X-12 Atomic Locomotive

Far more attempts than anyone should be strictly comfortable with have been made to create an atomic locomotive. The Germans came up with a bizarre lozenge shaped unit, and the Russians developed a two story monster. The Denver & Rio Grande Western railroad worked closely with the Atomic Energy Commission to repower conventional steam locomotives with atomic reactors in place of fireboxes, however this proved to be impractical. Perhaps the most fully-developed concept for an atomic locomotive came from a graduate student project: the X-12. Dr. Lyle Borst came up with the project for his students in Physics 280: Nuclear Technology in 1952 at the University of Utah. The atomic locomotive was to compete with contemporary steam and diesel locomotives, and use only unclassified technology. (Reactor design at the time was rife with state secrets.) What they came up with was a behemoth 384 ton, two-unit carbody locomotive: the X-12. The X-12 was designed to use a aqueous homogeneous reactor (AHR), using a uranyl-sulfate and water solution rather than conventional uranium rods. This was simply because the AHR's design was largely unclassified while other, more modern reactors under development at the time required security clearance to view or work with. The working fluid is water , which is passed directly through the reactor and the steam fed into the turbine with no heat exchanger between. The turbine, therefore, becomes highly radioactive very quickly, and is hence designed to be maintenance-free, requiring a service only once every ten years -- since servicing would require a lengthy and expensive decontamination process. The second car is entirely composed of radiators to cool and condense the radioactive steam before it is fed back into the reactor. The entire unit would have generated 7000 horsepower and would be run by a standard two man crew. The X-12 as I have depicted it has had some alterations: to account for more modern turbine and reactor technology (boiling