Re:Nuclear-powered passenger aircraft 'to transport millions'
by ars on Monday October 27, 2008 @08:42PM
(#345839)
"with the same lethal outcome in case of failure"
Not so, it's a lot easier to put extra safety equipment on the ground then on an airplane.
I quite agree that parachuting the reactor is not going to work - if you were flying the thing, and you had a 50% chance of saving the plane if you had a power plant, but a 100% chance of crashing if you let it drop - would you do it?
The military is trained for such choices, civilians are not.
Re:Nuclear-powered passenger aircraft 'to transport millions'
by cstejerean on Monday October 27, 2008 @07:31PM
(#345762)
If in the event of a plane crash I die but the reactor is safely parachuted to the ground I'm going to be pretty unhappy.
The biggest issue is radioactive contamination in case of an ordinary plane crash, and parachuting a reactor doesn't sound like especially convincing solution: when planes crash, it is usually because a lot of things go wrong onboard, with parachuting system possibly being one of them.
I think we'll be much better off investing into development of new generation of speed trains: they can easily be made electric (thus taking advantage of cheap nuclear energy), riding on electro-magnetic fields friction-free at crazy speeds.