Fifty Years of Space Nuclear Power - with a comment by James Oberg

[bananas]

http://www.fas.org/blog/secrecy/2011/06/space_nuclear_power.html

Fifty Years of Space Nuclear Power
June 28th, 2011 by Steven Aftergood

Fifty years ago this week, on June 29, 1961, an electrical generator driven by nuclear energy was launched into space for the first time.

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“The men and women involved in Voyager did something that is absolutely the equal of Magellan or Columbus or any of the great explorers of terrestrial discovery,” said project contributor (and FAS sponsor) Ann Druyan. She and Voyager project scientist Ed Stone offered “Perspectives on More Than 3 Decades of the Voyager Mission” (pdf) in an article by Randy Showstack in the May 10 issue of Eos, the weekly newspaper of the American Geophysical Union (scroll down to the middle of the first page).

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Unfortunately, the plutonium 238 power sources that are used to power these missions are not only expensive, they are dirty and dangerous to produce and to launch. The first launch accident (pdf) involving an RTG occurred as early as 1964 and distributed 17,000 curies of plutonium-238 around the globe, a 4% increase in the total environmental burden (measured in curies) from all plutonium isotopes (mostly fallout from atmospheric nuclear weapons testing).

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A good deal of effort has been invested to make today’s RTGs more or less impervious to the most likely launch accident scenarios. But they will be never be perfectly safe. In order to minimize the health and safety risks involved in space nuclear power while still taking advantage of the benefits it can offer for space exploration, the Federation of American Scientists years ago proposed (pdf) that nuclear power — both plutonium-fueled RTGs and uranium-fueled reactors — be used only for deep space missions and not in Earth orbit.

Although this proposal was never officially adopted, it represents the de facto policy of spacefaring nations today.

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James Oberg posted a comment there:

1. Jim Oberg Says:
June 29th, 2011 at 5:42 pm

One of the other controversial space nuclear power accidents was the loss of the Russian ‘Mars-95′ probe, as described in my 1999 article in ‘New Scientist’ linked here:
http://www.jamesoberg.com/plutonium.html

The saddest part was how the Russian government and the Clinton administration promoted the false notion — at first a mistake, and later a convenient camouflage — that the craft’s nuclear batteries had safely sunk in the deep Pacific Ocean. Much more likely was that they fell over the Atacama Desert near the Chile-Bolivia border, where local residents were never alerted to watch out for them. Political pretense may have taken a human toll, because nobody seems to have ever even looked for the hazardous objects.

Jim O