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Nuclear Airplane

Travis

Misanthrope of the Mountains
Travis
Joined
Mar 31, 2007
Messages
24,133
Might it be possible to use one of the new smaller reactors to generate electricity for an entirely electric turbofan or turboprop airplane?

It is just kind of a crazy idea I suddenly had and I'm sure there are good reasons no one tries it.
 
Interesting question. Does it have to carry people? Do they have to survive the trip?
 
Travis said:
Might it be possible to use one of the new smaller reactors to generate electricity for an entirely electric turbofan or turboprop airplane?

It is just kind of a crazy idea I suddenly had and I'm sure there are good reasons no one tries it.
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I'm sure better designs could be put forth than the 60 year old US military studies and programs produced, but from your verbiage I assume you aren't looking at Hafnium reactors or nuclear scramjet systems?
 
Bit of a bummer when one of these nuclear powered aircraft crashes in your backyard.
 
Imagine there had been a nuclear element to 9/11!

How many planes crash every year?
 
Wouldn't the huge amount of weight needed for radiation shielding, water tanks, ect. make a nuclear powered airplane unfeasible for the amount of power required?

I'm assuming you mean a standard fission setup where the heat from the reaction is used to boil water into steam, which then powers steam turbines? (I suppose you could just hook the steam turbine directly to a jet engine instead of a generator, or make a jet engine that's powered directly by high-pressure steam.)

But I suppose there are other options. You could take a glider and install a prop powered by a small heat engine of some kind, which in turn would be powered by a highly energetic rapidly decaying isotope, such as Actinium-255. But the problem with that is you're using a fuel that decays rapidly whether you use it or not, and even the briefest exposure to the would be lethal (much more deadly than uranium or plutonium).
 
Didn't Richard Feynmann have the patent for this ?

IIRC they experimented with this in a Convair B36.

Why not use Nuclear power on a larger scale to generate hydrogen and then burn that in conventional jet engines ? Seems a lot safer and a lot more scaleable to me
 
The Don said:
Didn't Richard Feynmann have the patent for this ?

IIRC they experimented with this in a Convair B36.

Why not use Nuclear power on a larger scale to generate hydrogen and then burn that in conventional jet engines ? Seems a lot safer and a lot more scaleable to me
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The X-6 was a prototype for the proposed fleet of USAF NB-36 bombers, it didn't fly though a modified B-36 did carry an operational reactor (and fifteen tonnes of shielding). The programme was abandoned in 1961, along with the B-72 project; a direct cycle system released to much irradiated material and an indirect cycle wasn't sufficiently powerful.
The Soviet Union has a similar project using the Tu-95. It was also abandoned.

It would be probably possible to build such an aircraft today, give advances in material science. Whether such an aircraft would have a useful role or be desirable are debatable.
 
Skwinty said:
Bit of a bummer when one of these nuclear powered aircraft crashes in your backyard.
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Been there. Depleted Uranium was used as trim ballasts in aircraft. Some of the older, still flying, planes still have them.

El-Al Flight 1682 was a Boeing 747 outfitted with DU ballasts when it crashed in an inhabited neighborhood in Amsterdam in 1992. ~150 kg of DU was not recovered. A link between health problems and the (presumably) broken down to dust and scattered DU was not established.
 
Well, if your reactor is separated from humans by enough distance, you don't need much shielding. So think of a multi-hull aircraft like the Burt Rutan carrier aircraft in which reactor is in one hull and people in the other.

Not that I think this a great idea.

I'd use nucs to make fuel as a much better way to power an aircraft with nuclear energy.
 
The Don said:
Didn't Richard Feynmann have the patent for this ?

IIRC they experimented with this in a Convair B36.

Why not use Nuclear power on a larger scale to generate hydrogen and then burn that in conventional jet engines ? Seems a lot safer and a lot more scaleable to me
Click to expand...

Hydrogen has very poor energy density, the whole craft would need to be fuel tanks- high pressure, heavy tanks.

But hmmm, liquid rocket fuel of some kind, using nuke electricity to make? There has got to be something renewable with a huge energy density. Not as hazardous as rocket fuel, because it can still use atmospheric oxygen.
 
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