Fossil fuel-free jet propulsion with air plasmas

233 · 7 May 2020 at 06:28

Quartz cooling really isn’t an issue on a smr

lots of these new micro reactors are passive air cooled

Angilion · 7 May 2020 at 06:49

Rroff said:
You generally need quite specific circumstances for a reactor to cause irradiation of note - the runaway cook off at Chernobyl doesn't easily happen by accident.

Nuclear reactors don't usually hit the ground at hundreds of miles per hour, break up tens of thousands of feet above ground or crash while taking off or landing at a busy airport.

edscdk said:
There was a stunning end of the world nuclear plane / rocket that the US developed if I remember correctly, it would fly in circles dumping radiation on the ussr.. They decided to scrap it when they realised the USSr were making or would have to make their own.... I'm sure it was up and running (maybe a more efficient version not dumping radiation everywhere but it was easy to make it throw bits if the reactor out the exhaust)

It was this thing I referred to:

Angilion said:
The USA had one of those planned too. IIRC it was called Project Pluto. A fitting name, as Pluto was the god of the underworld, the god of death. They tested it. It worked. They binned it for being so nasty that just having it might provoke the USSR into war.

It was a missile powered by a nuclear ramjet. There's no way to make that into a commercial plane or any kind of crewed vehicle. It's main purpose was to dump multiple nuclear bombs on the USSR. Spewing radiation from the exhaust as it passed by was just an extra weapon. It was never flown, but the engine testing showed that it could have flown.

wolfie138 · 7 May 2020 at 07:00

Wuhan University! uh oh!

Quartz · 7 May 2020 at 09:33

Angilion said:
Nuclear reactors don't usually hit the ground at hundreds of miles per hour, break up tens of thousands of feet above ground or crash while taking off or landing at a busy airport.

Containment is not an issue. They drove a train into one.

Destination · 7 May 2020 at 11:08

Quartz said:
That's not actually true. The Soviets sent reactors - not RTG units - into space. And reactors don't just explode. An airplane in a crash would not irradiate a large area if the reactor broke.

The Boeing Megaton MAX would!
You bet you fallout ridden life it would

By design!

ianh · 7 May 2020 at 11:35

Quartz said:
Containment is not an issue. They drove a train into one.

Ah yes was it one of those 600mph trains, because that how fast commercial airliners can fly. Even a planes slowest take off is still faster than the train used to test "containment" and the only aircraft test was a Phantom being crashed into concrete to simulate a plane crash into a power station which survived the test and only needed 3.5m of concrete to do so, nice an lightweight material

adolf hamster · 7 May 2020 at 11:47

Quartz said:
Containment is not an issue. They drove a train into one.

Was the container they crashed a train into capable of sustaining enough power for flight?

Quartz · 7 May 2020 at 14:38

ianh said:
Ah yes was it one of those 600mph trains,

It's the energy of impact that's important.

adolf hamster · 7 May 2020 at 14:49

Quartz said:
It's the energy of impact that's important.

Indeed, did you forget the bit where kinetic energy is proportional to the square of velocity?

Quartz · 7 May 2020 at 15:59

adolf hamster said:
Indeed, did you forget the bit where kinetic energy is proportional to the square of velocity?

Of course not. Why are you assuming I did?

Eurofighter · 8 May 2020 at 10:43

By the time this thing is made they will have better batteries I think.

ianh · 8 May 2020 at 13:15

Quartz said:
Of course not. Why are you assuming I did?

I've been looking around and I can't find a reference to a train crashing into a reactor for testing, have you got a link I can read, thanks. I can find several about trains being crashed into nuclear waste containers for testing but none on reactors.

Nasher · 8 May 2020 at 13:21

Rroff said:
You generally need quite specific circumstances for a reactor to cause irradiation of note - the runaway cook off at Chernobyl doesn't easily happen by accident.

The problem is radioactive debris being scattered everywhere after a crash.

D.P. · 8 May 2020 at 13:39

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Eurofighter said:
By the time this thing is made they will have better batteries I think.

indeed, airlines are already planning on future hybrid planes with a biofuel jet engine for take off and then electric for cruise. This is actually technically feasible now, i believe easyjet was supporting an R&D project with a corporate partner. Battery tech is moving fast though so what is marginally feasible now will become much more practical in 10 years

Orionaut · 8 May 2020 at 15:02

Nasher said:
The problem is radioactive debris being scattered everywhere after a crash.

The difference between a bomb and a reactor breach is the quantity of fission fragments invilved.

A traditional Atom bomb (Hiroshima) only produces a small quantity of fission fragments. Less than A Kg

A reactor, especially one that has been running for a while, might contain hundreds of Kg of fission fragments.

An air craft reactor that was refuelled for each flight with fresh fuel would not present too much of a danger in a crash.

But doing this would lose out on most of the benefits of having a nuclear powered aircraft in the first place.