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If nothing else, it could be useful for portability. You can't make a solar powered aircraft carrier. You might be able to make a fusion-powered one.
by adrianmonk 8y ago
If nothing else, it could be useful for portability. You can't make a solar powered aircraft carrier. You might be able to make a fusion-powered one.
- cagenut 8y agoyou say that like its a bad thing
- mmirate 8y agoOh, it is a bad thing, very much so. The more efficiently we can maintain the U.S. Navy, the bigger we can keep it, and the less likely it is that some smaller nation will threaten the balance-of-power by pulling a competitively-sized navy out of their butts.
- pfdietz 8y agoFusion has very bad power density compared to fission, so a fusion-powered ship would be idiotic.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- imtringued 8y agoYou can always make it 10x times as big and if that is not enough then make it 10x times bigger still.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- pfdietz 8y agoYeah, let's make our ship 100x bigger for a given engine power! How could the customer paying for this POSSIBLY object? Please don't be absurd.
- gpm 8y agoFission has this radioactive waste and nuclear proliferation problem. A fission-powered ship would be idiotic if a fusion powered ship was an option.
- pfdietz 8y agoFusion has proliferation problems too. In some ways this is easier than using fusion for energy production. A Q = 0.1 DD burning reactor, for example, would be useless as a power producer, but would produce plenty of neutrons (at lower, less damaging energies) to make plutonium in a subcritical natural uranoium blanket. And it would not need to breed tritium.