigerator), and furnish about 25,000 Hp. as steam energy which can be used to drive a steam turbine. These would be much lighter than current engines, esp. considering the fact that no fuel need be carried. The radioactivity is of a very low level, and the reactors are well shielded so that accidents would not be catastrophic. Refrence Hyperion Power for detailed information.

I don't think it would be even considered. Imagine having hundreds of nuclear reactors hurtling through residential areas all across the country every day and night. Maintainance would be another problem, and then, god forbid, if there was an accident???? Forgedaboudit! *said in a good fellas type of accent*

mobile nuclear weapons? If the boiler blows up you have alpha beta and gammer radiation flying around its location, doesnt sound too crash hot

Its more efficient to have electric powered locomotives which are recharged at the electrical grid.

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