
America's Attempts to Build Nuclear-Powered Aircraft (2015) - chha
http://nationalinterest.org/feature/americas-crazy-attempts-build-nuclear-powered-aircraft-13352?page=show
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jimhefferon
> America's Crazy Attempts to Build Nuclear-Powered Aircraft

My father worked on the nuclear plane. When you asked him, it was cut off
because of crazy hippies. Jane Fonda was at fault. What would happen when it
crashed? Just be careful that it doesn't crash.

Crazy, indeed.

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pohl
That’s reminiscent of programming safety through best practices.

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tlb
It's too bad that low levels of radiation cause cancer, because otherwise you
could build all kinds of cool nuclear-powered stuff.

Obviously strong radiation will necessarily do damage. But the mechanism by
which low-level radiation causes increased mortality over decades is quite
complex, and could possibly be disrupted. There's no fundamental reason why
medicine couldn't prevent all cancers. In that case radiation will become like
most other hazards: OK as long as you limit exposure.

If so, it'll be awesome to ride around in hypersonic nuclear jets.

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gmueckl
Ionizing radiation is not selective about which molecular bonds get hit and
broken up. There is no way to deal with the potentiality resulting billions of
different molecules and their effects (the order of magnitude is probably way
to low).

It is the same thing with transmutations caused by neutron radiation. If the
proton count of the atom changes, the moecule that it is part of has to change
as well. Again, there is no way to counter all the possible results of this
process.

And finally, even if we countered the effect in humans, the wildlife would be
similarly exposed, but without any treatment to counter the effects.

Directly fission powered airplanes are simply a pipe dream.

