The First Nuclear Era is Alvin Weinberg's autobiography, the memoirs of a most influential American nuclear engineer/physicist. These reminiscences date from the dawning of the nuclear age in the early 1940s to the present. It is the story of one notable scientist's life and times and a look...
books.google.fr
I finally understood (or I think I've understood ROTFL)
There were, kind of, three different kind of nuclear engines explored by ANP
- General Electric, direct cycle
- Indirect cycle:
a) liquid metal cycle (= sodium, a bit like the later Superphenix or clinch river breeders, also Soviet attack subs)
b) circulating fluid reactor (= molten salt reactor. ARE, CFR, CFRE, Fireball...)
It essentially boiled down to a simple question:
how do you heat the air ? (instead of burning it with kerosene)
- direct cycle heated the air by passing it straight into the reactor
- indirect cycle heated the air by using some intermediate loop of hot material,
two options
a) liquid metal, sodium
b) circulating fuel (molten salt ?)
The attached document helped a little.
Seems ANP ran into three major issues
- G.E direct cycle was horrific, spewing radioactivity all over the countryside
- Indirect cycle was much more difficult to achieve
- and then it got bogged down into "WS-125A vs CAMAL" controversy.
That is
- do we want a subsonic, lumbering platform with nearly-infinite endurance
or
- do we want a XB-70 (WS-110) except with a nuclear engine. That is: an ultrafast supersonic bomber (= WS-125A)
From what Asnys told me at AH.com, seem that the state-of-the-art was on the side of the long-endurance subsonic platform (CAMAL) rather than WS-125A...
Can someone confirm if the above is correct or incorrect ?
