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Any uses for the Borst railway reactor?

Are there any practical uses for Lyle Borst's 30,000 KW railroad nuclear reactor, either for its original role of powering a train or for being used as a (comparably) small nuclear generator for another task?

The Borst reactor is an aqueous homogeneous reactor design. They're simple to design and build but no one really considered using them for any form of power generation after the early to mid 1960s. There aren't too many of them operating anywhere in the world anymore either and it seems to be a technology that has been surpassed by other reactor designs.

The best way to power a train with nuclear power would be to build a nuclear power station and use it to supply electricity for an electric powered train. However, if you want a nuclear reactor to directly power a train or to be on a train (such as for ease of transportation) the best way to do it would be to use some type of pressurized water or molten salt design. They have relatively low weight and volume requirements which helps makes them viable for powering vehicles.
 
The best way to power a train with nuclear power would be to build a nuclear power station and use it to supply electricity for an electric powered train.
Yeah. If you look at how over the top the Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) rules regarding things like structural strength of locomotives and rolling stock are I can't begin to imagine how insane their ones for a nuclear train would be.
 
Some sort of portable power source for disaster relief purposes?

Obviously, if you can get it somewhere on a train, you can also get diesel fuel and a generator (or just use the locomotive itself) there for the same purpose, but...

One of the competitive advantages of nuclear energy is its great energy density. A fossil fuel plant requires significant railroad or pipeline infrastructure for continuous operations, but a nuclear reactor needs far less infrastructure after being established. A nuclear core contains months or even years worth of fuel, while even a coal pile can only reasonably contain a few weeks of fuel. That makes nuclear energy ideal for areas without strong railroad or pipeline infrastructure, which historically even included some areas of the continental United States. Even areas with strong infrastructure ended up with nuclear power plants because energy demand was growing so rapidly prior to the energy crises that the United States was on track to run out of railroad capacity by the 1980s. They were looking at scenarios in which railroads would have had to start expanding at an exponential rate just to meet the demands of coal fired power stations.

Yeah. If you look at how over the top the Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) rules regarding things like structural strength of locomotives and rolling stock are I can't begin to imagine how insane their ones for a nuclear train would be.

There are also issues related to levelized cost (total system costs divided by total power output). Steam engines have high fuel efficiency and high capital costs. Diesel engines and gas turbines have low fuel efficiency and low capital costs. If something has a low capacity factor (total power generated divided by total power generation possible) it may make more sense to use a power plant that costs less but has lower efficiency, as total system costs may be lower. That's why large baseload power stations that continuously operate at full power tend to use steam turbines while stations that are operated less frequently (including ships and trains) use gas turbines or diesel engines.
 
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