World Nuclear News, the information arm of the World Nuclear Association that seeks to boost the use of atomic energy, last week heralded a NASA Mars rover slated to land on Mars on Monday, the first Mars rover fueled with plutonium.
"A new era of space exploration is dawning through the application of nuclear energy for rovers on Mars and the Moon, power generation at future bases on the surfaces of both and soon for rockets that enable interplanetary travel," began a dispatch from World Nuclear News. It was headed: "Nuclear 'a stepping stone' to space exploration."
In fact, in space as on Earth there are safe, clean alternatives to nuclear power. Indeed, right now a NASA space probe energized by solar energy is on its way to Jupiter, a mission which for years NASA claimed could not be accomplished without nuclear power providing onboard electricity. Solar propulsion of spacecraft has begun. And scientists, including those at NASA, have been working on using solar energy and other safe power sources for human colonies on Mars and the moon.
The World Nuclear Association describes itself as "representing the people and organizations of the global nuclear profession."
In its July 27 dispatch, World Nuclear News noted that the Mars rover that NASA calls Curiosity and intends to land on August 6, is "powered by a large radioisotope thermal generator instead of solar cells" as previous NASA Mars rovers had been. It is fueled with 10.6 pounds of plutonium.
"Next year," World Nuclear News continued, "China is to launch a rover for the Moon" that also will be "powered by a nuclear battery." And "most significant of all" in terms of nuclear power in space, it went on, "could be the Russian project for a 'megawatt-class' nuclear-powered rocket." It cited Anatoly Koroteev, chief of Russia's Keldysh Research Centre, as saying the system being developed could provide "thrust ... 20 times that of current chemical rockets, enabling heavier craft with greater capabilities to travel further and faster than ever before." There would be a "launch in 2018."
The problem -- a huge one and not mentioned whatsoever by World Nuclear News -- involves accidents with space nuclear power systems releasing radioactivity impacting on people and other life on Earth. That has already happened. With more space nuclear operations, more atomic mishaps would be ahead.
NASA, before last November's launch of Curiosity, acknowledged that if the rocket lofting it exploded at launch in Florida, plutonium could be released affecting an area as far as 62 miles away -- which includes Orlando. Further, if the rocket didn't break out of the Earth's gravitational field, it and the rover would fall back into the atmosphere and break up, potentially releasing plutonium over a massive area. In its Final Environmental Impact Statement for the mission, NASA said in this situation plutonium could impact on "Earth surfaces between approximately 28-degrees north latitude and 28-degrees south latitude." That includes Central America and much of South America, Asia, Africa and Australia.
The EIS said the costs of decontamination of plutonium in areas would be $267 million for each square mile of farmland and $1.5 billion for each square mile of "mixed-use urban areas." The Curiosity mission itself, because of $900 million in cost overruns, now has a price of $2.5 billion.
NASA set the odds very low for a plutonium release for Curiosity. The EIS said "overall" on the mission, the likelihood of plutonium being released was 1 in 220.
Bruce Gagnon, coordinator of the Global Network Against Weapons & Nuclear Power in Space, which has for more than 20 years been the leading opposition group to space nuclear missions, declared that "NASA sadly appears committed to maintaining its dangerous alliance with the nuclear industry. Both entities view space as a new market for the deadly plutonium fuel. ... Have we not learned anything from Chernobyl and Fukushima?"
Plutonium has long been described as the most lethal radioactive substance. And the plutonium isotope used in the space nuclear program, and on the Curiosity rover, is significantly more radioactive than the type of plutonium used as fuel in nuclear weapons or built up as a waste product in nuclear power plants. It is Plutonium-238 as distinct from Plutonium-239. Plutonium-238 has a far shorter half-life -- 87.7 years compared to Plutonium-239 with a half-life of 24,110 years. An isotope's half-life is the period in which half of its radioactivity is expended.
Dr. Arjun Makhijani, a nuclear physicist and president of the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research, explains that Plutonium-238 "is about 270 times more radioactive than Plutonium-239 per unit of weight."
Thus in radioactivity, the 10.6 pounds of Plutonium-238 being used on Curiosity is the equivalent of 2,862 pounds of Plutonium-239. The atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki used about 14 pounds of Plutonium-239.
The far shorter half-life of Plutonium-238 compared to Plutonium-239 results in it being extremely hot. This heat is translated in a radioisotope thermoelectric generator into electricity.
There hasn't been an accident on the Curiosity mission. But the EIS acknowledged that there have been mishaps previously -- in this spaceborne game of nuclear Russian roulette. Of the 26 earlier U.S. space missions that have used plutonium listed in the EIS, three underwent accidents, it admitted. The worst occurred in 1964 and involved, it noted, the SNAP-9A plutonium system aboard a satellite that failed to achieve orbit and dropped to Earth, disintegrating as it fell. The 2.1 pounds of Plutonium-238 fuel onboard dispersed widely over the Earth. Dr. John Gofman, professor of medical physics at the University of California at Berkeley, long linked this accident to an increase in global lung cancer. With the SNAP-9A accident, NASA switched to solar energy on satellites.
