The US uses nuclear power aircraft carriers. Is this efficient? What are the drawbacks? Could the same systems theoretically be used in cars?
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The biggest problem for nuclear powered vessels is the initial cost and the ongoing maintenance. For the US Navy the ability to operate for 25 years without refuel and retrofit is worth the cost. For civilian ventures this is a huge thing to get over, plus the civilian world doesn’t have a pipeline of qualified technicians to work on these things. The navy can just get some of the smarter enlisted guys and toss them into school in Croton and they get qualified maintainers. It is similar to why military transport jets still have 4 engines when civilian ones have 2, 3, or 4. The Air Force is less concerned about economic viability than it is about being able to get that plane off the ground in cruddy conditions and under duress, more engines = more survivability.
In the civilian world it never got a fair rap. They made a few commercial nuclear powered vessels but they were denied docking permits at most ports and it turned into a political shit-storm – which is a shame because naval diesel fuel is disgusting and polluting.
A nuclear reactor is, at its heart, a steam engine. It heats water that turns a turbine that can be connected to a drive shaft or charge some batteries or both. A car would need that high pressure steam/turbine too fast for it to be practical in a car or tank. What I mean by that is you would need to regulate the amount of heat (for the volume of steam desired) every time you accelerated and decelerated. You would be pistoning the control rods inside that generator so quickly you might as well just use the pistons to compress and combust a bit of air and petrol and have a far less expensive machine.
There is a land vehicle powered by a gas turbine, the M1 tank, but it burns diesel or jet-A and a *lot* of it.
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