NASA's nuclear gamble - October 1997 launch of a Cassini space probe which will carry 732.3 lbs of potentially dangerous plutonium: includes information on anti-launch activities - Cover Story

Progressive, The, Sept, 1997 by Karl Grossman

As for the death toll, NASA says that only "2,300 health effects could occur over a fifty-year period to this exposed population." These "latent cancer fatalities," says NASA, would be "likely to be statistically indistinguishable from normally occurring cancer fatalities among the world population."

But Sternglass at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine says NASA's environmental-impact statement "underestimates the cancer alone by about 2,000 to 4,000 times. Which means that not counting all the other causes of death -- infant mortality, heart disease, immune-deficiency diseases, and all that -- we're talking in the order of ten to twenty million extra deaths."

Helen Caldicott says NASA fails to understand the especially dangerous characteristics of plutonium and the health impacts from "chronic, long-term exposure. This is incredibly deadly stuff." Also, she says, NASA has drastically underestimated the impact by basing it on an "average dose for the overall world population," and not providing for those people who would receive larger doses of plutonium.

The shielding around the plutonium is "fingernail thin. It's a joke," says former NASA scientist Poehler. It consists of an iridium shell 3/128 inches thick, two 1/4-inch graphite shells, "insulating foil and, finally, a 1/16 inch-thin aluminum housing. Hardly what one would call 'heavily shielded.'" Poehler cites thirty NASA tests that acknowledge that plutonium in various impact situations could be released.

Indeed, the NASA environmental-impact statement admits that if Cassini breaks up in the 1999 flyby, much of the plutonium fuel would disperse as "vapor or respirable particles" -- just the form in which lethal doses of plutonium could be breathed in by many people.

An accident involving the 1999 Earth flyby could be "the mother of all accidents," says Poehler.

The amount of plutonium NASA admits could be dispersed in a flyby accident "represents an astronomical quantity of a potent alpha-emitting cancer producer," says John Gofman, professor emeritus of medical physics at the University of California at Berkeley and former associate director of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. "The number of cancer doses is so high as to make calculations extraneous," says Gofman. "Scientists and engineers in control of their faculties would surely have eliminated this project from their agenda. Yet it appears that is not the case."

NASA says in its environmental-impact statement that 32 to 34 percent of the plutonium on Cassini would be released in a flyby accident. But, considering the speed at which Cassini would hit the Earth's atmosphere, the probe "would completely disintegrate" and "all the plutonium" would fall out, Kohn says. He calls the flyby scheme "unconscionable."

In a chart in its environmental-impact statement, NASA outlines the "decontamination methods" it will apply if plutonium is released in a Cassini accident. NASA's plan if the plutonium rains down on "natural vegetation" is: "Remove and dispose all vegetation. . . . Remove and dispose topsoil. . . . Relocate animals." If the plutonium comes down on a region of "agriculture," NASA's plan bans "future agricultural land uses."