Re: Plutonium on Next Atlas V - Bad Idea?

I used to work in nuclear litigation from the plaintiff side. My job
was to build databases to help aggregate and let the attorneys search
all of the documents discovered in cases. People have no idea of the
amount of plutonium that was spilled into the environment and how many
people, workers, residents, etc, sacrificed unknowingly their health
and their lives so that we could maintain an effective strategic
deterrent. You could probably make the argument that the entire
Columbia River system has been contaminated with plutonium and other
radioactive and poisonous systems from Hanford. There were
experimental, controlled releases, there were numerous accidents, and
bad stuff got into the environment. Same as for Rocky Flats, Fernald,
and others. At Rocky Flats, they actually had very serious fires, and,
they had some really goofy cleanup procedures. They put a bunch of
nasty stuff into the ground and put a big concrete "pad" on top of it,
but then you had earthworms and insects eating radioactive stuff and
spreading it around to the surrounding community.

All in all, even though Chernobyl has gotten a lot more publicity, even
unclassified documents show that the total amount of radioactivity
released by our nuclear weapons program was -MORE- on a nationwide
basis. Hanford alone released the same amount, just over 50 years, but
when you are talking about stuff whose halflife measures in decades at
a minimum, a few decades doesn't matter. Those of us over 30 have
strontium 90 in our teeth and the only metal they can use to make
certain geiger counters with comes from salvage from pre-1945 - all
other metal is now mildly contaminated and I think they harvest scrap
from the German High Seas Fleet that scuttled itself after World War I.

With all of that, life in the United States goes on. And for that
reason, I think that given that we can absorb a certain amount of
radioactive punishment, that we are living in a "worst case" already,
and the potential gain from nuclear powered space craft, we may as well
explore other planets. Unless you can invent a nonnuclear technology
with a specific impulse of 3000, nuclear powered spacecraft are the
only feasible way that we can truly get to Mars or to other planets -
by making the travel time measured in weeks, or months, and not years.

I support not only the use of RTGs in space, I also think it was a
mistake to cancel Prometheus and the plan to build a nuclear plant in
space, and I hope free enterprise will someday pick up the slack or
that NASA will come to its senses. Yes, we risk maybe a 1000 people
dying from an accident, but, the gain is the ability to spread
humanity, over time, to other planets, and manage the risk of human
extinction because of a catastrophic natural disaster on earth. It's
worth it.

.

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