Mach 1.5 Nuclear Powered Bomber

A design reported on by Aircraft Nuclear Propulsion project staff at Oak RidgeNational Laboratory in mid 1952. The report dealt with the reactor program, not the airframe, so there’s limited data… including who designed the thing. Could be an in-house Oak Ridge design, it might be a Fairchild NEPA design. There is even limited technical data on the design. No dimensions are given, but they can probabaly be estimated based on a few snippets:

Gross weight: ~350,000 pounds

Wing loading: 70 lb/sq.foot

Reactor-to-crew separation: 120 feet

Crew compartment: 4.5X5.5X12 feet

Thrust at takeoff was to be 155,000 pounds, using six turbojets clustered around a single 350 megawatt beryllium oxide moderated circulating fuel reactor.

Note that the geometry of the aircraft is *really* simple… lots of straight lines, sharp corners and simple circular structures. This was pretty common among early “NEPA”-era nuclear aircraft designs. But by 1956 or so, contractors were producing nuclear powered aircraft concepts of far greater sophistication, which would have been difficult to tell from conventionally-powered (albeit advanced and exotic) aircraft design concepts.