The next generation of small nuclear reactors still weighs in the tens of tons range and remains out of reach for flying machines. Unless the next generation of nuclear power achieves a breakthrough in light weight and safety, the dusty nuclear aircraft will be awakened then.
Hello, I’m Charlotte Hill, host of Current Affairs Military. The Weasel Factory is a Lockheed Martin project. But these planes pale in comparison to Lockheed’s proposed nuclear-powered flying carrier, the CL-1201.
The crazy idea was to build an aircraft weighing 5,265 tons. With a wingspan of 1,120 feet, it was 45 feet wider than the Chrysler Building, and it had a fuselage height of 153 feet, the equivalent of a 14-story building. The length of the fuselage is 560 feet, and the interior space of the fuselage reaches 2 million cubic feet.
This is a top-secret design known as CL-1201, proposed by Lockheed Martin in 1969. Martin proposed it in 1969. As you know, the late 1960s was a special Time, just as the Cold War was coming down to a freezing point. The U.S. enemy was scattered around the globe, and the U.S. Department of Defense believed that the U.S. was at risk of being cut off from allies and overseas bases at any time, and the military needed a solution that could drop U.S. special operations forces overseas, or wherever they were needed, in a timely manner when they were needed. To quickly drop formed task forces anywhere in the world, even carrier battle groups are not up to the task. This particular operational requirement forced the military to develop a bold vision to build a giant flying castle, which is how the CL-1201 came to be.
The military required it to be able to carry 22 F-4 Ghost-type fighters or 6,900 troops. It could cruise at Mach 0.8 at an altitude of 30,000 feet. It has unlimited range, requires no refueling and can remain in the air for 41 days. It is equipped with four huge turbofan engines that can generate 15 million pounds of thrust, which are converted to nuclear propulsion after climbing to an altitude of 16,000 feet using turbofan engines. At the center of the aircraft is a nuclear reactor with a power of 1,830 megawatts. It even has 182 vertical turbofans on its wings, which are used for short-range or vertical takeoff and landing, and are installed only to enable it to take off. It needed a crew of 845 to do all the work needed to sustain the flight.
This plan seems simply absurd today, but in the context of the times, it had its justification. Of course, the flawed tactical use and obvious technical flaws kept it on the drawing board forever. However, the idea of a nuclear-powered aircraft is like a spark that has not been extinguished in people’s minds to this day, and the development team has tasted the pain for it.
How difficult it is to make a nuclear reactor fit for flight is, I’m afraid, beyond what people can imagine. Unlike a submarine, the dead weight of an airplane is designed to be calculated by the gram, so to speak. Because the greater the dead weight of an aircraft, the smaller its payload, and when this indicator deteriorated to a certain point, the aircraft lost its practical significance. In order to shield the radiation and cooling needs, the nuclear reactor weighed thousands of tons at the time, making it unimaginable to fly such a huge heavy object. Of course, there was also the threat of nuclear radiation to people and other problems.
In fact, the concept of a nuclear aircraft was already proposed in the 1950s. In engineering, the weight of the nuclear reactor was too great to lift it into the air, and in desperation of not being able to solve the technical problems, engineers had proposed, in order to reduce the weight, to hire elderly crew members to solve the radiation problem. The reasoning was that they were old enough to die from other causes before they developed deadly cancers from nuclear radiation. Sacrificing the lives of older people to achieve a strategic nuclear strike was a form of age discrimination that existed during the Cold War and was not universally accepted.
A secret Atomic Energy Commission memo, now in the Eisenhower Presidential Library, explains the promise of nuclear flight in cautious tones. Aerial nuclear propulsion would enable planes to fly around the world; it would allow bombers to stay in the air for days and could cover any target around the world without refueling. They require only a Home base and no landing anywhere else, no aerial refueling. Keep in mind that aerial refueling is the most vulnerable time for military aircraft, and the expense of maintaining military bases overseas is astronomical.
At the time, these advantages of nuclear aircraft were tempting, but problems also arose. In addition to efficiency issues, the more important issue for nuclear power in aviation was safety. In the event of a nuclear leak in the air, contamination could quickly spread around the world. Protecting pilots from the dangers of radiation is even more difficult to address, and no one would fly an aircraft that they knew would kill them.
The advent of the intercontinental ballistic missile in the 1950s combated the idea of developing a nuclear-powered bomber. From a military perspective, nuclear aircraft became irrelevant because ICBMs avoided all the problems of manned nuclear flight. They had only one-way missions, required no refueling, and required no pilot to operate them. Without a military need for nuclear bombers, funding dried up. The Eisenhower administration concluded that the program was unnecessary, dangerous, and too costly. President John F. Kennedy canceled the program as soon as he took office. Proposals for a nuclear-powered airplane followed, all of which were shelved due to fears of radiation and lack of funding.
Today breakthroughs in nuclear energy technology seem to have rekindled the dream of a nuclear aircraft. Developments in nuclear technology have been manifested in two main areas of progress.
One is progress in micro reactor technology. bWXT, a major supplier of nuclear reactors to the U.S. Navy, will develop triple isotropic (TRISO) fuel for micro reactors, a high abundance low enriched uranium (HALEU) fuel that retains structural integrity after high temperature fission and is designed to cement the nuclear fuel inside a structure of graphite and ceramic materials that can withstand higher The fuel is designed to be cemented inside a structure of graphite and ceramic materials, which can withstand higher temperatures and prevent core meltdown, minimizing radioactive material leakage even if the structure is damaged. Safer than conventional fuels.
A typical next-generation small nuclear reactor would use highly enriched low-enriched uranium fuel with 5% to 20% enrichment, generate 200 kilowatts to 15 megawatts of power and operate for more than 10 years. Weighing no more than 40 tons, they can be transported using standard military transport vehicles, including trucks, ships and aircraft.
Once successful, military small nuclear reactor applications will be used for new concepts of weapons with extremely high energy requirements, such as naval or land-based laser weapons, electromagnetic guns, and high-power electronic warfare equipment. But the weight of the first generation of small nuclear reactors is still in the tens of tons range, so this generation of nuclear power plants is still not relevant to flying vehicles. Unless the next generation of nuclear power achieves a breakthrough in light weight and safety, the long-lost nuclear aircraft will be awakened.
Another area where progress is being made is in nuclear fusion reactions. One of the advantages of fusion reactions is that they do not have the same insurmountable radiation hazards as nuclear fission reactions. The high temperature and pressure of the sun’s core causes hydrogen and helium atoms to fuse together, thus releasing a staggering amount of energy. Scientists have attempted to replicate the physical conditions under which nuclear fusion occurs in the sun’s core, allowing deuterium and tritium to undergo fusion reactions under such conditions to capture energy.
Scientists have technically achieved the high-temperature, high-pressure environment that produces nuclear fusion. They have used beams of light to squeeze small spheres containing deuterium and tritium, compressing the spheres to 100 times the density of lead and heating them to more than 100 million degrees Celsius, higher than the temperature at the center of the sun, under conditions that allow deuterium and tritium to combine into heavier helium while releasing enormous amounts of energy. Currently, this extreme state only lasts for a few seconds, and it is hoped that it will be increased to 300 seconds by 2025. Nuclear fusion reactions still have a long way to go from theoretical experiments to practical applications, and there are still several problems to be solved along the way, such as fuel extraction, energy conversion and utilization, which still seem to be difficult to cross.
Decades ago, people kept hearing that “the era of nuclear fusion will be ushered in in just 10 years,” and these statements have become a laughing stock time and again. But now that it is being said that in 10 years mankind will have access to the energy produced by nuclear fusion, it is likely that many people will take it seriously.
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