The worst accident of several involving a Soviet or Russian nuclear space systems was the fall from orbit in 1978 of the Cosmos 954 satellite powered by a nuclear reactor. It also broke up in the atmosphere as it fell, spreading radioactive debris over 77,000 square miles of the Northwest Territories of Canada.
Initiatives in recent years to power spacecraft safely and cleanly include the launch by NASA last August 8 of a solar-powered space probe it calls Juno to Jupiter. NASA's Juno website currently reports: "The spacecraft is in excellent health and is operating nominally." It is flying at 35,200 miles per hour and is to reach Jupiter in 2016. Even at Jupiter, "nearly 500 million miles from the Sun," notes NASA, its solar panels will be providing electricity. Waves Solar power has also begun to be utilized to propel spacecraft through the friction-less vacuum of space. The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency in 2010 launched what it termed a "space yacht" called Ikaros which got "propulsion from the pressure of sunlight particles bouncing off its sail."
As to power for colonies on Mars and the moon, on Mars, not only the sun is considered as a power source but also energy from the Martian winds. And, on the moon, as The Daily Galaxy has reported:
"NASA is eying the Moon's south polar region as a possible site for future outposts. ... NASA's lunar architects are also looking for what they call 'peaks of eternal light' -- polar mountains where the sun never sets, which might be a perfect settings for a solar power station."
Still, the pressure by promoters of nuclear energy on NASA and space agencies around the world to use atomic energy in space is intense -- as is the drive of nuclear promoters on governments and the public for atomic energy on Earth.
Critically, nuclear power systems for space use must be fabricated on Earth -- with all the dangers that involves, and launched from Earth -- with all the dangers that involves (one out of 100 rockets destruct on launch), and are subject to falling back to Earth and raining deadly radioactivity on human beings and other life on this planet.
William Bradley: The New Space Era Takes Big Steps Forward
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Come on, Karl. If you live on land, you are inhaling and exhaling a far more dangerous radionuclide every minute of every day. It's called Radon, and it's all natural.
Operating the instruments on this rover would have required a solar array of undeliverable proportions.
Nothing is achieved without risk, Karl.
Your entropic vision does not inspire. I, for one, refuse to believe that humanity's future constitutes squatting on this little blue ball, placidly conserving our way to extinction.
It's interesting to note Mr. Grossman's deliberate ommission of two facts conveniently left out of his story:
-- The May 1968 launch of the Nimbus B-1 weather satellite from Vandenberg AFB aboard an Atlas launch vehicle that was aborted shortly after launch -- a so-called "Challenger"-type event as the vehicle was blown up. Its RTG contained the plutonium fuel as designed. The fuel container was retrieved intact from the bottom of the Santa Barbara Channel after it impacted the Pacific Ocean from a similar height as Challenger in 1996. The fuel within the container was used on a subsequent mission (Nimbus III).
-- An RTG intended to operate science instruments on the surface of the moon as part of Apollo 13 returned to Earth in April 1970 following its aborted mission. "Aquarius," the lunar module portion of Apollo 13 was used successfully as a lifeboat for the three astronauts following damage to their command module (unrelated to the RTG) while they were on the way to the moon. Following the astronauts' safe return, "Aquarius" was cast off, along with the RTG as it re-entered the Earth's atmosphere and fell into deep water in Pacific Ocean. No release of radiation from this incident has ever been detected.
3 micron particles are considered the limit of inhalability.
A 1 micron particle ingested will expose 800 cells to over a million grays, over 20 million Severts.
Here's the calculation for the tech types.
Pu239 since that';s the most common Pu waste product.
The LET for an 5Mev Alpha in flesh is about 90keV per um.
So the total range is about 56 um.
The average cell is about 10um.
So the numbers of affected cells is about 750.
A micron size Pu239 particle has about 40 decays per sec.
About 8e-13 Joules per Decay
7.5e-10 kg cells in range
.043 Grays per sec
155 Grays per hour
1.3e6 grays per year.
Normally Alpha is given a BER of 20, so that's 20M severts per year.
Not hard to see how that might cause cancer, is it?
You know you can't measure a 1% increase in cancer deaths, so you keep harping on mensurable as if that proved, not happening.
The individual components are designed by different groups - those may have RHUs and indeed seem to. As a rule though I dont think they crash anythign like that. But we will see.
http://www.muller.lbl.gov/pages/PlutoniumToxicity.pdf
"Plutonium is constantly referred to by the news media as ``the most toxic substance known to man.'' There is no scientific basis for any of these statements as I have shown in a paper in
the refereed scientific journal Health Physics (Vol. 32, pp. 359-379, 1977). Nader asked the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to evaluate my paper, which they did in considerable depth and
detail, but when they gave it a ``clean bill of health'' he ignored their report. When he accuses me of ``trying to detoxify plutonium with a pen,'' I offered to eat as much plutonium as he would eat of caffeine, which my paper shows is comparably dangerous...
