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 plutonium falling on an "urban" area, NASA's plan says: "Impose land-use restrictions . . . Demolish some or all structures. . . . Relocate affected population permanently."

Before Cassini, NASA had already launched missions involving nuclear generators. The two biggest were the Galileo and the Ulysses. In 1989, the Galileo (with forty-nine-and-a-quarter pounds of plutonium fuel on board) went on a mission to Jupiter. In 1990, the Ulysses (with twenty-five pounds of plutonium) went on an orbit of the sun. The Ulysses had been scheduled to launch years earlier; it had been slated to be the next mission to follow the ill-fated Challenger disaster of 1986.

Alan Kohn served as NASA's emergency-preparedness operations officer for the Galileo and Ulysses launches. He was not impressed with the instructions his superiors gave him.

"They didn't even let me do that job," he told protesters at a Florida Coalition for Peace & Justice demonstration at Cape Canaveral in June. "I was told that the job was cosmetic, that nothing was going to happen and I should just sit and counsel everyone in the radiation-control center and do nothing, and in case of disaster, I could take all protective measures at that time. The only protective measure I could have taken at that time, of course, would have been to wet my pants. And my own immediate management told me: Lay off, keep a low profile, don't let the public know, above all don't let the protest groups know that there is any danger. I disobeyed orders. I provided that all the buildings should be turned into fall-out shelters, that air conditioning be shut off, that buildings be sealed, the doors be sealed, that people who were going to work outside would be put in bunny suits and given gas masks."

What NASA was going to do in case of a launch accident, said Kohn, was "monitor the fall-out as the plutonium fell." There was "exactly nothing," in fact, that could have been done to stop the plutonium from raining down. Furthermore, Kohn said, he saw NASA's projection of "potential fall-outs, which depended on wind, speed, and the direction and height at which the explosion took place." They extended as far as highly populated Orlando, west of Cape Canaveral.

"It is time to put a stop to NASA's freedom to threaten the lives of the people here on the Earth," said Kohn. As rain fell and lightning flashed, Air Force and NASA security personnel watched Kohn speak. "I don't know what they think gives them the right to do a thing like this."

Nevertheless, the U.S. government is pushing ahead on the launch of the plutonium-fueled Cassini probe and on many more space shots involving nuclear power.

Perhaps most outrageous, there is no need to use deadly plutonium at all. In 1994, the European Space Agency (ESA) announced a breakthrough in the development of "new high-performance silicon solar cells for use in future, demanding deep-space missions." It stated: "Until now, deep-space probes had to use thermonuclear power generators like the so-called RTGs. . . . As RTG technology is not available in Europe, ESA therefore attempted to develop a power source based on very high-efficiency solar cells." In what it termed a "technology milestone," the European Space Agency developed cells with a 25 percent efficiency, "the highest efficiency ever reached worldwide. . . . ESA expects that the high-performance silicon solar cells could profitably be used in deep-space missions."