0 to 100 kmh in 1.5 seconds and a top speed of 250 kmh and a range of 426 km sounds good to me.

@Background Pony #AA7E  
Really? That’s awesome! I guess I’m just not around kids enough to tell.

@Cirrus Light
 
These are actually still officially the highest selling form of wheeled transport in the world. So they weren’t a 90s fad, they came out in the 70s and they’ve been popular ever since, and are still popular today. Unlike an actual car, however, it’s very hard to tell if you have a 30 year old Cozy Coupe or a brand new one.

@Cirrus Light  
I know liquid fluoride thorium reactors are especially safe, because it’s not a self sustaining nuclear reaction. they have to continuously shoot the thorium with a proton gun to kick start the chain reaction.
 
thorium reactors don’t have the sheer output of uranium ones, but they can be built on a smaller scale, and thorium’s a hell of a lot more abundant in the universe than uranium.
 
plus if the fuel gets too hot, it’s deliberately stored in a weaker container, with a stronger container beneath it, out of the path of the proton gun. so it melts the tank, drops down into the other tank, and without a source of protons it cools down all on its own. they can even just replace the upper tank, pump the fuel back up into it, and start the reactor going again.

but I can power up hills like you wouldn’t believe

@dekutree64  

 
actually, with how quite cars are these days…
 
true story, Ive almost gotten hit in a parking lot because I didn’t realize the car right next to me was on. modern cars are practically silent when not in motion.

@dekutree64  
I don’t know, actually. Intuition says dropping the rods would stop the reaction almost instantly, since it entirely depends on interactions that you instantly cut off when the rod is down. But I could be wrong about that.

@Cirrus Light  
Yeah, it’s certainly possible to drop control rods in passively, but does that completely stop it, or does it still need backup power to keep the coolant circulating for a while before it’s actually in stable condition?
 
And AFAIK the main reason we developed solid fuel in the first place is to produce plutonium for nuclear weapons… and then the reason we tried solid fuel breeder reactors is because we were used to solid fuel. Liquid breeders make so much more sense as an energy technology.
 
Though now that I think about it, I wonder if the separation tanks for the liquid fuel design can withstand the heat in the case of a complete power failure, or if they need powered cooling for a while too.

Well, I think we can blame the china syndrome for most people’s distrust of nuclear power; prior to the movie people were highly optimistic about nuclear power in the US.
 
Then The movie and three mile island came out in basically the same week, and everyone was afraid that a single nuclear power plant could destroy the planet like in the movie.

@dekutree64  
I’m pretty sure most reactor designs have passive safety / cutoff systems.
 
I know a small reactor I visited had this design: the control rods were held up by non-permenant magnets, meaning a loss of power would immediately drop the control rods and shut off the reactor.
 
That was at a university. I can’t help but think actual power plants have at least as much, almost certainly a lot more safety.
 

 
Anyways, lol, I can’t help but think a liquid system is safer. After all, your plant is designed to hold a melted-down (liquid) fuel core. Hard to imagine how it could melt down catastrophically when melted down is how it normally operates, lol…

And if you drive me, people will think you are gay.  

@Blissey1  
Thanks for the correction :) And good to know that electrics are already that much cleaner to drive.
 
And aside from global pollution, there’s the issue of local pollution and its effects on health. Running cars on coal burnt outside the city is a lot less harmful to human life than burning gasoline in the middle of the air everyone is breathing. And without the exhaust and excessive noise, walking places would be far more pleasant, and that has huge health benefits.
 
I’ll bet we’ll see a rise in pedestrians getting run over, but I’ll also bet that it will be more from the increased number of pedestrians than from them not hearing the cars coming. If cities were quiet, you could hear the tire noise no problem.

@Cirrus Light  
I was referring to the hydrogen explosions at Chernobyl and Fukushima. The explosion itself doesn’t destroy anything but the reactor containment building, but it spews radioactive material over the surrounding city so a lot of valuable property is lost anyway.
 
I think liquid fuel reactors could still cause similar groundwater pollution to what’s happening at Fukushima if the piping that carries the fuel to the emergency separation tanks is destroyed, but the only thing I can think of to cause that is direct earthquake damage, which can be avoided easily enough by not building them directly on fault lines. Correct me if I’m wrong, but solid fuel reactors need backup power systems to shut everything down properly, whereas liquid fuel passively shuts down if all power is cut.

@Background Pony #9F04  
Heh, I meant powerplants, not nuclear powered cars, of course.
 
 
@dekutree64  
More misinformation on nuclear powerplants. If you meant a nuclear explosion by “go boom,” well, that’s just plain wrong. Powerplant-grade material cannot produce an uncontrolled reaction in the same way weapons-grade material can. Once you’ve refined it to powerplant grade, it’s fairly easy to refine it a bit more to weapons-grade, but that requires refinement process. In other words, it’s physically impossible for a meltdown to be a nuclear explosion.
 
