To the Editor:
I am disheartened that the media shows little inclination to mention the words “plutonium” or “probabilities of accidental release” in their so-called reporting of the Mars rover arrival. You have to question who they work for.
A “1 in 960 chance of a deadly plutonium release” is a real concern—gamblers in Las Vegas would be happy with those odds.
We daily hear the excited anticipation of the nuclear industry as stories reveal the growing plans for hosts of launches of nuclear devices—more rovers on Mars, mining colonies on the moon, even nuclear reactors to power rockets bound for Mars. The nuclear industry is rolling the dice while people on Earth have their fingers crossed in the hope technology does not fail—as it often does.
But the media, while ignoring the Mars rover plutonium story, is also guilty of not reporting about the years of toxic contamination at the Department of Energy (DoE) nuclear labs where these space nuclear devices are produced. The Idaho Nuclear lab or Los Alamos Nuclear lab in New Mexico have long track records of worker and environmental contamination during this dirty space nuke fabrication process.
The public will need to do more than cross their fingers in hopes that nothing goes wrong. We need to speak out loudly so Congress, NASA and the DoE hear that we do not support the nuclearization of the heavens.
Go solar or better yet—stay home and use our tax dollars to take care of the legions of people without jobs, health care, housing, food, or heat.
Mars can wait.
For more, see: www.space4peace.blogspot.com/2021/02/our-opposition-remains-dangers-of.html
Bruce K. Gagnon, Coordinator, Global Network Against Weapons & Nuclear Power in Space
PO Box 652
Brunswick, ME 04011
(207) 389-4606; www.space4peace.org; www.space4peace.blogspot.com (blog)
“Thank God men cannot fly, and lay waste the sky as well as the earth.”
– Henry David Thoreau
Bruce:
Thanks a lot. With our deadline looming, we just spent an hour surveying the history of radioactive satellites. Yoiks!
The Editor