Could This be the First Nuclear Powered Airliner?

BBC ^ | 07-16-2016 | By Stephen Dowling

[Red Badger]

A supersonic airliner that flies at three times the speed of sound – and runs on nuclear fusion. Stephen Dowling investigates the challenges of making airliners run on atomic power.

It could whisk you from London Heathrow and have you stepping onto the air bridge at New York’s John F Kennedy airport just three hours later. It would take you in no small comfort – luxuriously so, if you’re in first class – at speeds approaching 2,300mph (3,680km/h), the Atlantic Ocean racing below your feet.

The Flash Falcon, looking like a spacecraft from the video game franchise Halo, is a futuristic peg to fill the hole left by the retirement of the Supersonic Concorde in 2003. No prototypes have been built though – the design so far lives only in the imagination of Spanish designer Oscar Vinals, who also designed a ‘whale-shaped’ giant airliner BBC Future profiled back in 2014.

The Flash Falcon, Vinals’ concept imagines, would carry 250 passengers at Mach 3, in an airframe more than 130ft (39 metres) longer than a Concorde and with a wingspan twice as wide. Its engines would even be able to tilt up to 20 degrees to help the aircraft take-off and land like a helicopter.

At the heart of the Flash Falcon is something even more revolutionary; Vinals' aircraft is designed to fly on nuclear power, with a fusion reactor pumping energy to its six electric engines.

“I think nuclear fusion could be the best future source to obtain great amounts of electric energy,” Vinals tells BBC Future. “At the same time, it’s ‘green’ without creating dangerous waste.

[AdmSmith]

NUCLEAR SCIENCE AND ENGINEERING: 2, 804-825 (1957)
The Aircraft Reactor Experiment-Design and Construction1

The Aircraft Reactor Experiment was designed for operation at temperatures in the region of
1500ºF (1100 K) at a power of 1-3 MWt with a fluoride-salt fuel circulating in a heterogeneous
core. The moderator was hot-pressed BeO blocks cooled by circulating sodium. The heat
produced was dissipated in water through hot liquid-to-helium-to-water heat exchange systems.
All sodium and fuel circuit components were made of Inconel fabricated by inert-gas (Heliarc)
welding. The system was heated to design temperature by means of electrical heating units
applied over all parts of the system. Instrumentation and control of the experiment were fairly
conventional. For the most part, standard instruments were modified slightly for the hightemperature
application. The reactor system was constructed and operated in a building
specifically provided for the purpose.

http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.471.8103&rep=rep1&type=pdf

[Red Badger]

I wonder if a Pebble Bed reactor could be used in cars as well as aircraft.......................