That Time Ford Designed a Nuclear-Powered Car, the Nucleon

Slim Aarons/Getty Images

The 1950s were an interesting time. The "Atomic Age" gave us everything from starburst clocks to the dread of nuclear annihilation and "duck and cover" drills in schools. It was whiplash — one minute you're told to dive under a desk, the next you're promised jet packs and a clean-energy future where everything runs on science magic. 

Right at that intersection, Ford was all in on the atomic fantasy. Ford's designers cooked up one of the most gloriously unhinged concept cars: the Ford Nucleon. Unveiled in 1958 as a three-eighths-scale model, the Nucleon wasn't just a styling exercise, it was an attempt to partially domesticate the apocalypse. The plan? Stuff a miniature nuclear reactor in the back of a family car. Because, of course. This was the '50s, a decade that produced some of the most diverse car designs, and putting a nuclear reactor in a car seemed ... completely reasonable?

The Nucleon's design, undertaken by the aptly named Jim Powers, was dictated entirely by its power train. The idea, borrowed from the Navy's then-new nuclear submarines, was that uranium fission would create heat, which would flash water into steam, which would spin turbines to generate electricity for the motors driving the wheels. The cabin was crammed way out front under a giant bubble canopy — straight out of "The Jetsons," minus the flying dog walker. The payoff for this setup was a theoretical range of over 5,000 miles on a single core. The plan was to offer different types of cores for long-range and performance — sound familiar?

Ford pictured a world where gas stations were out, and reactor service stations were in — roll up, drop your used core, and grab a fresh one. An idea that perfectly foreshadows the battery-swapping stations of today, although storing mass quantities of nuclear cores creates its own headaches, both on local and national-security scales.

So why aren't we all driving our own personal Chernobyls? Well, physics. Using more recent radiation research, to shield the occupants from lethal radiation the reactor would need a container made of lead and other dense materials about a foot thick in every direction. Good luck with that cornering performance.

Of course, the Ford Nucleon never made it past the scale-model stage. The engineering problems were insurmountable. A fender-bender had the opportunity to be a localized radiological disaster.

The original model now lives in Dearborn, Michigan's Henry Ford Museum of American Innovation, a beautiful plastic tribute to an impossible but ambitious dream. But the Nucleon's most enduring legacy is found in the digital wasteland of the "Fallout" video game series. The game's retro-futuristic nuclear-powered cars seem a direct nod to the Nucleon's atomic-age design. In a perfect bit of satire, if you shoot these cars enough, they detonate in a miniature mushroom cloud, a grim commentary on the dangers of the original concept.

Sure, nuclear power is still kicking around as a clean-ish energy option, but maybe we're better off keeping the reactors bolted to the ground instead of stuffed in the trunk. As EVs take over the roads, it turns out plugging them into nuclear-powered grids made way more sense. In the end, Ford's Nucleon wasn't just a concept car — it was a glowing time capsule of mid-century optimism.