This would get the NIMBYs up in arms:
http://www.megazone.org/ANP/
Quote:
The NEPA contract was with the Fairchild Engine & Airframe Co., and the work was conducted at Oak Ridge. By the end of 1948 the USAF had invested approximately ten million dollars in the program.[7] Extensive studies were conducted under NEPA from 1946 until 1951, at which time it was replaced by the joint Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) / USAF ANP program. The ANP program set forth the ambitious goal of full-scale development of aircraft reactor and engine systems. One of the factors that led to the creation of the ANP program was a study done at MIT by a group convened by the AEC in 1948 to look at the potential uses of atomic powered flight. "This study group, known as the Lexington Project, came to the conclusion that nuclear aircraft (manned) were likely less difficult than nuclear ramjets, which, in turn, would be less difficult than nuclear rockets to develop."[8] Ironically, this turned out to be the reverse of the proper order of difficulty, as later research and development would prove. Although nuclear ramjets, under Project Pluto, and nuclear rockets, under Project Rover, were successfully tested at the levels needed for operational use, an operational level atomic aircraft powerplant was never developed. In 1954, Raymond Clare Briant, who was then the director of the ANP Project stated that "manned nuclear aircraft pose the most difficult engineering development job yet attempted within this century."[9]
