I agree with the sentiment. Anti-science sentiments proliferate partly because science doesn't spend much on public outreach, especially compared to people who want to make a buck off scaring others about new technologies. NASA has been doing more and more PR work over the past few years, and that's great - but IMO in this case, they really need to get someone who looks and sounds confident, and who would go on national TV and say "Yes, we are totally sending a nuclear reactor to space, why wouldn't we?".
The way I feel it, engaging with irrationality legitimizes it. You don't want to do that too much. If you bend over yourself to explain that people really don't need to worry, it'll only make them feel that there is something to fear.
What I want to suggest is engaging with people on an emotional level, but projecting confidence while doing so.
Nuclear energy may be safe, if done under near-perfect condition, with extremely large budgets to understand risks, and plans to mitigate incidents. There is truth to the argument that nuclear power saves lives compared to coal power.
But nuclear power isn't inherently safe. It is, by its very nature, extremely dangerous. Actual nuclear scientists understand that. See, for example, Feynman's work on nuclear safety during the Manhattan project.
Strapping a nuclear reactor to a rocket is almost by definition a dirty bomb. Depending on the height and mode of an eventual launch failure, the result could be anything from Tchernobyl to a less-dramatic yet more deadly dispersal of nuclear material in the upper atmosphere.
The dose-response relationship of radiation exposure is largely linear, meaning the latter event might just increase your risk of brain cancer by 0.005%. Yes, you may consider it negligible. But statistically, it would kill half a million people.
To blithely state that "nuclear is safe, hoho, why shouldn't we strap Plutonium to a rocket, you environmental nincompoops" has nothing to do with science, and gives science a bad name. Maybe NASA could come up with a way to protect a reactor during a missile launch. But it wouldn't be easy, and saying "why wouldn't we?" on TV would not inspire confidence in their abilities, but doubts in their sanity. The right thing to say on TV is "We're sending a reactor into space, and here are the mechanisms we've come up with to make it safe..."
But maybe I should have stated my main assumption explicitly: people at NASA know what they're doing. They're not incompetent morons, they can do the math. They already have absurd amounts of procedures in place to ensure a launch failure doesn't hurt anyone. They're not just trying to strap a bunch of random nuclear isotopes on a rocket and hope for the best.
> Strapping a nuclear reactor to a rocket is almost by definition a dirty bomb.
No, it isn't. A dirty bomb is meant to create a large-scale radioactive contamination that's dangerous to humans, and U-235 is probably the last thing you'd like to put in it. It's an alpha emitter with a half-life so long it doesn't matter, so the only effect you'd get is heavy metal poisoning.
(That's beyond the fact that dirty bombs are speculative devices, and from what I read, they actually turned out not to be a real issue in practice.)
> Depending on the height and mode of an eventual launch failure, the result could be anything from Tchernobyl to a less-dramatic yet more deadly dispersal of nuclear material in the upper atmosphere.
That's the kind of thinking that I suggest we need to fight with a serious public outreach effort. Chernobyl was a total clusterfuck, but the only connection between it and the NASA project is the word "nuclear" in newspaper headlines. Chernobyl was an active reactor, and its explosion contaminated the area with reaction products that had very low half-life and underwent beta and gamma decay, making them really dangerous, unlike plain U-235.
> To blithely state that "nuclear is safe, hoho, why shouldn't we strap Plutonium to a rocket, you environmental nincompoops" has nothing to do with science, and gives science a bad name.
I'm not saying that. I'm saying that there's so much baseless fear around nuclear energy as a whole, that it's high time we stopped treating it as reasonable. And right now, the biggest danger around nuclear energy is the cost in lives of it not being used instead of fossil fuels.
The thing about this reactor is that it doesn't work until you switch it on - so in case of an explosion you are spreading a near-stable isotope that you could handle without any health risks. Chernobyl doesn't compare, because the ashes were spreading isotopes produced as a result of operating the reactor, and are simply not present here until the reactor is actually switched on.
Consider coal electricity. It kills much more people globally than potential harm from space probes with nuclear engine blowing up in atmosphere periodically. Yet we continue to burn coal.
Or consider bio-engineering. We mess with cells without understand how they work. And since cells are self-replicating, we have a potential of quickly making the whole planet permanently unsuitable for human life. Compared with that the total risk of nuclear is bounded even after accounting for a possibility of a large-scale global nuclear war. Yet protests against, say, GMO are rather weak compared with protests against nuclear energy.
