My original tumblr post was here. I have been unable to establish that this page, apparently from the London Illustrated News of October 13, 1945 is a joke. And no, I’m afraid I don’t know what they were smoking. The image was originally posted on Tumblr by The Vault of the Atomic Space Age.
It’s real.
G.H. Davis, regular technical artist for ILN, drew these based on the suggestions of Professor M.L.E. Oliphant, who played an important role in the development of nuclear physics.
An entry in the bibliography of 2012 book The Neutron’s Children: https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=r1XGeqf0OHgC&pg=PA295&lpg=PA295&dq=“illustrated+london+news”+”13+october+1945″+399&source=bl&ots=VseMKC9dIS&sig=K9jQGwxa-7JD-cv49jFnRXQu5EM&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjdkuXKk9jQAhWJIcAKHdhKCTgQ6AEIITAA#v=onepage&q=%22illustrated%20london%20news%22%20%2213%20october%201945%22%20399&f=false
M.L.E. Oliphant’s wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Oliphant
Information about G.H. Davis: http://downthetubes.net/?p=29350
Real. Here’s a Wikipedia link to the life of Sir Mark Lawrence Elwin Oliphant, noted physicist.
Oops, forgot the link.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Oliphant
There were also plans for nuclear-powered aircraft.
Years later people were announcing that with nuclear power electricity would be so cheap there’d be no need to charge for it.
They even thought about nuclear powered cars.
Maybe not more than a concept design, but this strongly inspired the lore of the Fallout games.
Here’s a link to the Ford Nucleon:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Nucleon
The atomic liner, of course, is now the Nuclear Aircraft Carrier… so that one was not that out of line. At the time the images were created, public common knowledge was limited to the fact that atomic power was tapped for electricity by creating steam in a boiler… which is still how it is done with Gen II power plants. So anything driven by steam, such as a locomotive, was an obvious choice for nuclear innovation. As for airplanes and cars… not difficult to do as long as you don’t mind dying of radiation poisoning because the shielding required would be prohibitively massive.