US Army's Land Trains (2020)
In his autobiography, LeTurneau talks about one of the land trains being nuclear powered, casually as if it was just another increment. This man was on another level. His faith was pretty fantastic too, it's a really enjoyable read of how he did a bootstraps-pull-up but also with the appropriate amount of good fortune ("fortune?") that generally leads to massive successes. The man was a prodigy/genius, absolutely amazing and from very humble roots.<p>Now, the nuclear land train didn't materialize, but this guy is the guy that Elon Musk wished he was. The OG ironman back in the 50's or whenever you'd classify his active years to be in. Presumably because he died, on the nuclear powerplant front, but I got the sense from reading it that he was adored enough that despite the safety risks he could have relatively handily gotten something like that in production.<p>Which would have changed the nature of our transportation today in a big kind of way. If you make a portable nuclear generator that can sit on a military land train (and this man could, just read his engineering reasoning you'll see why I speak of it with a sense of awe and wonder), then you can make that same generator and use it to power rural neighborhoods, remote electric vehicle stations, etc. The cost of infrastructure maintenance and installation would go down, and we'd have one more good option during the energy crisis today, with global warming and such as it is.<p>Really and truly a peek into what could have been almost our current "alternative future". Probably not a bad one either, though presumably there would be negative consequences like Appalachia getting hit more hard economically due to further lowered coal dependence, etc.