(342.3420) WISE Amsterdam - The launch was the second in a series of plutonium-fueled space probe flights which began last year with the Galileo mission (see WISE News Communique 320.3214). It is also part of a much larger scheme involving placing nuclear reactors in space to provide the power for "Star Wars" and the launching of rockets that would be propelled by nuclear power.
Both probes could impact on the lives of large numbers of people. It takes less than a millionth of a gram of Pu to induce fatal lung cancer. The Galileo probe carries 49.25 pounds of Pu, the Ulysses 23.7 pounds. Thus each carries enough radioactive plutonium to give every person on Earth a fatal dose of lung cancer if it were to be dispersed in an accident. (The plutonium is used in electric generating systems to supply electricity - 570 watts on the Galileo, 284 watts on the Ulysses - to instruments.)
The Galileo was taken up on a shuttle in October 1989 and sent from it on a mission to explore Jupiter. But this year, in December, it is on its way beck towards Earth for the first of a pair of unusual "flybys". The rocket carrying Galileo does not have the power to take the probe straight to Jupiter, so NASA devised a scheme which would first send the probe to Venus, then hurtling back towards Earth. On 8 December it is to pass the earth at a distance of 625 miles. Then it is to be sent back into space again, to return on 8 December 1992. At that time it will be only 185 miles from Earth, flying at more than 30,000 miles per hour. The idea is to use the Earth's gravitational pull to increase the velocity of the probe, so that after the two flybys it will have the power to get to Jupiter. The idea, however, has never been tested at such a low altitude. Certainly not with a space probe containing plutonium.
If radio contact is lost with the Galileo probe, if it collides with a meteorite altering its trajectory, or any number of miscalculations occur, and it crashes into the Earth's atmosphere on either of the flybys and disintegrates, Earth is in for a disaster. According to Dr. John Gofman, Professor Emeritus of Medical Physics at the University of California at Berkeley, "the amount of radioactivity released would be more than the combined plutonium radioactivity returned to Earth in the fallout from all the nuclear weapons testing of the United States, the Soviet Union, and the United Kingdom." Gofman calculates that these have already caused 950,000 lung cancer fatalities.
The reason the plutonium radio-activity would be so intense, says Gofman, is because the plutonium isotope used on space probes is Pu-238 which is 300 times more radioactive than the Pu-239 used in atomic bombs.
Even General Electric Co. (GE), the manufacturer of the plutonium-fueled electric generating system on both probes (a radioisotope thermal generator, or RTG), admits that the danger of contamination on Earth from the plutonium on the two RTG's on the Galileo will only be over when the last flyby is over, in 1992. A "Final Safety analysis" on the Galileo done by 3E and obtained from NASA under the US Freedom of Information Act by Karl Grossman, a journalism professor at the State University of New York, Old Westbury, states:
"At this point, with a successful and correct burn of the IUS, escape of the spacecraft from the Earth's gravitational pull will be effected, and the RTG's will no longer present a potential risk to the Earth's population."
Other documents reveal that the use of plutonium on the Galileo, Ulysses and other space probe missions is not needed -that the risk being taken is unnecessary and that solar-generated electricity would be adequate (see WISE News Communique 337.3369.)
According to one NASA-contracted report by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) released to Grossman photovoltaics can replace RTG's on several NASA missions on which plutonium power was proposed. These included what is now the next proposed plutonium-fueled space probe shot, the Comet Rendezvous Asteroid flyby (CRAF) mission, scheduled for 1995.
NASA's dismissal of the solar alternative and preference for nuclear power in space has much to do with a new role it has taken on: providing delivery service for Star Wars. NASA, notes Dr. Michio Kaku, Professor of Nuclear Physics at the City University of New York, has been reshaping itself in recent years to use its shuttle fleet as a service for the orbiting nuclear power plants that are to provide power for the laser cannons and particle beams of Star Wars. Faced with tight budgets since its moon landings, NASA has joined in what he calls an "unholy alliance" with the military in order to receive larger new sources of money - and the plutonium-fueled space probe flights are a part of this.
GE is currently developing what are to be 100 or more space nuclear reactors - it calls its design the SP_100 - designed to be small enough to be launched on NASA shuttles and which, orbiting overhead, are to provide power for Star Wars. In addition, four other types of space nuclear power systems are being developed for the Star Wars program.
Not to stop there, NASA has revived an old Atomic Energy Commission scheme: development of rockets actually propelled by nuclear power. Concerns about the consequences if a nuclear-powered rocket crashed back on Earth led to the cancellation of the scheme in the late 1970s after some US $ 2 billion had been spent. No nuclear-powered rocket ever got off the ground. But now NASA is seeking funding to build nuclear-powered rockets to be ready as early as 2005. Says Gary Bennett, manager of government studies for NASA on the subject, " If we're going to Mars to stay and colonize, we'll need some type of nuclear propulsion."
The Florida Coalition for Peace and Jusitce, which ahs engaged in protest including civil disobedience at the Kennedy Space Center, vows to continue opposition to NASA's attempt to "nuclearize space". The Coalition is a plaintiff in a lawsuit brought in US federal court to block both the Galileo and Ulysses launches. Part of that suit is still to be decided as it calls for halting the flybys. The Coalition's coordinator, Burce Gagnon, says NASA's new nuclear-powered rocket plan "confirms what we have been saying all along - the nuclear industry is continually working to develop more dangerous kinds of nuclear power for space use. When these reactors start dropping out of the sky, they're going to fall anywhere. Those who are concerned about toxic contamination had better pay a lot more attention to the space/nuclear issue."
Sources: The above is a summary of an article by Karl Grossman.
Contact: Florida Coalition for Peace and Justice, PO Box 2468, Orlando FL 32802, USA, tel: 9407) 422-3479
Karl Grossman, Box 1680, Sag Harbor NY 11963, USA.
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