SUFFOLK CLOSEUP
By Karl Grossman
Suffolk County is nuclear-free as a result of the battles to stop the Shoreham nuclear power plant from going into operation and preventing the construction of the many other nuclear power plants the Long Island Lighting Company planned to build here. Indeed, all over the United States there have been opposition to nuclear power plants which has caused their number to be reduced.
But there’s a look upward for using nuclear power.
There are now plans afoot to put nuclear power plants on the Moon and Mars for would-be colonies. “US Eyes Building Nuclear Power Plants for Moon and Mars,” declared the headline this July of an Associated Press dispatch.
There’s also work on nuclear propulsion in space. In July, too, the White House National Space Council issued a strategy for space exploration that includes “nuclear propulsion methods.” Nuclear propulsion, its promoters say, would get astronauts to Mars quicker.
And last week The White House released a “National Strategy for Space Nuclear Power” elaborating on its desire for nuclear power and nuclear propulsion in space.
Meanwhile, Elon Musk, founder and CEO of SpaceX, has been touting the detonation of nuclear bombs on Mars to, he says, “transform it into an Earth-like planet.” As Business Insider has reported, Musk “believes it will help warm the planet and make it more hospitable for human life.” The website www.space.com says: “The explosions would vaporize a fair chunk of Mars’ ice caps, liberating enough water vapor and carbon dioxide…to warm up the planet substantially, the idea goes.”
It’s been projected that it would take more than 10,000 nuclear bombs to carry out the Musk scheme. SpaceX is selling T-shirts emblazoned with the words “Nuke Mars.” Check out SpaceX selling “Nuke Mars” T-shirts online at: https://shop.spacex.com/products/nuke-mars-t-shirt
Musk’s nuclear bomb of choice: hydrogen bombs. The detonations would render Mars radioactive
The nuclear bombs would be carried to Mars 1,000 SpaceX Starships that Musk wants to build—like the one that blew up in a fireball this month. “Fortunately,” reported Lester Holt on NBC Nightly News the next evening, “no one was aboard.” But what if nuclear materials—reactors headed for the Moon or Mars, for example—had been aboard?
The nuclear space issue is one I got into 35 years ago when I learned from reading a U.S. Department of Energy newsletter about two space shuttles to be launched the following year with plutonium aboard. One shuttle was the Challenger. It was to carry up a space probe loaded with 24.2 pounds of plutonium. The plutonium was to be used as fuel in radioisotope thermoelectric generators to provide a few hundred watts of electricity for the space probe’s onboard instruments. The shuttles were to release the probes upon achieving orbit.
I asked DOE and NASA under the U.S. Freedom of Information Act what would happen if there was an accident on launch or lower or upper atmosphere and what would be the consequences to people in Florida if the plutonium was dispersed in an accident. For 10 months DOE and NASA blocked my receiving information. Finally, after my challenges to this, they sent documents to my post office box here in Suffolk claiming the likelihood of an accident releasing plutonium was “small due to the high reliability inherent in the design of the Space Shuttle.” Then, on January 28, 1986, the Challenger blew up. On its next mission, in May 1986, it was to have aboard the plutonium, the most deadly of all radioactive substances.
And I’ve been pursuing the issue of using nuclear in space ever since authoring two books, one The Wrong Stuff, and writing and presenting three TV documentaries, and penning hundreds of newspaper, magazine and internet articles.
There are safe alternatives to the use of nuclear in space. Said the headline in Universe Today last month, “Solar Power is Best for Mars Colonies.” The extensive piece stated how “a NASA-sponsored MIT think-tank has weighed up the future energy needs of a manned settlement on Mars and arrived at an interesting conclusion…solar arrays might function just as well, if not better, than the nuclear options.” Likewise, solar power is seen as abundant on the Moon. A 2016 Discover magazine piece was headlined “How to Harvest Terawatts of Solar Power on the Moon” and spoke of the Japanese corporation, Shimizu, “gearing up to develop solar power on the moo=
As tor propulsion, there are solar sails. The magazine New Scientist published a comprehensive article in October titled, “The new age of sail,” with a subhead: “We are on the cusp of a new type of space travel that can take us to places no rocket could ever visit.” Japan sent up its Ikaros spacecraft in 2010 using energy emitted from the sun to sail in the vacuum of space. Last year, the LightSail 2 mission of the U.S.-based Planetary Society was launched and is still up in space flying with the sun’s energy. The New Scientist article piece spoke of scientists wanting to use solar sails “to set a course for worlds currently far beyond our reach—namely the planets orbiting our nearest star, Alpha Centauri.”
Solar power has also begun to replace plutonium power on space probes. NASA in 2011 launched its Juno space probe on a mission to Jupiter. It uses three solar arrays instead of nuclear power to generate onboard electricity. Juno is still up there, orbiting and studying far-off Jupiter.
Karl Grossman is a veteran investigative reporter and columnist, the winner of numerous awards for his work and a member of the L.I. Journalism Hall of Fame. He is a professor of journalism at SUNY/College at Old Westbury and the author of six books.