DATE                          11/07/24

TIME:                          4:00pm

LOCATION:              31-270

SPEAKER:                Dr. Jake Hecla

TOPIC:                       A New Look at Air-Breathing Nuclear Propulsion

ABSTRACT:

The nuclear-powered airplane is more often a punchline than a topic of serious discussion. Considered by some to be the pinnacle of Cold War military extravagance, air-breathing nuclear propulsion is often portrayed as a case of technical ambitions running far ahead of material reality. While nuclear aircraft failed to take flight during the 1960s, many of the technological barriers to compact, lightweight nuclear power systems have eroded. In 2018, Russia announced the development of the Burevestnik, allegedly a nuclear-powered, nuclear-armed cruise missile. In 2019, a failed flight test of the system killed at least five Rosatom scientists, and released a cloud of fission products detected at the Norwegian border. In this presentation, I describe the results of an open-source reverse-engineering effort targeting this system, and I explore the possible future of nuclear-powered flight.

BIO:

Dr. Hecla is a Stanton Nuclear Security Fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His research interests include nuclear thermal propulsion, micro-reactors, and advanced radiation detection techniques. 

As a PhD candidate, he worked with the Rare Event Detection group at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. There, he developed diagnostic tools for antineutrino detectors, and analysed antineutrino-based reactor monitoring schemes.

Prior to this work, he developed algorithms for radiation mapping systems, and led a project to perform detailed mapping of the radiation environment in the Chornobyl Exclusion Zone. Hecla holds a PhD and MS in nuclear engineering from the University of California, Berkeley and a BS in nuclear science and engineering from MIT.