Indeed, lenr is no good for airplanes due to low power density and extreme cost of onboard power generators. Same argument goes also for fission powered airplanes, because high cost of fission reactor cannot compensate extremely cheap jet fuel. All plans for fission/LENR planes rely on assumption that the price of Jet fuel would increase, but this is silly assumption! Fuel/energy usually gets cheaper over time if we are looking longer trends.
As Earth is globular, there is no need for longer flight distances than ca. 20 000 km. Therefore it is very practical to produce hydrogen using LENR or solar energy and then use hydrogen as hypersonic jet fuel. Artificial photosynthesis may produce cheap hydrogen for airplanes decades before LENR is practical. However, I think that while we are waiting for cheap hydrogen, there might be a niche for hypersonic electric jets. Right now energy density of batteries must be doubled in order to electric jet engines to be economically practical. As cost performance of batteries gets better ca. 7-10 % annually, and there are promising prototypes that might suggest doubling the energy density of lithium batteries, I would estimate that first electric jet will fly commercially in early 2020's. Main benefit with electric jets is low maintenance costs compared to jet fuel driven turbofan jet engines and ability to go supersonic cheaply. Turbofan engines cannot operate supersonic and conventional jet engines are as expensive as Concorde and afterburners are not practical. Biggest drawback is low energy density of lithium batteries and hence range is limited to few thousand kilometers. There is just no physically possible better aviation technologies than hydrogen + SABRE engine. This provides ca. mach 5.5 cruising speed at 30 km, what is good enough for near term aviation. Later in 2030's we might try to develop suborbital airplanes but this technology is of course speculative. —Jouni Ps. Happy new year! Top topic for 2013 is the revolution in transportation: new generation of aviation technology and breakthrough of electric cars. Tesla Model S was the first real electric car. Also solar electricity will be big hit of the year. There will be onset investments for large scale solar electricity production. By 2020 solar electricity is the primary energy source in sunny areas such as in Australia, Greece and Arizona. On 30.12.2012, at 21.18, Ron Kita <[email protected]> wrote: > Greetings All, > > Boeing is fully aware of LENR Cold Fusion..and yet they talk about batteries: > http://phys.org/news/2012-12-sugar-volt-boeing-vision-hybrid.html > > My bet is that their electric plane never sees batteries-except for a > temporary back-up. > > Respectfully, > Ron Kita, Chiralex
