We Need Nuclear-Powered Airplanes, Not Solar-Powered Ones

Making liquid fuels from low-carbon sources is better than mounting solar panels on planes.

It’s being billed as a triumph for solar power, but the Solar Impulse solar-powered airplane could also be seen as an illustration of just how amazing liquid fuels like jet fuel are, and how far solar power and battery technology would need to go to challenge them. A far better idea than solar-powered flight is nuclear-powered flight, although I don’t mean putting nuclear reactors on airplanes as the U.S. government once proposed (see these two pdfs). Let’s use fission to make low-carbon fuel.