Most importantly, the reactor did not catch fire, as some nervous Atomic Energy Commission officials had worried it would.”īut as Herken tells it, Washington was already beginning to cool to the idea of a nuclear-powered cruise missile. But the test was deemed a complete success. In a 1990 article for Air and Space Magazine, Gregg Herken writes that “the Tory-IIA ran for only a few seconds, and at merely a fraction of its rated power. But they wouldn’t be able to fly it, not yet, since it was potentially a nuclear bomb. On May 14, 1961, they tested it at an 8-square-mile facility in a desolate area of Nevada called Jackass Flats. Four years later, after much experimentation with different materials and the careful assembly of 500,000 small fuel rods, they had an engine called Tory-IIA. Undaunted, the lab went to work creating a 500-megawatt reactor that could operate at 2,500 degrees Fahrenheit. “Since in principle such ramjet power plants can operate from sea level to quite high altitudes, rather large ‘gust loadings’ must be anticipated,” he wrote. Then there were the inertial stresses of flight. Next in order: to transfer heat from the fuel to the air stream, there must be a temperature drop in the fuel-bearing materials and, for typical ceramics and power densities that would be of interest for possible missile applications, stresses of many thousand psi result as a consequence of these temperature differences.” “When concentrated at various support points, it contributes loads like thousands of psi. “There are the stresses associated with the pressure drop through the 'reactor' and, as indicated earlier, this stress is of the order of hundreds of psi when spread over the entire reactor,” Merkle wrote. Putting one in a cruise missile would require a design that could withstand three types of stress that no previous reactor had needed to endure. The biggest challenge: nuclear reactors are fragile things. Powered into the sky atop a conventional rocket booster, the ramjet would compress incoming air in a uniquely shaped chamber, superheat it with a small nuclear reactor, and expel it as exhaust, propelling the missile almost three times faster than sound. Like the makers of Skyfall, Merkle decided on a ramjet design. In 1959, Merkle reported to the Air Force on the feasibility of the project, noting a number of enormous technical challenges but also “some interesting and exciting possibilities to discuss.” The work proceeded at the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory (today, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory), in Berkeley, California, under the supervision of Charles “Ted” Merkle, a hard-driving physicist. Air Force and the Atomic Energy Commission launched Project Pluto to build the Supersonic Low-Altitude Missile. A missile powered by a small nuclear reactor could cruise about its target for days, giving it a wide range of potential targets it could strike upon command. Nuclear-powered cruise missiles, the Pentagon concluded, are a bad idea.īut the concept still appeals to Vladimir Putin, who last year revealed his pursuit of an “unlimited-range” missile that Russia calls the 9M730 Burevestnik (Storm Petrel) and which NATO has dubbed the SSC-X-9 Skyfall. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, the United States pursued a less advanced version of a similar technology but abandoned the effort before ever launching an actual test vehicle. “We have similar, though more advanced, technology,” he said. When President Donald Trump heard that Russia’s experimental nuclear-powered cruise missile had exploded, killing seven scientists and causing a major radiological incident less than 300 miles from the Finnish border, he fired off a boastful tweet.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply.AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |