It seems too obvious to be a solution, but why did we give up on steam power? I believe nuclear power plants essentially work by generating steam, could this model be used in a car? Does steam not provide enough force to move the water and its container?
In: Engineering
The reasons you can’t have a car directly powered by a nuclear reactor is because nuclear reactors generate a lot of radioactive byproducts (not because a car would explode like a bomb if it crashed — it wouldn’t). You’d both need to shield the car to keep the driver and anyone around it alive — and shielding is heavy, and so the weight of your car is going to be massive and unwieldy — and any kind of accident that might damage the internals of the reactor, or breach the containment of the radioactive byproducts, could be extremely contaminating. It’s not worth it.
The best way to have a nuclear-powered car is to generate electricity with a nuclear reactor and store it in the battery of an electric car. You lose some efficiency that way, of course, but it works.
The main vehicles that have been used with nuclear reactors are very large boats (if there is a problem, it sinks, which is not ideal but it won’t spread contamination), some trains (again, few people, room for shielding, etc.), and it has been studied for rockets (but never used like this). In all of these cases you’re talking about vehicles that are relatively few in numbers (unlike cars), relatively large, and if they fail they ideally fail away from most people.
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