Nuclear airoplane

I used to be friends with an american business man who also used to be a government contractor, anyway we got talking about different projects he had worked on and/or heard about officially.He told me that the US have active nuclear planes that are used to stay in the air for very long periods of time kind of like a nuclear sub,he didnt go into detail and of course i dont have any proof.Presumably though it must have been a sealed system that turned a generator or something of that kind to power props or turbines.I believe it would be fairly easy to build and want to know if anybody has heard anything on this subject.

Too much mass would be required for the shielding if the plane was flown by humans...
On the other hand, for unmanned aircraft, it's very plausible

Maybe it was something from this article that was recently in Popular Mechanics.

www.popularmechanics.com...

After more than six decades of research, the first atom-powered airplane is cleared for takeoff. Although details of the project remain classified, a description of this remarkable aircraft has begun to emerge from technical conferences and declassified engineering studies. The plane will be both familiar and unique. Familiar in that it will resemble a Northrop Grumman Global Hawk, the bulbous-nosed unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) that the U.S. Air Force has used to track enemy movements in Afghanistan and Iraq. Unique because its nuclear reactor is unlike any other. Rather than split heavy elements or fuse light atoms--as in fission and fusion reactors--it will use what is known as a triggered isomer reaction. If this new powerplant, called a quantum nucleonic reactor, performs as scientists expect, its effect on the aircraft industry may prove as revolutionary as the introduction of the jet engine.

Large illustration

well the TR3B is supposedly nucleur powered but its probably BS.

They did fit a B-36 with a nuclear reactor in the aft bomb bay as a pure test to see if it was possible to shield the crew from the radiation and see if the reaction was controllable midair. The aircraft [a href='http://www.wpafb.af.mil/museum/research/bombers/b3-84.htm']made 47 flights[/a], and was made public in 1955.

There were two methods of nuclear propulsion put forward to the USAF, and both were eventually rejected.

The first method involved passing the airflow from the intakes directly through the reactor core, and this was rejected due to the amount of radioactivity that would be present in the resulting heated air.

The second method involved heating a liquid metal solution which then had the airflow passed around it in heating element style. This was rejected because it was far too complicated for two crewmen to handle. (This is also the method in which most nuclear power stations around the world generate electricity)

The only "efficient" way to power an aircraft using nuclear means was found to be a plasma flow system. Basically this is done by charging the air at the leading edge of the wing, and passing an electric charge back over the upper side of the wing, front to back. This causes air movement over hte wing, creating lift. Unfortunately this only worked on very small models in the lab, tho they could have perfected this in the past 10 years.

[edit on 6-7-2004 by RichP]

Originally posted by ufo3
He told me that the US have active nuclear planes that are used to stay in the air for very long periods of time kind of like a nuclear sub,he didnt go into detail and of course i dont have any proof.

Non of them ever flew, but several got beyond the design board. These was an airborn test of a reactor abord a b-36, but it was never used for propulsion. See my thread on Project Pluto which would have created a nuc powered ramjet cruise missile. The Russians also looked at a variety of concepts as well.

Well the Global Hawk is not really powered by a nuclear reactor. It's powered by a type of Quantum battery.

A solar cell or engine-mounted generator sends electricity to run a small X-ray machine. The X-rays strike a block of hafnium-178, triggering a drop in the energy levels within the nucleus of the hafnium atoms. This change in energy levels is accompanied by the release of a burst of gamma radiation.

If this concept works as well as I think it will, we could have a whole new era of space flight on our hands(Doesn't that sound familiar). BTW I have also read somwhere that this type of reaction produces 60x more energy coming out then is used to trigger a drop in hafnium178 energy levels. Can anyone confirm this?

Here are some more links on the subject..
www.spacedaily.com...
www.newscientist.com...

Originally posted by sardion2000
Well the Global Hawk is not really powered by a nuclear reactor. It's powered by a type of Quantum battery.

A solar cell or engine-mounted generator sends electricity to run a small X-ray machine. The X-rays strike a block of hafnium-178, triggering a drop in the energy levels within the nucleus of the hafnium atoms. This change in energy levels is accompanied by the release of a burst of gamma radiation.

If this concept works as well as I think it will, we could have a whole new era of space flight on our hands(Doesn't that sound familiar). BTW I have also read somwhere that this type of reaction produces 60x more energy coming out then is used to trigger a drop in hafnium178 energy levels. Can anyone confirm this?

Here are some more links on the subject..
www.spacedaily.com...
www.newscientist.com...

That is a nuclear reactor, theres nothing 'quantum' about it. A nuclear reactor isnt just a uranium/plutomium powered thing, its something that encompassed anything involving directly manipulating an atomic core or subatomic particles for purposes of drawing energy.

BTW, what you quoted is a type of RTG (Radioisotopic
Thermoelectric Generator - something that produces electricity or another form of usable energy directly from the decay of an element without a classic nuclear reaction going on, in this case its forced. The 'energy drop followed by a gamma ray burst' is the other way round, the energy drop is because of the burst.) and is in wide usage today (the Cassini saturn probe has more than one RTG on board, tho of a different type)

Id like to add that the error on the 'quantum' battery wasnt on the part of sardion2000, but rather the common source those two articles came from (probably AP or some agency like that), who seemed to have 'embelished' the facts somewhat

[edit on 6-7-2004 by RichP]

I did see a program on the History Channel that the US gov did testing on a nuke power plant for aircraft or for IBM. The engine was built and tested in the Southwesten US at some secret base.

