Bush expanding nuclear power for space: threatens planetary ecosystem.

• Author: Gagnon, Bruce

After a 30-year shutdown of plans for the nuclear rocket, the Bush administration has resuscitated the technology by giving NASA nearly $1 billion to expand space nuclear and propulsion research and development. "We are still doing exploration of our solar system in covered wagons," says Ed Weiler, NASA's Space Science Chief. "The Nuclear Systems Initiative will open up the railroad."

Included in NASA plans are the nuclear rocket to Mars; a new generation of Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generators (RTGs) for interplanetary missions; nuclear-powered robotic Mars rovers to be launched in 2003 and 2009; and the nuclear powered mission called Pluto-Kuiper Belt scheduled for January, 2006. NASA envisions mining colonies on the Moon (for helium 3 and water), Mars (magnesium, cobalt, and uranium) and asteroids (gold) powered by nuclear reactors launched from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida on rockets with a historic 10% failure rate. By exponentially increasing the number of nuclear launches NASA also exponentially increases the chances of accident.

During the 1950s and 1960s NASA spent over $10 billion to build the nuclear rocket program canceled in the end because a launch accident would contaminate major portions of Florida and beyond.

NASA's expanded focus on nuclear power in space "is not only dangerous but politically unwise," says Dr. Michio Kaku, professor of nuclear physics at the City University of New York. "The only thing that can kill the US space program is a nuclear disaster...a Chernobyl in the sky."

"NASA hasn't learned its lesson from its history," says Kaku, "and a hallmark of science is that you learn from previous mistakes. NASA doggedly pursues its fantasy of nuclear power in space."

Since the 1960s there have been eight space nuclear power accidents by the US and the former Soviet Union, several of which released deadly plutonium. In April, 1964 a US military satellite with 2.1 pounds of plutonium-238 on board fell back to Earth and burned up as it hit the atmosphere, spreading the toxic plutonium globally as dust to be ingested by the people of the planet. In 1997 NASA launched the Cassini space probe carrying 72 pounds of plutonium that fortunately did not experience failure. Hundreds of thousands of people could have been contaminated.

Last year the Department of Energy (DoE) and NASA announced that present facilities must be expanded. The DoE will spend over $35 million to renovate the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in...