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Comment by mattkrause | Hacker News Reader

I wouldn't read a ton into this. He also has a patent on a room-temperature superconductor.

In one of his autobiographies, Richard Feynman talks about ending up with some bizarre patents on nuclear-powered aircraft. In brief, the patent office at Los Alamos went around and solicited patent ideas, though he tells it better here: https://youtu.be/rc9gwPB78lk

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The nuclear powered jet engine technically did work both the Russians and the US worked on it and had what you can call a functional prototype; however irradiating the sky wasn’t a good idea after all, it required a normal engine to take off and with the development of aerial refueling and much more efficient jet engines the loitering time you get form superheating air using a nuclear reactor instead of burning fuel just bring enough of an advantage to make up for the cost, complexity and the risk.

That said at least for the US the nuclear jet was developed into the liquid metal cooled reactors that became the first submarine nuclear reactors to be deployed https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sodium-cooled_fast_reactor

The US navy stopped using sodium reactors once the small pressurized water reactors have been developed.

If you listen to the story I posted above, it's pretty clear that Feynman's patent was issued well before that--he basically rambled off a list of nuclear <things> to the patent officer, who then ran with it.

The US army (Air Force didn’t exist then) started the Nuclear Energy for the Propulsion of Aircraft program in May of 1946, Feynman was 28 at the time however he did work on the Manhattan Project and using nuclear propulsion for submarines, aircraft and surface vessels heck even trains were things that people at Los Alamos and other labs were actively working on since the late 30’s.

So it wasn’t that much of a crazy thing to work on, heck while looking back at it I’m sure Feynman was in jest but I’m not sure it was the case when he was in his mid 20’s.

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