The engine was loaded with fuel in a secure building and then trucked by rail using a remote controled locomotive.

And I also remember that these engineers had to borrow the worlds largest air compressor from the US navy to fill a series of pipes which was about the size of a foot ball field.

Then the engine was unloaded by remote controled arms and attached to a concrete encasement and then test fired the engine.

I remember the honey combed exhaust ports that were used, they were running so hot the engineers were concerened they would melt and cook the whole engine, so they filmed the exhaust of the atomic engine and compaired the exhaust colors to known photo temps to ensure they were not going to melt.

And the engine did work, the engineers considered flying the engine using a tether and fly the craft around in a circle, but the engineers were worried that the craft would break loose and fly over LA or Las Vegas leaving a toxic exhaust trail where ever it flew.

The atomic engine was scrapped at about the same time ICMB came on line in the US, so the engine never did fly but was proved it could work.

I will do a search on this and try to find a link to this engine, it was really impressive.

john

Well nuke powered aircraft can stay in the air with no need to refuel but if it crashes dose the reactor shut down or do we have a nuclear spill on the ground I think the only real use for this type of thing is long space journeys cuts down the cost of fuel and room for the fuel also for UCAVs like someone said no shield for the human and they can remain in the air observing something for very long time.

It wouldnt surprise me if the US used this kind of thing in the cold war for fast deployment of nukes ,a nuclear plane could stay airbourne for weeks or even months just waiting for the order to strike.Of course it would never be made public due to extreme public outrage ,but does that really mean the gov wouldnt do it?

Originally posted by ufo3
It wouldnt surprise me if the US used this kind of thing in the cold war for fast deployment of nukes ,a nuclear plane could stay airbourne for weeks or even months just waiting for the order to strike.Of course it would never be made public due to extreme public outrage ,but does that really mean the gov wouldnt do it?

They looked at it in a b-36 but the shielding requirements for the crew were outrageous.


The nuc concept was explored in project Pluto a nuclear powered ramjet / cruise missile. Mach 3 at sealevel!!!

Originally posted by WestPoint23
Well nuke powered aircraft can stay in the air with no need to refuel but if it crashes dose the reactor shut down or do we have a nuclear spill on the ground I think the only real use for this type of thing is long space journeys cuts down the cost of fuel and room for the fuel also for UCAVs like someone said no shield for the human and they can remain in the air observing something for very long time.

NASA and the Russian space agency can and have built reactor containment vessles (for satalites that used nuclear reactors as power source) that can withstand the full heat of reentry (indeed there is one report of a NASA one that came out so well preserved by its containment shell that it was dusted off and reused in another satalite.)

Building a containment vessle for this type of reactor wouldnt be that hard, just weight costly.

I did a thread on this very topic a while back, I was kinda surprised that it fell through the cracks

www.abovetopsecret.com...

There was some talk about an Atomic powered aircraft that use Quantum Nucleonics as propulsion. A professor here in DFW found a way to produce gamma rays by frying a heavy element known as Hafnium with X-rays. I think it would be a neat excursion for some ATS'ers here in Dallas/Fort Worth to look into this, and maybe even the Supercollider remains now that I think about it.

originally posted by: FredT


Non of them ever flew, but several got beyond the design board. These was an airborn test of a reactor abord a b-36, but it was never used for propulsion. See my thread on Project Pluto which would have created a nuc powered ramjet cruise missile. The Russians also looked at a variety of concepts as well.

The B-36 fitted with an airborne nuclear reactor was designated NB-36H, and Convair in 1951 was awarded a contract in 1951 to convert two B-36s to an experimental nuclear-powered aircraft, designated X-6. However, the X-6 was shelved shortly before the start of flight tests of the NB-36H due to budget restrictions.

The Soviet nuclear-powered aircraft concepts you mention included Tupolev '120' and '132', but also the Myasishchev M-60, and the Tupolev Design Bureau had one Tu-95 'Bear' modified to carry an airborne nuclear reactor, giving it the designation Tu-95LAL (LAL=flying atomic laboratory). The Tu-95LAL made several flights in 1961, but the shielding used for this aircraft was not as efficient as that used for the NB-36H, and a few crewmembers who flew the Tu-95LAL were irradiated and died a few years later. An experimental nuclear-powered aircraft based on the Tu-95 was proposed as the '119', which would have the inboard NK-12 turboprops replaced by two nuclear-powered NK-14 turboprops fueled by a nuclear reactor, but like the X-6 it was not built. Two Antonov An-22 turboprop airlifters were tested in the early 1970s with airborne nuclear reactors to test the viability of a proposed nuclear-powered An-22 for the anti-submarine warfare role, the An-22PLO, but the An-22PLO also was not built.

Links:
web.archive.org...://aviation-history.com/articles/nuke-bombers.htm
jpcolliat.free.fr...
testpilot.ru...