The danger of nuclear powered drones, and plutonium for spacecraft

The Deadly Folly of Nuclear Power Overhead HUFFINGTON POST, Karl Grossman: 04/12/2012 The crash last week of a U.S. drone on the Seychelles Islands– the second crash of a U.S. drone on Seychelles in four months — underlines the deadly folly of a plan of U.S. national laboratory scientists and the Northrop Grumman Corp. for nuclear-powered drones.

The use of nuclear power on U.S. drones was “favorably assessed by
scientists at Sandia National Laboratories and the Northrop Grumman
Corp.,” revealed Steven Aftergood of the Project on Government Secrecy
of the Federation of American Scientists last month.

Sandia’s report said that “use of these technologies” could provide
“system performance unparalleled by existing technologies.” It
acknowledged, however, that “current political conditions will not
allow use of the results.”

Just consider if the drones that crashed on the Seychelles used
nuclear power — and the impacts if the radioactive fuel they
contained was released — or if the drones had crashed elsewhere, in
Somalia, for instance, providing nuclear material to those who might
want to make a “dirty bomb.”

Although the nuclear-powered drone scheme is ostensibly not going
anywhere now, other schemes to use nuclear power overhead — which
also threaten nuclear disaster — are on the planning table and some
are moving ahead.
These include:

A new U.S. Air Force plan which supports “nuclear powered flight.”
Titled Energy Horizons, issued in January, it states that “nuclear
energy has been demonstrated on several satellite systems” and “this
source provides consistent power… at a much higher energy and power
density than current technologies.” It does admit that “the
implementation of such a technology should be weighed heavily against
potential catastrophic outcomes.” Indeed, the worst accident involving
a U.S. space nuclear system occurred with the fall to Earth in 1964 of
a satellite powered by a radioisotope thermoelectric generator or RTG,
the SNAP-9A. It failed to achieve orbit and fell to Earth,
disintegrating upon hitting the atmosphere causing its Plutonium-238
fuel to be dispersed as dust. Dr. John Gofman, professor of medical
physics at the University of California, Berkeley, long linked the
SNAP-9A accident to a global rise in lung cancer.
“A ground-breaking Russian nuclear space travel propulsion system will
be ready by 2017 and will power a ship capable of long-haul
interplanetary missions by 2025,” the Russian state news agency, Ria
Novosti, reported last week. The worst accident involving a Soviet or
Russian nuclear space system was the fall from orbit in 1978 of the
Cosmos 954 satellite powered by a nuclear reactor. It also broke up in
the atmosphere spreading radioactive debris which scattered over
77,000 square miles of the Northwest Territories of Canada.
The U.S. is moving again to produce Plutonium-238 for space use. RTGs
powered by Plutonium-238 had been used by the U.S. as a source of
electricity on satellites — as the Energy Horizons noted. But that
was until the SNAP-9A accident which caused a shift to generating
electricity with solar photovoltaic panels. However, RTGs using
Plutonium-238 have remained a source of on board electricity for space
probes.
The Department of Energy plans to produce Plutonium-238 at both Oak
Ridge National Laboratory and Idaho National Laboratories.
The U.S. is also developing nuclear-powered rockets. Ad Astra, headed
by former astronaut Franklin Chang-Diaz, is working on what it calls a
Variable Specific Impulse Magnetoplasma Rocket or VASMIR to be powered
by a nuclear reactor. It would provide a “faster trip” to Mars, says
Chang-Diaz, according to a Voice of America article last year, could
be used “for missions to the International Space Station or to
retrieve or position satellites in Earth orbit.”
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