Déjà vu all over again
Rosatom officials’ description of the engine as “an isotopic power source for a liquid engine installation” is a fairly oblique reference to a nuclear-missile engine. But as the opposition paper Novaya Gazeta pointed out, “This is a fairly precise description of Burevestnik’s nuclear powerplant.” The Burevestnik’s propulsion is, according to Novaya Gazeta and other sources, a nuclear scramjet much like that originally envisioned for the US military’s SLAM program of the early 1960s. That effort, which aimed at building a hypersonic cruise missile capable of dropping multiple warheads while flying at low altitude, was shut down by the Kennedy administration because the weapon was seen as too provocative.
Unlike SLAM’s Tory nuclear engine, which relied on air passing directly through the nuclear core of the engine, the Burevestnik’s engine uses a liquid metal to both cool the reactor and transfer the heat to air passing through the scramjet. The US researched the use of metal and salt-cooled reactors for nuclear-powered jets and space-based nuclear reactors in the 1950s, but Russia soon took the lead, first deploying a lead-bismuth cooled reactor aboard the K-27 experimental submarine, launched in 1962.
Even with isolation of the nuclear reactor from direct contact with the air, however, the exhaust of such an engine would inevitably include some nuclear contamination—which is why Russia has been testing the Burevestnik offshore. It would be, as Novaya Gazeta described it, a “small flying Chernobyl.”
The five killed in the accident—Evgeny Koratayev, Vyacheslav Lipshev, Sergei Pichugin, Alexei Vyushin, and Vladislav Yanovsky—have been posthumously awarded unnamed state honors.
Translation of Novaya Gazeta provided by Robinson Mitchell