Very likely, but it still would not be practical, if only due to all the radiation shielding needed.

Yes, but considering there's no practical way to throttle steam production, it'd need frequent watering. Plus in an ordinary steam engine a dry boiler is bad, in this thing it'd be catastrophic.

If you want an atomic train, put the nuclear power plant on a big concrete base somewhere stable and just run wires to the tracks, honestly.

Which is the most practical solution, as you can use one powerplant to power many trains. And your home, too.

Still, I wish the 15MW helium reactors from "Desperately Seeking Ranma" were here for real.

This is such a terrible idea and it is just about as bad as the Atomic airplane.

What would be the solution would be is to have a stationary nuclear plant and string catenary at 25kV at 60hz, and use electric locomotives. Then you can sell excess generation capacity to the public grid.

There were a handful of research papers written on the topic in the ~1960's.

They all came to the basic conclusion of: 'Possible: Yes. Reasonable: No.'

>>132978

>German words
>ALCo/EMD-esque body designs

I don't get it.

>>132979
That specific design came out of the University of Utah. I have no idea why the image is labeled in German, it's just the best quality example I could find off hand.

https://books.google.com/books?id=bVMEAAAAMBAJ&lpg=PA78&ots=oNcGmhCvuD&dq=x-12%20locomotive&pg=PA78#v=onepage&q=x-12%20locomotive&f=false

Furthermore:

http://atomic-skies.blogspot.com/2012/07/to-peoria-by-atom.html