In the first few decades after WWII, the aviation industry tried so many interesting new things. Knowledge of all the sciences led to incredible advances when applied to aviation. The unusual aircraft and missile designs reflect that application very well.
Nearly unlimited cold war v1.0 budgets helped.
A
hugely significant development
vastly more important than a nuclear powered aircraft came of it, something the Chinese are correctly spending $1 billion a year on developing... but we're not. Why?
Because money made via nuclear reactors is based on the razor/razorblade model: the main profits aren't made building reactors, but in supplying the difficult to make and proprietary custom fuel assemblies for them.
We have a native industry which makes those fuel assemblies and they don't like the revolutionary and
VASTLY safer ("walk-away safe") type of reactor which came about
FROM the airborne reactor requirements which
WE developed in the 50s and continued to develop through the 60s because it's "fuel elements" can come in 50 pound
BAGS of salts. That and the loss of training about or even knowledge
OF that technology are the reason we aren't pursuing it to the degree we should
today.
The reasons we went down the
later abandoned plutonium breeder reactor path and not the vastly safer molten fluoride salt breeder reactor path are much more complex and include a Richard Nixon political motive of giving a gift to California.
The Chinese DON'T have that native industry to resist this vastly superior reactor technology, so they sent teams over to Oak Ridge some years ago to copy everything we had on the totally unclassified technology.
Aircraft Nuclear Propulsion
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aircraft_Nuclear_Propulsion
The United States Aircraft Reactor Experiment (ARE) was a 2.5 MW thermal nuclear reactor experiment designed to attain a high power density for use as an engine in a nuclear-powered bomber. It used the molten fluoride salt NaF-ZrF4-UF4 (53-41-6 mol%) as fuel, was moderated by beryllium oxide (BeO), used liquid sodium as a secondary coolant and had a peak temperature of 860 °C. It operated for a 1000-hour cycle in 1954. It was the first molten salt reactor.
[video=youtube;tyDbq5HRs0o]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tyDbq5HRs0o[/video]
The reason given in this video about why WE abandoned this technology is a gross oversimplification:
[video=youtube;7uKwdtHQEPM]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7uKwdtHQEPM[/video]
Nuclear Experts Head to China to Test Experimental Reactors
Rules, lack of funding make it hard to try new systems in U.S.
China ready to try 4th-generation reactors to meet energy need
September 21, 2017
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/arti...s-head-to-china-to-test-experimental-reactors
Excerpt:
China is becoming the testing ground for a new breed of nuclear power stations designed to be safer and cheaper, as scientists from the U.S. and other Western nations find it difficult to raise enough money to build experimental plants at home.
China National Nuclear Power Co. this month announced a joint venture to build and operate a traveling wave reactor in Hebei province, designed by Bellevue, Washington-based TerraPower LLC, whose chairman is Microsoft Corp. founder Bill Gates. The development follows Canadas SNC-Lavalin, which has agreed to build a new recycled-fuel plant with China National Nuclear Corp. and Shanghai Electric Group, and Oak Ridge National Laboratory, which is working with the Shanghai Institute of Applied Physics on a salt-cooled system.
