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Nuclear power can certainly be used on aircraft (as long as your plane is big enough), and offers one sizable advantage from the get-go--you theoretically never have to land until your fuel runs out. Even though realistically you'd want to land every few weeks to do maintenance, that's still a massive advantage.

Although both the US and Soviet Union drew up designs for nuclear aircraft and put nuclear reactors and shielding in aircraft as tests, no nuclear aircraft ever flew. Part of this is the obvious risk of a crash scattering nuclear materials everywhere, but also because the combination of nuclear submarines and ICBMs were considered to make these obsolete.

But there's one place conventional aircraft can never go where nuclear aircraft can, and that's making some truly enormous aircraft. Take a look at the Lockheed CL-1201, which would weigh over 5,000 tons and with dimensions several times the size of a Boeing 747. In theory, you could make a plane even larger, too. Over a certain size (several million pounds), nuclear aircraft have a better power-to-weight ratio than non-nuclear aircraft.

The uses of this are numerous. You could airlift hundreds of soldiers and their equipment to any point in the world within a day. You could use it as a flying command center with equipment too large/energy intensive to be mounted on smaller aircraft. You could use it as a platform for an ALBM system (an improved version of the concept of launching a Minuteman ICBM from a C-5 Galaxy as tested). Perhaps you could use it as a flying aircraft carrier, although it could only sustain a small air group (of course, being far more mobile than a comparable light carrier more than makes up for it). I like the idea of using such a massive aircraft to launch spacecraft with--it could fly over international waters at the equator, carrying a rocket to launch into space. You could no doubt design some efficient and useful launch systems with such a system.

The downsides are finding a runway where something this size could take off and land from, and realistically very few of these runways would be built. Making it a flying boat would be most realistic, since you'd have all the world's oceans to land in. Any civilian uses of such planes would likely only be above the oceans anyway.

Basically, can aircraft like the CL-1201 ever be produced? What would the effects of such aircraft existing be?
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