Will Columbia Disaster Embolden Nuclear Protesters

The first part of your statement (not excerpted here) referred to the LA
Times article about NASA pushing for nuclear propulsion technologies to
enable a Mars mission--that article was badly done, and NASA confirms that
no such program is in place. I urge you to see some of the followup
reporting done on that piece at SpaceDaily.com or elsewhere.

That said, yes this kind of accident does sort of play into the hands of the
anti-nuclear crowd. I'm surprised it hasn't already been front-page news.

One thing that doesn't get said by these protesters is the vitally important
question of quantities. I grant that if Columbia had had fissile material
on board, they'd now be considering evacuating a county or two in my home
state of Texas, if only to be extra careful.

But the anti-nuke folks would have you believe that a single such accident
would be an extinction-level event. I just don't think so. The grim
business of estimating the impact of nuclear leaks has an established set of
caluculations--so many deaths due to acute radiation burns, so many due to
the poisoning that even non-radioactive uranium can cause, so many due to
secondary infections in non-lethal radiation poisoning cases, so many years
of potential life lost due to cancers, etc. The anti-nuke folks seem
generally to be so underwear-soiling scared of a nuclear release that they
shout down any such calculations, never giving anyone a chance to even begin
to quantify the quantifiable risks associated with an accident.

What if (and I'm not good enough to give these figures with confidence, but
just suppose) we discover that a high-altitude accident like Columbia, with
a very small reactor on board, would have resulted in no acute radiation
burn deaths on the ground, no uranium poisoning deaths, no secondary
infections, and a population total of 5 potential years of life lost due to
cancers because of radiation exposure? Would that be an acceptable risk?
What if I told you that stopping all the Radon leaks that are happening
every minute of the day in basements of houses in the Midwestern and
Northeastern US would result in tens of thousands of years of potential life
saved due to radiation-related cancer? That figure is close to right. What
about your average solar radiation, not even in an ozone depletion scenario?
Again, tens of thousands of years of life lost planet-wide due to cancers
from solar radiation exposure. Chernobyl of course was orders of magnitude
more damaging for those close by.

I'm also pretty quick to suspect the nuclear industry. Like any
corporations, their first concern is profit, which makes them a poor
information source on such vital technical matters.

Yet there are objective scientific voices out there too, doing these kinds
of calculations. Try the CDC website for the Radon and solar radiation
information. Then look around elsewhere. These same calculations have been
done for Chernobyl and Three Mile Island, Hiroshima and the atmospheric
testing on Bikini Atoll, for terrorist's dirty bombs and for radium paint on
watch faces. Educate yourself, then help others. Arming the public with
accurate knowledge to make rational decisions, rather than standing back
while they're swayed by the noise of panicky protesters or slick corporate
PR officers, is the only weapon we have.

Brad W.