Opening the Next Frontier
by Anthony Tate

Part 9: But isn't this dangerous?


Of course it is! Cars are dangerous. Planes are dangerous. Storms are dangerous. Anything powerful is dangerous.

The Space Shuttle is dangerous, for example. The Space Shuttle generates about 100 gigawatts of power when it is launched, or as much as 50 big nuclear power plants. Plus, the exhaust gases left behind by those huge rockets are not very safe to breathe, either. Not to mention the number of workers who have died in accidents while getting it ready to fly.

Power is dangerous. But the way to stop dangerous from becoming deadly is to be aware of the danger, and take steps to avoid that danger. This is also called risk mitigation. Since the Space Shuttle has flown well over a hundred times so far, we have had a LOT of practice in risk mitigation in this kind of a system.

I can already imagine folks reading this saying, 'Yeah, but the Space Shuttle isn't nuclear!' This is true. But nuclear radiation isn't some magical, evil thing. Radiation is part of nature. The Sun is radioactive, but we aren't all dead from it. The Sun is dangerous too, as anybody with a sunburn will tell you, and many people die of sunstroke and sun poisoning every year. Yet nobody advocates living in caves because of the dangerous Sun. In other words, we know how to handle radiation, we just have to be careful.

Let's examine exactly how much risk we have from using a nuclear rocket to get to space.

Suppose we have a nuclear rocket. Suppose it has 10 pounds of radioactive nuclides in it.

'Radioactive nuclides' is not the fissile fuel, it is the waste generated after that fissile fuel has done its thing and the atoms have split. Surprisingly enough, fissile fuel before you use it is not terribly nasty stuff. You wouldn't ask it home for dinner, but it is not 'kill you in your tracks' stuff either. No, the nuclides left after you use it is the mean stuff, which is why we want to discuss it now. Ten pounds of radioactive nuclides doesn't seem like much, does it? You could hold it in one hand, easily.

Well, it is a lot, trust me. To put it into perspective, all of the radioactive nuclides that were released by Chernobyl were also about 10 pounds worth. That's all. Just ten pounds was enough to kill nearly 40 people and generate a terrible panic among hundreds of thousands of others.

Sounds pretty bad, doesn't it?

Well, let's compare our ten pounds of radioactive nuclides to something else, like the Ivy Mike nuclear bomb test which took place on November 1st, 1952. This is a real test, you can go look it up. Now, when Ivy Mike happened, it obviously released radioactive nuclides into the air. How much?

1023 pounds worth, that's how much.

Holy Cow! That old nuclear test back in 1951 was 100 times worse than Chernobyl! There must have been terrible casualties because of it! How did anybody survive such a huge release of radiation? Thousands of people must have died!

Well, no, as a matter of fact, not a single person died, or was even hurt, by that huge release of radiation. Why not?

Because we knew it was going to happen, and we planned for it. In other words, the risk was mitigated.

Now, given the many, many years of experience we have with launching rockets like the Space Shuttle, I can confidently say that we treat rockets much more like a nuclear bomb than we do a quiet power plant. The only reason Chernobyl was a disaster was because it was a surprise. If we had had even a day to get ready, nobody would have been hurt, and nobody would have died.

A nuclear powered rocket, even a HUGE one like I am about to describe in the next section, is not very dangerous on a global scale because we can launch it from a safe place (like the middle of the Pacific Ocean), and we can be prepared for any problems that occur because we know exactly when we are going to launch it. We can tame this Devil.

We have tamed much bigger ones in the past, and the world did not end 50 years ago, did it?

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Contents:

1: The Frontier Spirit

2: What went wrong.

3: Where do we go next?

4: So, why aren't we going?

5: Dealing with the Devil

6: A brief technical interlude

7: So how good is Nuclear, anyway?

8: Heat, temperature, and cooling.

9: But isn't this dangerous?

10: Prometheus would be proud of us.

11: Ok, that all sounds nice, but this is just fantasy, right?

12: But isn't this just too big?

13: But doesn't this thing make nuclear waste?

14: Conclusions