...there has never been a reply beyond a request for a copy of my paper. Yet the false statements continue in the news media and surely 95% of the public accept them as fact although virtually no one in the radiation health scientific community gives them credence. We have here a complete breakdown in communication between the scientific community and the news media, and an unprecedented display of irresponsibility by the latter. One must also question the ethics of Nader..."
http://www.fortfreedom.org/p22.htm
If they prove practical, and the author at this point believes they will, there is a much safer alternative to Plutonium in the birth canal.
The article by Gregory Goble was published today. It can be found under Cheap Green at www.aesopinstitute.org Scroll down to page 15.
It was copied from the Cold Fusion Now website which should be credited.
The Juno probe to Jupiter will use 650 sq. ft. of solar panels to generate 486 Watts of electricity. That's a really big solar array to generate a small amount of electricity, barely enough to power a single desktop computer. This is at the edge of feasibility, and is only possible now due to significant advances in electrical efficiency. The way that Karl Grossman worded his article, he portrays this accomplishment as something that NASA could have done all along, if it had made the effort; however, that would be a false assertion.
Grossman claims that alternatives to nuclear power could safely power our space probes, but he doesn't even attempt to show what else could feasibly power the Curiosity rover. The rover will produce 2.5 kWh of electricity per day. It would not be feasible for the rover to carry around the 300 square feet or so of solar panels it would take to power it.
Let's risk cancer for millions because solar would have to be twice that big using 50 year old solar panels, right?
if you want to lessen humanity's footprint, we need to do MORE with LESS. That means we need to *move to higher power densities*. Nuclear energy does just that, which makes it cleaner and less cumbersome on the planet. The ground covered by the huge and unrestrained manufacture of solar panels would have a huge negative imcpact on the planet, not produce much energy, and yet guarantee the primacy of combustion of fossil fuels with their much higher power density than sunshine and breezes. Fission, however, is a million times more power dense than combustion, and the marketability of combustion can fail before it.
Have you noticed that comercials for oil and gas show windmills and solar panels but NEVER a light water reactor? It is because they lost 20% of their market for electrical generation to nuclear energy. Windmills and solar panels, on the other hand, not only guarantee their survival, they guarantee thp primacy of their filthy carbon crankin' products.
We need to compete with them, not guarantee their primacy. Nuclear Energy can do this.
Solar panels are fragile, bulky and generally heavy. They are made from glass (or crystals), so they tend to shatter on impact, and the larger they are, the more susceptible they are to shattering. Bouncing a 650 sq. ft. glass panel across the surface of Mars would be pointless, because it is too fragile and heavy to be useful.
Another point not mentioned in the article is, plutonium is a cancer risk only if it is ingested. The stuff requires close contact to cells for a long time before they can have an affect. Generally, that means breathing it, so it lodges inside the lungs for years. However, the plutonium NASA is launching would remain in chunks larger than 1/4 inch in the event of an accident. That's too large to inhale or become airborne, and so the contamination is limited to chunks on the ground.
What we discover at Jupiter helps us understand our own world better, and might even revolutionize our lives. For one thing, the outer planets naturally accumulate the largest concentrations of antimatter in our solar system.
I won't get into the many facts you left out from NASA's EIS, but suffice it to say, the risks you claim in this article are way overblown.
To claim that the nuclear power industry "pressures" space scientists into using RTGs instead of solar power is absurd. The choice has primarily to do with the power requirements of the spacecraft and its particular mission. It's been over 30 years since the Voyager probes were launched, and the same technology was used on the recent New Horizons mission to Pluto. Beyond a certain distance from the sun, today's solar cell technology just isn't practical. While safe, solar cells are far less efficient and so weigh much more to provide the same power. If we only used solar cells, some missions would have to be canceled because they would be too heavy and cost too much to launch.
There are so many more important and imminent environmental threats than the release of radiation from a failed space probe launch, including the actual (though still surmountable) dangers of terrestrial nuclear power. Focus your investigations on those problems.
Actual terrestrial nuclear power has proven as safe as houses - the reality, that is, as opposed to wild but unfounded anti-nuclear stories. Statistical blips and conservative approaches are the crumbs of doubt that they spin into their campaigns of fear.
6M cancer deaths from nuke power industry ad since it's only 1% of the 8M cancers were get per year, it's surmountable? Sure, people die all the time, what's 6 million more.
No problem, right?
Mr. Grossman thinks Pu in space is bad. Its Pu-238. Its not possible to go critical with Pu-238. So the tying it with the atomic bomb is false.
NASA will continue to rely on nuclear technology for deep space missions. If the sun hits the earth at 1000 w/m^2, then as a craft moves away from earth, 1/R^2 comes into play.
In short, you just cant use solar power to power deep space missions.
The only viable power source is a radiothermal generator. They are packed securely enough that it should survive a launch failure.
Plutonium-238 is very nasty to breathe in, but if it stays in a lump then it's fairly harmless.
Also, Pu-238 powers heart pacemakers.
It was used to power heart pacemakers. That was a long time ago.