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There was a study in the 50's called Project Pluto that was an air-breathing ram jet fueled by a nuclear reactor. Kinda cool, and some of the events around it were pretty nutso.

Richard Feynmen (sp? you know, the famous funny nuclear dude), while working on the really big bombs, had an idea that you could power a jet engine with a reactor. So he patented it. At that time the scientists were allowed to patent their ideas they came up with on the project. As a side note, they also got a dollar for each patent, but no one really bothered. Until Feynman found out, and demanded his dollar. Anyways, more funny mayhem ensued, which he talks about in his books.

He never really thought about the idea until Project Pluto came along independently. The scientists there found out there was a patent on the idea, much to their surprise. To they contacted who they thought was the expert, Feynman. He was surprised they contacted him and just said it was a back of the napkin patent, and he really wasn't the expert.

There's some info on Project Pluto here:
http://www.nv.doe.gov/news&pubs/publications/histo ryreports/news&views/pluto.htm

http://yarchive.net/space/exotic/project_pluto.htm l

http://www.merkle.com/pluto/

Kooky stuff...

Jason

"They use something else that works just a well, but without killing the ozone."

It is called R-134-A, and although it may be safer to the enviorment, it is not safer to you. See here or here.

You've actually hit upon a lot of the ideas in the book; you should probably try reading it, if it sounds at all interesting, you would probably enjoy it.

To clarify what happens in the book: The terrorists blow up the central portion of the space elevator, pretty much directly at the midpoint. The top half flies harmlessly into space. The bottom half, now no longer balanced by the top half, flies into the ground.

And since it's made of these insanely strong carbon tubes, it doesn't crumble or break. It's a giant tube, thousands of kilometers long, falling into the earth. (If this still doesn't sound bad, here's the right thought experiment. Imagine cutting down a tree (and arguably a tree isn't such a bad model for carbon tubules). If you've ever cut down a big tree, you know the amount of force with which it hits the earth. Now imagine that same tree, except now it extends 20Km into the sky.

For the people who are still nay-sayers: Try computing the potential energy stored within a 5kg mass 10,000 km above the earth. Now convert that to kinetic energy and figure out the ground velocity. (Given, energy will be burnt up or diminished in the atmosphere, but anything that hits will have lotsnlots of joules.) Larry Niven talks about dropping 'crowbars' (with minimal guidance/targeting) from orbit as a weapon in the book Footfall. It's actually amazing how much power such a weapon could hold. (A projective travelling at 3000 m/s has a much kinetic energy equal to its weight in high explosives.)

Deuterium IS toxic, but not by much. 1/6000 of seawater is D2O.
Drinking 100% D2O will be bad for you.
Once you hit 50% D2O in your cells they can't divide, and you get symptoms a lot like radiation poisoning or chemo.
This page talks about the toxicity of heavy water
A few drops of it probably won't do much, but I am not a toxicologist...

Read this. Especially the part about a D20 concentration of only 50% in a human would stop cell mitosis (the mechanism that is cellular reproduction).