I mean, sure, people would freak about a flying reactor, if only on principle. But that sort of thing dies down with time.
/me starts hunting for weights of marine nuclear reactors
In the 1950s, both the US and USSR did some fairly extensive research into nuclear-powered aircraft, culminating in flight tests by a US NB-36H carrying an operational 3 MW air-cooled nuclear reactor and a Soviet Tu-119 with a reactor powering two of its engines. The US had progressed quite far in developing nuclear-powered engines, culminating in Heat Transfer Reactor Experiment-3 (HTRE-3), but the project was cancelled in 1961 before it could go much further, with the Soviet project being cancelled soon afterwards. [1]
The program didn't solve all the problems that nuclear-powered aircraft could case, such as escaped radiation after crashes, but it did prove that crew shielding could be done safely at a low-enough weight that the concept remained feasible.
Scientific American featured an article [2] a couple of years ago about some people's recent calls to resurrect the idea for commercial use. But the inherent safety risks remain a big issue.
It's probably an inevitable development at some point, once the core problems have been solved. And with a new generation of high-temperature reactors emerging, such as South Africa's Pebble Bed Modular Reactor, we may see reactors that are ideally suited to this sort of thing coming through.
[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_aircraft
[2]http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=nuclear-pow...
And oops ^^; should've checked for "nuclear aircraft" on wikipedia first. I dove into details without hunting for attempts first. Thanks for the summary!
Surely we can make a bigger plane, especially if the power output of these things is enough to significantly increase the power of the engines, meaning the plane won't have to be as light (I'm thinking a flying-wing plane). Though does anyone know what the approx. power of those engines might be?
[1] : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antonov_An-225 [2] : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SSTAR