Відео

Fireflash...the nuclear powered airliner LOL

That is why Wikipedia exists... the Internet too! 😁 en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aircraft_Nuclear_Propulsion

In a normal jet engine, heat and pressure is generated by fuel combusting within the turbine. In a nuclear-powered plane, the reactor is off to the side and there's a loop bringing hot fluid to the air-breathing turbine to transfer heat in indirectly. This heats the air in the turbine, adding pressure and thrust.

Interesting, I guess it makes sense that you'd hear about it in the Navy, presumably for shielding right?

@@whatisnuclear I think any nuclear education program would teach about most the accidents, incidents and many early experiments. Its good to know about how things lead to what you learn and use currently. It's important to learn how a reactor works, but just as important to learn how one doesn't work haha. They are very interesting to learn about. Edit: I came back later and wrote this better:)

The film on the BORAX test also is more than slightly harrowing. So is the stuff from the (eventually) abandoned efforts for satellite thermal reactors (Atomics International SNAPSHOT). I wish I could remember which fragment of film from that same era showed two fellas in coveralls hand-loading plate fuel into a prototype reactor, bare handed.

Where'd you hear/read that?

@@whatisnuclear They made it up. Very little reactor testing has been done in regions where squirrels live. Nevermind the fact that the facilities are so large that no trees would be in proximity. If referring to testing, they certainly didn't use squirrels as organic test subjects.

@@syncade - The nuclear cowboys did lots of crazy things to find out what would happen, but not out in the woods. They did deliberately blow up a basic reactor in an open concrete trench at Santa Susana, about 40 km from downtown L.A., though.

@@whatisnuclear I think this is in reference to the Radiation Effects Facility at the Georgia Nuclear Aircraft Laboratory. They had a 10MW reactor on a hydraulic lift out in the forest and would raise it up to irradiate large airplane components on a rail car. It would inadvertently result in "instant taxidermy" of any animals in the vicinity. James Mahaffey describes this facility in detail in his book "Atomic Adventures" and there's also a video on it here: ua-cam.com/video/Cz_h6oGyGD0/v-deo.html

Now look up “Windscale” - an open circuit aircooled plutonium production reactor…

Shielding technology hasn't really improved that much since this time. Plus, today we probably wouldn't want to use highly enriched uranium so the core might have to be bigger. Just need a HUGE airplane.

@@whatisnuclearThe atomic jet engines developed from this still exist. They were originally supposed to be used in a derivative of the XB-70 Valkyrie as a cruise missile. It needed to be big to hold the navigation computer - and then integrated circuits happened (developed for the Polaris missile guidance system) and suddenly the whole thing shrank by two orders of magnitude and the final product was the conventional jet powered ACLM instead.

I can definitely think of worse ideas. As long as the reactor is designed to remain contained during a bad crash (not too hard considering we design spent fuel casks to withstand burning in jet fuel for 90 minutes), then it's not a totally outrageous proposition. That said, shielding this kind of thing in operation is probably the bigger problem. Can be done but probably needs a very huge airplane.

This was mostly done to calibrate nuclear tests from similar towers.

@@whatisnuclear The need for a very huge plane seems unavoidable. It's difficult for me to conceive of a containment system similar to dry cask storage that could be used at all for a reactor on an aircraft. The mass of the thing would be so huge it would destabilize the aircraft by radically shifting the center of gravity relative to the center of pressure and lift, necessitating VASTLY larger aircraft sizes to mitigate such effects. At that point, the need for exceedingly large runway lengths would become a serious issue drastically limiting the locations such a plane could land and take off at. In a crash, an immediate total loss of coolant accident would almost inescapably occur by definition. Engineering the core so that it didn't melt down in such a scenario would be an EXTREMELY daunting task, particularly given such a core's very high power density, necessitated by the nature of compactness dictated by the engineering constraints of fitting it into an airplane.

It’s a hard problem that was engaged because of the benefit: large aircraft that could stay aloft for years at speed, back in the days before satellites had fully come up to speed.

The Russians actually built and flew a nuclear powered version of the Tu-95. They didn’t spend as much effort on crew compartment shielding however - and that was rather detrimental to the crew’s health. The B-36 was the only American aircraft that could carry the weight.

Very cool! Any stories from back in the day?

Thank you and you're welcome!

Thanks! That pamphlet sounds super interesting. I've never seen one with transparent reactor cutaways like that. Would definitely be interested.

Thanks! I just love that people made it in the first place. I feel like this last step of digitizing it is so minor compared to all the effort it took to make the stuff and then make the film. I guess digitizing it is just a really high leverage activity. Small bit of paperwork and cpu cycles for a big benefit for everyone.

Absolutely! There's so much we can learn from these films. It would be a terrible shame for them to sit unseen in a vault until the film degrades beyond recovery. There really is something special about all the old engineering/technical films. I wish making content like that was a more common practice today.

thanks!