[Kroem3r]

Pff. If 'molten salt' reactors are an inch closer in 10 years, I will eat my hat. The idea is only slightly more appealing than having the reactor fly around under it's own power.

What makes you think The Economist is interested in probing the nerdosphere? Would Tesla, Apple, etc., be more effective? For sure, the '... adoption is 10 years away' thing is funny. Makes me reminisce for Popular Science.

If I were to guess; they are advertising where their technological sympathies lie. It is more about managing their brand than probing an audience.

[jff]

> The idea is only slightly more appealing than having the reactor fly around under it's own power.

That was a pretty fun one: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Pluto

[Turing_Machine]

This was better:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NERVA

If we hadn't canceled it we'd be colonizing the Solar System by now.

[colechristensen]

Ahem... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convair_NB-36H

... speaking of flying nuclear reactors

[MrBuddyCasino]

Oh wow, basically its Chernobyl with wings. Don't miss this, its pure gold: http://www.merkle.com/pluto/pluto.html

Quote: "Meanwhile, at the Pentagon, Pluto's sponsors were having second thoughts about the project. Since the missile would be launched from U.S. territory and had to fly low over America's allies in order to avoid detection on its way to the Soviet Union, some military planners began to wonder if it might not be almost as much a threat to the allies. Even before it began dropping bombs on our enemies Pluto would have deafened, flattened, and irradiated our friends. (The noise level on the ground as Pluto went by overhead was expected to be about 150 decibels; by comparison, the Saturn V rocket, which sent astronauts to the moon, produced 200 decibels at full thrust.) Ruptured eardrums, of course, would have been the least of your problems if you were unlucky enough to be underneath the unshielded reactor when it went by, literally roasting chickens in the barnyard."

[politician]

I was suggesting that The Economist knows how to write link bait articles that generate views, and that this article which offers nothing new is an application of that skill.

Of course I was down-voted: HN's readership doesn't like to be told that it's a trivially exploitable source of clicks.