3 ms·
"Professor Poll said an alternative to carrying nuclear reactors on aircraft would be to develop aircraft fuelled by hydrogen extracted from sea water by nuclea
by bprater 18y ago
"Professor Poll said an alternative to carrying nuclear reactors on aircraft would be to develop aircraft fuelled by hydrogen extracted from sea water by nuclear power stations." Somehow, I'd feel a bit better flying across the US knowing there wasn't a nuke reactor underneath me.
- lhorn 18y agoWell... there are hundreds of cities where people live fairly close to a reactor, with the same lethal outcome in case of failure. They live there 24/7 and you're opposed to an idea of spending at most tens of hours a year right next to one? 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.
- cstejerean 18y agoIf 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.
- ars 18y ago"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.