News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on Drop the Supersonic Aircraft Ban. Parent comment

Re:Drop the Supersonic Aircraft Ban by nradov on Monday June 13, 2016 @04:06PM (#11897095)
Airplanes will go nuclear, but not with onboard reactors. There is simply no way to make onboard reactors sufficiently safe, especially in a crash. Instead nuclear power plants will be used to produce synthetic hydrocarbon liquid fuel for airplanes.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Drop the Supersonic Aircraft Ban by outworlder on Monday June 13, 2016 @07:23PM (#11898581)
Are you sure there's no way? Or do you mean that's not economically sensible to do so?

RTGs are designed to survive uncontrolled reentry. I am aware that they are much simpler devices, but we are talking about containment.

There's no way to get the public to accept that though.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Drop the Supersonic Aircraft Ban by TylerE on Monday June 13, 2016 @08:36PM (#11898945)
The most powerful RTG ever flown had a power output of 3kW.

A typical commercial jet engine (on a SUBSONIC aircraft) is on the order of 50MW.

Might as well try to power an ocean-going freighter with a hand-held sterling engine.

[ Parent | on HN ]