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Comment by baq | Hacker News Reader

You don’t need to rant when it’s enough to show that a few dozen airliners consume a day’s worth of a nuclear reactor power production (for some size of an airplane and a nuclear reactor; we should be accurate within an order of magnitude). Imagine every single airport needing its own huge ass power plant and you get your point across in an HN comment.

Not sure what’s the point in attacking physicists, either. They should be the first ones pointing this out and I can’t imagine one not nodding in agreement.

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His beef against physicists is likely rooted in confirmation bias. Musk has a BA in physics that some debate if he even completed, but one bad egg does not prove the rule. It would be just as easy to point out engineers who have gone on to lead dodgy enterprises but, again, a few bad eggs do not prove the rule.

His reason for attacking another group is likely to make his own group look superior. This works on the playground and in more professional situations than it really should. He might also just be airing his prejudices thoughtlessly.

Either way, it's probably going to limit the audience he reaches and invite some nasty responses. He'd do well to avoid spewing such nonsense in the future.

but the metric the OP was using was power density. nuke fuels are MUCH more energy dense than hydrocarbon fuels. but putting a reactor on each plane would probably have negative externalities.

but mixing your comment with a few others, maybe a nuke plant on the ground that cracks the co2 in the atmosphere to make carbon neutral hydrocarbon fuel.

> but putting a reactor on each plane would probably have negative externalities.

Probably? It would be a disaster every time one crashes, would carry a huge proliferation and terrorism risk. Oof.

In the 50's some countries were that crazy and they even put reactors in space. Two of which crashed and one contaminated a huge area in Canada. Luckily common sense prevailed and these things don't happen anymore. Though nuclear ships still exist, there's only a few icebreakers in the civilian fleet AFAIK.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought we still use RTGs in space on some satellites? Not counting extraterrestrial research, since those are definitely still powered by RTGs

The ones I speak of had actual reactors with moving parts. Most of them were Soviet, one was American (a research one, the soviet ones were active radar sats with a shelf life of only a few months). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/US-A (The soviets called them US-A for some weird reason, lol). There were 33 of them, 3 of which have already crashed to earth.

But yeah RTGs are very nasty stuff too. They are much easier to secure against breaking apart on re-entry though (although dropping a concentrated plutonium source into a random place is not a great idea either obviously).

I don't think any are used on current earth-orbiting sats though: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioisotope_thermoelectric_ge...

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