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Comment by battery_cowboy | Hacker News Reader

I wish we had a world with zepplins ferrying people around, land trains with several gas turbine engines, and nuclear powered aircraft. I'm bored of the same Material design web sites, phones that look the same, every apartment is the same, etc. I want imagination and crazy ideas to rule the world.

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There used to be steam-powered and battery-powered cars in the early 20th Century. There was an Edison-Westinghouse war in electricity distribution.

Typically, a consensus is reached based on technical and economic limitations.

For example, nuclear-powered aircraft? You need shielding to protect the human crew. You also need a reactor that can survive a crash. That's why they use nuclear fuel for unmanned probes. There are no humans to protect, and it's a one-way trip.

Shielding is all probably doable, but still really hard and questionable. Here's a good chapter on the Human Factors of Nuclear Powered Flight: https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015001555146&vi...

It's my understanding that if not for the development of ICBMs, the US might have created cruise missiles powered by unshielded nuclear reactors. They got as far as running a prototype engine for five minutes, but the whole project became pointless when it became clear ICBMs would work.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Pluto

Russia has seemingly been developing this same sort of technology in recent years. Presumably this is in response to anti-ballistic missile technology calling into question the future effectiveness of ICBMs.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/9M730_Burevestnik

Well if it makes you feel better, the US government spent about 1 billion 1950s dollars on nuclear powered aircraft between 1949 and 1959. Some remnants can still be viewed, e.g. in the parking lot of the EBR-1 museum near Arco, ID, which usually opens around Memorial Day if you're in the Snake River Valley area.

One spin-off out of these is molten salt reactor technology, which was adapted from airplanes to power reactors in the 1960s, but died anyway, along with about a half-dozen other "crazy" reactor technologies intent on making economical nuclear power.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aircraft_Nuclear_Propulsion

If you did, you’d be bored of zeppelins and land trains.

Unfortunately, this happens because reaching a consensus helps in scaling that product/tech/design which in turn means more of that same thing.

Hold my beer..

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