Because that’s an impossibly big “if”. Let’s say you have a working reactor compact enough to fit in a car’s engine bay. How do you protect it against car accidents? Theft? Fire? If you just pack on more and more shielding, either the car has to get bigger and heavier, or the reactor has to get even smaller.
Right now, a “micro-reactor” is the size of a shipping container. So while you could put it on a truck and power the truck to make it self-sufficient, you are at net zero, i.e. you’re not moving any cargo. It’s certainly not a personal vehicle.
While you could make a road train with a bunch of trailers (depending on how much power the reactor produces), which could make sense for places like the Australian outback, or crossing Russia or Canada, if the reactor gets T-boned on the road, you have a nuclear mess that’s going to be extremely expensive to clean up.
Because that’s an impossibly big “if”. Let’s say you have a working reactor compact enough to fit in a car’s engine bay. How do you protect it against car accidents? Theft? Fire? If you just pack on more and more shielding, either the car has to get bigger and heavier, or the reactor has to get even smaller.
Right now, a “micro-reactor” is the size of a shipping container. So while you could put it on a truck and power the truck to make it self-sufficient, you are at net zero, i.e. you’re not moving any cargo. It’s certainly not a personal vehicle.
While you could make a road train with a bunch of trailers (depending on how much power the reactor produces), which could make sense for places like the Australian outback, or crossing Russia or Canada, if the reactor gets T-boned on the road, you have a nuclear mess that’s going to be extremely expensive to clean up.