At the risk of this site consuming the rest of your life - welcome to the Museum of Retrotechnology entry on steam airplanes:
Been watching season 3 of “For All Mankind”?
Not only that, I recently annoyed myself by reading some books by Peter F Hamilton (the Alan Partridge of SF) featuring the same idle trope
Is that guy attempting to antagonize mega-cruise ship lines?
Get everything you’d expect from a land-based hotel… except not on land!
There was a real design for a nuclear-powered car.
As for safety, this proposed design is fusion powered so the total amount of fuel on it at any time would be a couple of grams, which would be less than a gram of tritium, which is really not dangerous if it were released into the atmosphere. Never mind that, as everyone else has pointed out, ITER is gigantic and is still many years away from fusion.
However, there other fusion approaches that also have never been demonstrated but are possibly possible, such as polywell and the stellerator and quite a few others, also including other reactions.
And this isn’t the only fusion-powered airplane concept. Lockheed Martin proposes a compact fusion reactor that would power airplanes, although they don’t go into any details about their design.
If we watch the whole video there is a clear internal view of a magnetic fusion torus at one point
I mean, if this is the same video going around 
@BakaNeko 's comment is the answer that has some footing in reality. This, however, is a retro-futuristic marketing blurb that says at about 2:05:
You don’t have to worry about SkyCruise’s carbon footprint. Its 20 electric engines are powered solely by clean nuclear energy.
So … no runway on earth would be long enough for this to take off even if it were to work, which it never could due to its ludicrous list of dumb issues, such as
- The massive weight of carrying swimming pools, an MRI machine(???), elevators, a giant glass dome, and a fusion reactor including the necessary shielding
- The sheer impossibility of maintaining a pressurized environment within that glass dome
- The idiotic double-decker-with-motors-in-between-and-below wing design that looks like it would be quite efficient at making the wings not work as wings
- The insufficiency of 20 motors - even assuming they’re much more powerful than today’s most powerful jets - to move all that weight, let alone make it take off or keep it flying
- The sheer stupidity of the “we’ll take on passengers and supplies using an elevator to a plane flying above us” and the … let’s say slight chance of disaster that brings with it
If at least this was presented as a silly SF concept, it could be kind of cool. Presenting it in the tone of this video, as if it’s actually even remotely possible, is just … ugh. No thank you.
*Chef’s kiss.
Great link!
An aspect of early attempts at powered flight that tends to get overlooked in the retelling is that steam was a really viable option at the time. That was the peak of steam technology and the very beginning of internal combustion. When crossing a technology paradigm line like that, the older technology is always a lot better because it’s the best it will ever be and the new technology is still very unrefined.
Steam engines had a much better power to weight ratio and fuel efficiency than internal combustion engines of the time. The problem, and what ultimately doomed steam for this application is that the minimum weight is higher. There’s a limit to how light you can make a steam engine, whereas an ICE can be made light even if the power to weight ratio is poor. For the Wright brothers this was one of their key innovations and also why they could barely fly any distance at all.
As for the rest of this post and thread, there seems to be a lot of people taking this seriously as a proposal and critiquing it on that basis? It’s not serious. It’s just a goofy render someone made for reddit for fun.
But … but … the higher it flys the fewer atmosphere so the fewer lift the wings provide. So bigger wings … heavier plane so need bigger wings etc. /s
Why did you do that? Anyway, thank you. Nice site.
My favorite detail in the video is that the front and rear set of wheels weren’t even drawn/modeled all in the same plane, so when it shows the plane sitting on the ground the rear wheels are supported by enormous 3-story-tall wheel chocks:
This video was clearly never meant to be a serious proposal. At all.
With this we have truly found the worst use for many interesting technologies.
I’m a monster.
