In yesterday's issue of The Space Review, Ryan Zelnio offered a model for international cooperation in lunar development (begging the question of why this is necessary).

Thomas James critiques it.

Speaking of Thomas, I wonder what he'll think of this scienctifically ignorant hysteria?

It's amazing how these anti-plutonium people have no clue to what's going on, but they're confident that it'll be "worse" than a hurricane. Perhaps if terrorists were steering the rocket (say by having it dive into the base of a large packed skyscraper in Miami), more damage could be caused.

Having read the Space Review item, I must agree with the refuting story. This is hardly more than The Moon Treaty in a new guise.

As for the risks of the New Horizons launch, the writer seems to be looking at the worst posible outcome where the plutonium is finely ground as possible, and directed into as many lungs as possible. FAR more likely, it would come down in one chunk, in one place, still contained in its cladding, after which, you collect it, dig up a few tens of cubic yards of soil around it to be sure, and take it away. One wonders if he's heard of Cosmos 954, or the nuclear weapons accident near Palomares, Spain. Last I saw, life still goes on in those places.

Me, I worry more about how much sleep the driver of the gasoline tank truck in the next lane has had...

I hate to quibble, but... scientifically

In 1968, a launch failure dumped a Nimbus weather satellite into the Santa Barbara Channel with SNAP-19 radioisotope thermoelectric radioactive heat sources. The RTGs (I believe there were two) survived intact and were recovered for later reprocessing and reuse of the heat sources.

The containment vessels are rather solid and strong.

Thanks for the link and the tip, Rand. I had planned to fisk the Grossman article last night, but stumbled across a richer vein of fiskable material before I could get to it.

Frank and Karl H. both are very close to the truth -- reading the New Horizons EIS, it's clear that what Grossman and Gagnon base their fearmongering on is the absolute worst case scenario NASA could imagine...something along the lines of a guidance failure coming off the pad combined with a failure of the flight termination system, with the vehicle rising high enough to turn back over land and reorient payload-down, then an impact on a hard surface under full downward thrust, with the RTG ending up trapped under large chunks of still-burning solid fuel. That is apparently what is required for there to be any significant release of plutonium into the surroundings, given the various safety systems in the vehicle and payload and the design of the RTG.

The leap they make is in equating this unlikely worst-case scenario with the "1-in-300!" or "4% chance of failure!" number picked from the report...as if to say that ANY failure WILL BE the worst possible case.

You know, Frank, you have a point about Cosmos 954...it's cited on occasion, but not nearly as often as Mars 96. Perhaps it's because Mars 96 has more utility for their purposes: less is known about its fate after reentry, making it easier to fill in the blanks with unfounded fears.

Here's a list of a few dozen marine reactor and RTG incidents and accidents from the past, including the Nimbus I mentioned above:

http://www-pub.iaea.org/MTCD/publications/PDF/te_1242_prn.pdf

I think the most sobering example is the April 1964 launch failure of a Transit satellite. A SNAP-9A was completely vaporized. Does anybody know if modern RTGs are more robust?

Dan, take a look at section 2.1.3.2 of the New Horizons EIS (Volume I). They describe the RTG in some detail, including the safety features designed into it. Pretty interesting stuff.

Link: http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/overview/deis/finalEnvImpact.html

I went over Grossman's article just now and frankly, it's all so slippery that I don't know where to start debunking it. He seems to take statements from the EIS out of context in some places and misrepresent them in others in order to imply the risk is higher than it is, but does so in such a way that when you look closely there isn't enough meat there to know what he is saying well enough to refute it. He's much better at this little game than Gagnon is, I'll give him that. Of course, he is a journalism professor...who better to know about misleading implications, distorted context, and cleverly concealed lies than one who teaches that kind of thing for a living?

Rand, thank you for bringing this to my attention. While I do have Thomas' blog on my blog roll, I've been to busy lately to read it. I'd like to point people to read my rebuttal I posted on his blog if they are interested.