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WORD COUNT
652
OCTOBER 4, 2006
NASA FINALLY ADMITS
PLUTONIUM DANGERS – by Karl Grossman
For years, the
National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) said it couldn’t be
done. Beyond the orbit of Mars, NASA said, solar energy could not be
used to generate electricity for onboard power on space missions.
So the agency used
the extremely dangerous nuclear substance, plutonium, as fuel in
electric generating systems—and people on Earth were put at great risk
in the event of an accident.
For instance, in
1997, NASA launched its Cassini plutonium-fueled space probe and in 1999
had Cassini hurtle back at Earth in a “slingshot maneuver” to increase
its velocity so it could get to Saturn. If there was what NASA called an
“inadvertent reentry” of Cassini into the Earth’s atmosphere during the
“slingshot maneuver” just a few hundred miles up, it would disintegrate
and “5 billion…of the world population…could receive 99 percent or more
of the radiation exposure,” NASA admitted in its “Final Environmental
Impact Statement for the Cassini Mission.”
Premature deaths from
a Cassini accident were put by Dr. Ernest Sternglass, professor emeritus
of radiological physics at the University of Pittsburgh School of
Medicine, at 20 million to 40 million.
And this is not a
sky-is-falling story. Of 28 U.S. space missions using plutonium, there
have been three accidents, the worst in 1964 in which a
plutonium-powered satellite fell back to Earth, breaking up and
spreading the toxic radioactive substance widely. Dr. John Gofman,
professor emeritus of medical physics at the University of California at
Berkeley, has long connected that accident to a lung cancer increase on
earth.
That caused NASA to
develop solar power for satellites—and today all satellites (and the
International Space Station) are energized by solar panels. But insisted
NASA, in deep space, sunlight is too weak and solar energy could not
work; only plutonium could.
Now the leading space
industry trade magazine, “Aviation Week & Space Technology,” reveals
that solar energy is to be used by NASA to substitute for nuclear power
in deep space. The recent article began:
“Budget and technical
realities have led NASA to put its once-ambitious space nuclear power
plans on a slow track, but development in solar power generation should
allow new scientific probes beyond Mars to operate without nuclear
energy. The U.S. space agency is already planning a solar-powered
mission to study the atmosphere of Jupiter, and has looked at sending
probes as deep into space as Neptune using only the Sun’s energy for
spacecraft and instrument power…It is all but certain the next U.S.
deep-space missions will be solar-powered.”
The piece went on
describe the new giant solar energy systems that will be used to harvest
solar energy at record efficiencies vast distances from the Sun.
Bruce Gagnon,
coordinator of the Global Network Against Weapons & Nuclear Power in
Space, comments that “for years NASA said that the Global Network didn't
know what we were talking about when it came to solar power working in
deep space. Now NASA is planning to do what we've been saying all along
it could do. It just goes to show that if you are willing to stay on-top
of an issue for a long time that something good can come from your hard
work."
Jeremy Maxand,
executive director of the Snake River Alliance, an Idaho group that’s
been challenging the use of Idaho National Laboratory to produce
plutonium for space power systems, says, “It’s good to see plutonium
space batteries following in the steps of the now demoted planet Pluto.
We've said since day one that plutonium is unnecessary and dangerous,
and that we can do the same job a better way, and now we're seeing what
that better way is—solar."
What’s to happen in
space is what should also happen on Earth. The Bush administration and
nuclear industry are pushing for a “revival” of nuclear power.
We don’t need to take
the enormous risk of building new nuclear plants—or having nuclear
poisons over our heads. Safe energy technologies are here.
--
Karl Grossman,
professor of journalism at the State University of New York/College at
Old Westbury, is the author of “The Wrong Stuff” (Common Courage Press)
and narrator of the TV documentary “Nukes In Space” (www.envirovideo.com).
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