Comment on same shit every day, on god
zarathustra0@lemmy.world 5 hours agoI wonder how fast we could get a steam engine to go if we stuck the a suitably shaped non-critical amount of plutonium in the firebox.
Pros:
Cons:
Pros clearly outweigh the cons. What are we waiting for?
As fast as it will roll down a hill. A non-critical mass of plutonium isn’t going to produce any significant heat for the boiler.
if we stuck a suitably shaped non-critical amount of plutonium in the firebox.
Non-critical? There isn’t much energy released from natural decay compared to criticality. We created things like this to power space probes like the Voyager I and II craft. 4.5kg of this Plutonium created about 2500w of thermal energy the the beginning of its life and the power declines from there.
So I need 80 tons of it in my firebox?
Well, you’d then have another problem. Unlike coal/wood/oil fuel, you can’t turn off radioactive decay.
You’d have megawatts (gigawatts?) of thermal energy boiling off all your water pretty quickly, and likely eventually melting down your steam engine firebox, and it would be that hot for decades!
You can boost it by hollowing out the middle and filling it with tritium, but plutonium is dense, so 80 tons will probably fit in the firebox just fine.
Hilariously this was a plot point I read recently. Isambard Kingdom Brunel replaced the firebox with some poorly shielded uranium, but the initial locomotive that was to demonstrate the technology was sabotaged and exploded, killing his parents.
This same book also had a fictional mad inventor who created a part newt-human hybrid named Victoria with womanly assets if you catch my drift, who upon failing to educate it he sent to a brothel because he couldn’t stand to “dispose of it” but when the princess and heir to the throne Elizabeth went missing, the newt-human hybrid Victoria was installed on the throne to prevent a constitutional crisis. And this is all events that occurred in the first 2 pages, so I’m not even spoiling anything!
To spoil where the Queen to be Victoria was so well hidden that she couldn’t be found, she was in fact working in the newt-human hybrid Victoria’s room at the brothel! Seriously bonkers stories in that book!
aaaaand saved
I’ll be real, I absolutely loved the first story, it took a little bit to get into the second one (but thoroughly enjoyed it after all) and I gave up partway through the third one because I was struggling to get pulled in and my library book was due soon anyways. So absolutely worth it for the first two stories at least, and hopefully you enjoy the third one more than I did!
Zwiebel@feddit.org 5 hours ago
And replace the pistons with a turbine…
Slovene@feddit.nl 5 hours ago
And replace the locomotive with a Delorean.
milkisklim@lemmy.world 5 hours ago
Then it’ll only get up to 88 mph.
e0qdk@reddthat.com 4 hours ago
What does a mile per hour really even mean when you can turn back time? 🤔️