A nuclear salt-water rocket (or NSWR) is a proposed type of nuclear thermal rocket designed by Robert Zubrin that would be fueled by water bearing dissolved salts of Plutonium or U235. These would be stored in tanks that would prevent a critical mass from forming by some combination of geometry or neutron absorption (for example: long tubes made out of boron in an array with considerable spacing between tubes). Thrust would be generated by nuclear fission reactions from the nuclear salts heating the water and being expelled through a nozzle. The water would serve as both a neutron moderator and propellant.
Read more about Nuclear Salt-water Rocket: Design, Advantages, Limitations
Famous quotes containing the words nuclear and/or rocket:
“American universities are organized on the principle of the nuclear rather than the extended family. Graduate students are grimly trained to be technicians rather than connoisseurs. The old German style of universal scholarship has gone.”
—Camille Paglia (b. 1947)
“Along a parabola life like a rocket flies,
Mainly in darkness, now and then on a rainbow.”
—Andrei Voznesensky (b. 1933)