Car with nuclear waste drive - disposal problems solved?
02/13/2020
It's unbelievable what we can find in our archive, and how ideas that seemed absurd even back then seem to work today.
Back in 1953, the French tried their hand at an automobile powered by electric motors, but the project came to nothing. Five years later, the inventors were back. In 1958, " Auto, Motor und Sport" wrote about Arbel, from the presentation of a new model at the Geneva Motor Show:
Audacity, satire or fool's errand ?
The Symétrie 58, whose strange face looks at the reader in the picture below, is - how could it be otherwise - a French design that has hardly anything in common with the conventional automobile apart from the four wheels and the steering. Even the bodywork is unorthodox in that the doors of the barrel-shaped body open upwards and downwards from the center as vertical sliding doors. They are driven by wheel hub motors which, when short-circuited, also serve as brakes. Even more unusual, however, is the drive source. For the time being, a Simca engine is still installed to drive the generator, and the first 100 cars in the Symetric series to be launched for Parisian cab drivers are also to be equipped with it.
After that, however, it is planned to use so-called static generators, which will generate electrical energy directly from heat using the principle of thermocouples. This heat, for its part, does not come from nowhere, but is initially generated by burning heavy fuel oil in a unit called "Généstafuel", whereby the energy is converted into electricity without the need for a generator in between; but even this is only an intermediate stage. The final power source will be the "Genestatom", consisting of two small furnaces that will be fed with nuclear reactor waste or delicate elements such as strontium 89 or yttrium 91.
A constantly working decay product is then put in there, which lasts for months as fuel and generates power whether it is needed or not. However, the Arbel company notes that this model can only be launched on the market with special approval from the French government. In any case, a customer service network abroad is already planned...
