At 04:27 PM 12/31/2012, Jed Rothwell wrote:
Fission reactor airplane engines were developed in the 1950s. See
chapter 18 of my book, and also:
<http://www.aviation-history.com/articles/nuke-american.htm>http://www.aviation-history.com/articles/nuke-american.htm
Half a billion dollars. What were they thinking?
Furthermore, you can make the cold fusion engine heavy and large,
because the mass of fuel is so small.
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.
Cold fusion will be orders of magnitude cheaper than jet fuel.
Well, depends on the jet fuel and the cold fusion technique. I'd not
care to bet on which way we'd go.
CF -- or any energy technology -- can be used to make hydrogen, which
burns totally cleanly. What's the problem being solved here?
The nuclear aircraft used a reactor for a very hot process, heating
air, basically. Cold fusion may not run at temperatures like that. In
any case, the question is how the reactor converts heat to aircraft motion.
It might be simpler to make hydrogen as fuel, by electrolysis,
leaving the apparatus for that on the ground. Or not. I assume we'll
figure it out if and when we know more.
