3 ms·

Nuclear powered aircraft have undesirable failure modes. I may not be fair because it may not have been what you meant, but I need to address this. It wouldn'

Nuclear powered aircraft have undesirable failure modes. I may not be fair because it may not have been what you meant, but I need to address this. It wouldn't be like a nuclear bomb going off. It wouldn't even be like a nuclear power station going into meltdown. The US purposefully made a nuclear rocket go through a worst-case scenario in the 60s and it didn't permanently irradiate the desert or anything.[1] It would kill people on the ground and you would need professional clean up, but that's also the case with normal plane crashes. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_thermal_rocket#Kiwi-TNT http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_thermal_rocket#Kiwi-TNT

dredmorbius 13y ago
Scattering bits of hot reactor all over the landscape is bad enough. Add to this the tendency for aircraft to crash in two general locations: at or near airports, which is to say, in the middle of a bunch of people and/or other stuff generally considered valuable and whose preferred state is non-irradiated, or way the hell in the middle of nowhere, which is inconvenient for all and sundry to access, including radioactive contamination mop-up mod squads. Then there's the general halt-and-catch-fire problem which further compounds the general tears and frustrations concerned with dumping fissibles and decay products all over creation. Normal plane crashes tend to kill the people who are loitering around the crash site while it's busy being a crash site. They don't go for the slow lingering kill, or just the damned uncertainty that accompanies known or, well, we're not sure, maybe, maybe not, radiation exposures. The acute nature of most chemical fuel incidents means that the risks, while not insignificant, tend to be effectively mitigated often in a matter of minutes to hours. Not years or centuries.

3 ms·

Nuclear powered aircraft have undesirable failure modes. I may not be fair because it may not have been what you meant, but I need to address this. It wouldn'

by danielweber 13y ago

dredmorbius 13y ago
Scattering bits of hot reactor all over the landscape is bad enough. Add to this the tendency for aircraft to crash in two general locations: at or near airports, which is to say, in the middle of a bunch of people and/or other stuff generally considered valuable and whose preferred state is non-irradiated, or way the hell in the middle of nowhere, which is inconvenient for all and sundry to access, including radioactive contamination mop-up mod squads. Then there's the general halt-and-catch-fire problem which further compounds the general tears and frustrations concerned with dumping fissibles and decay products all over creation. Normal plane crashes tend to kill the people who are loitering around the crash site while it's busy being a crash site. They don't go for the slow lingering kill, or just the damned uncertainty that accompanies known or, well, we're not sure, maybe, maybe not, radiation exposures. The acute nature of most chemical fuel incidents means that the risks, while not insignificant, tend to be effectively mitigated often in a matter of minutes to hours. Not years or centuries.