Word: nuclear
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Although the U.S. doesn't fuel its spy satellites with nuclear reactors, we have sent up more than 20 spacecraft powered by plutonium. One of these had an accident in 1965 from which we received two-thirds of all the plutonium-238 in our atmosphere today. About 20 percent of all nuclearpowered spacecraft sent up by the U.S. and Soviet Union have broken down in some...
...head of the "Star Wars" program, Lt. Gen. James Abrahamson has admitted that nuclear power in space is necessary for SDI to work Without it, he said, "that's going to be a long, long lightcord that goes down to the surface of the earth." Ten percent of the SDI budget goes towards developing satellites powered by nuclear bomb pulses and nuclear reactors; current plans call for up to 100 to be put into orbit...
...Department of Energy contracted a study into the possible dangers of sending a nuclear reactor into orbit. Steven Aftergood, who heads the Committee to Bridge the Gap, a public interest group that concentrates on nuclear policy issues, knew that there was a joint DOE-SDI-NASA project to develop the SP-100, a space-based nuclear reactor. The SP-100 is in its final design stages, and a prototype is to be constructed in the next few years; deployment is tentatively scheduled for the mid- or late-1990s. Aftergood requested the DOE study through the Freedom of Information...
...study, "Safety Assessment for Space Reactors," included a discussion of what would happen if a one-megawatt thermal nuclear reactor was to reenter the atmosphere immediately after 10 years of continuous output. The report read: "although not specifically calculated, the number of fatalities for reentry at time of shutdown or during operation would be 30,000-50,000." Translated from military-industrial- speak, this means that if the worst case scenario occurs, 30-50,000 people would be killed worldwide...
Luckily, Aftergood isn't the only person concerned about these dangers. In May of last year, a joint Soviet-American committee of scientists presented a proposal calling for a ban on nuclear reactors in earth orbit. The committee included Roald Sagdeev, a close adviser to Gorbachev and the leader of the U.S.S.R.'s space program, and a group from the Federation of American Scientists...