If you ever read about an explosion in a meltdown, that’s a result of coolant fluid overheating, its pressure rising above what its container is meant to take, and blowing its container up, no more violently than an overpressured SCUBA tank or something. Which is quite violent, but certainly not “going nuclear”.
 
People oppose nuclear power as if they could make nuclear explosions - but that’s simply not true.
 
And again, even taking every nuclear accident in history into account, solar and wind each still kill more people in workplace accidents per energy produced than nuclear.
 

 
It’s really interesting to see all the measures they take in nuclear powerplants for safety… For one, Chernobyl literally had no extra safety measures. They literally just stuck a reactor core in a warehouse.
 
Modern reactors have multiple failsafes to keep anything from happening - from excessive temperatures immediately shutting down the reactor, to flooding the reactor with extra coolant to shut it down, to a coolant leak automatically shutting the reactor down, and putting the entire thing in a giant steel-reinforced concrete dome multiple feet thick (so even if something did happen, it wouldn’t leave the dome), all while it’s constantly monitored 24/7 by multiple highly trained, certified technicians.
 
If they built cars this safe, then nobody would die in car accidents.
 

 
As for electric cars… I think the hope is that economics of scale will eventually kick in, and it will be able to float itself. Though I think you may be exagerrating with the 5x more expensive claim?… That would be a freakish amount of money to float an entire corner of an industry with taxes.

@omera251  

 
Also, at least in the US, electric cars are subsidized tremendously by the government at every level. They’d cost five or ten times what they do if the buyer were paying market rates for everything that goes into them.
 
It’s like solar power. How much would those panels cost if the government weren’t subsidizing the manufacturers, keeping the prices artificially low? Just look at the silver and other precious metals in them (and note also that solar panel manufacture is one of the dirtiest, in terms of toxic waste generated, semiconductor processes out there today). Solar power isn’t “free.” It’s not even cheap.
 
@Background Pony #9F04  
Go look up the Ford Nucleon, a concept car, or rather mockup of a concept car, from 1958. The guys at Dearborn were looking at how much smaller nuclear reactors had gotten over the past several years and were feeling optimistic about theidea of one small enough that you could build an automobile around it. It’s on display in a museum in Dearborn now.

@dekutree64  

 
somebody just said this the other day, and it was wrong then, too. Coal only accounted for 1/3 of all power generated in the US last year.
 
you’re thinking of china, they’re still getting ~70% of their power from coal

@Background Pony #9F04  
Right, just to charge the battery. Currently most electric power comes from coal, so electric cars are still indirectly running on fossil fuel. But they’re not dependent on it the way gasoline cars are.
 
Fusion would be even better than liquid fuel fission, so hopefully ITER will work, but I’m not counting on it…
 
The current light water reactors are ok too, but obviously make quite a mess when they go boom.

@Background Pony #9F04  
The price is one of the things that keeps me from supporting all of these alternative energy cars. Even if they stop making gas powered cars in the next ten years, the average person will still buy a used gas car over an electric one. Those cars are expensive to make, and rightly so considering all the materials needed to make them work properly, and manufactures need to make a profit to keep making them. It just doesn’t seem like a viable option for most people.

@Cirrus Light  
I think I misunderstood what you were saying here, when you said electric cars running on liquid nuclear power, do you mean INSIDE the car providing energy, or that the car plugs in as normal and the electricity is due to a nuclear power plant located somewhere stationary?
 
Because its having the nuclear power supply inside the car itself that I’m objecting to here.

@mrdoctorderpy  

 
One of us! One of us!

@Background Pony #9F04  
Using any other power source - even solar - you’ll kill more people through workplace accidents than nuclear will. [1]
 
Except hydroelectric seems to tie it for safety - though it’s notable that you can only dam rivers so much.
 
It greatly upsets me that people are so uninformed, though. “Chernobyl!” they scream, as hundreds of thousands of people die in workplace accidents to other forms of power.
 
As for nuclear waste, I toured a reactor before, and they typically store it… Wait for it… In the reactor radiation tank. Since, you know, it blocks radiation and you’ve already got radioactive stuff there, anyways. There’s really no issue with waste disposal, it’s mostly just made up for political ruckus, and taken off to be used in depleted uranium armor or munitions.
 

 
So, yeah, just trust the nuclear engineers to actually know what they’re doing better than random laypeople who have no engineering knowledge or experience…

@dekutree64  

 
That’s pretty much the epitome of a bad idea; We don’t need mini-chernobyl’s happening everyime there’s a wreck.  
100 times safer doesn’t mean much when even ONE incident makes the road a cancer hazard. To say nothing of the dangers of the fuel just leaking out.

@Background Pony #9F04  
Yep. And electrics are particularly good at fast acceleration, which you can actually enjoy more often than high top speed.
 
The future will be a good place if we all have electric cars running on power from liquid fuel nuclear reactors (which are much safer and 100x more fuel efficient than current solid fuel reactors).

And if you drive me ponies will think you’re gay

@Background Pony #293A