[NukeNet] NASA ADMITS SOLAR WILL WORK IN DEEP SPACE

[Bill Smirnow]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: Global Network
To: Global Network Against Weapons
Sent: Thursday, September 14, 2006 8:04 AM
Subject: NASA ADMITS SOLAR WILL WORK IN DEEP SPACE


NASA ADMITS SOLAR WILL WORK IN DEEP SPACE



By Karl Grossman

            For years NASA insisted it couldn't be
done. Beyond the orbit of Mars, NASA said, solar
energy could not be used to generate electricity
for onboard power on space devices.

            So the agency used the extremely
dangerous nuclear substance, plutonium, as fuel in
electric generating systems-and people on Earth
were put at great risk in the event of an
accident.

            For instance, in 1997 NASA launched
its Cassini plutonium-fueled space probe and in
1999 had Cassini hurtle back at Earth in a
"slingshot maneuver" to increase its velocity so
it could get to Saturn. If there was what NASA
called an "inadvertent reentry" of Cassini into
the Earth's atmosphere during the "slingshot
maneuver" just a few hundred miles up, it would
disintegrate and "5 billion.of the world
population.could receive 99 percent or more of the
radiation exposure," NASA admitted in its Final
Environmental Impact Statement for the Cassini
Mission.

            The death toll from a Cassini accident
was put by Dr. Ernest Sternglass, professor
emeritus of radiological physics at the University
of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, at 20 million to
40 million.

            And this is not a sky-is-falling
story. Of 28 U.S. space missions using plutonium,

there have been three accidents, the worst in 1964
in which a plutonium-powered satellite fell back
to Earth, breaking up and spreading the toxic
radioactive substance widely.

            That caused NASA to develop solar
power for satellites-and today all satellites (and
the International Space Station) are energized by
solar panels. But, insisted NASA, in deep space
sunlight is too weak and solar energy could not
work, only plutonium would.

            Now the leading space industry trade
magazine, Aviation Week & Space Technology,
reveals that solar energy is to be used by NASA to
substitute for nuclear power in deep space. The
recent article began: "Budget and technical
realities have led NASA to put its once-ambitious
space nuclear power plans on a slow track, but
development in solar power generation should allow
new scientific probes beyond Mars to operate
without nuclear energy. The U.S. space agency is
already planning a solar-powered mission to study
the atmosphere of Jupiter, and has looked at
sending probes as deep into space as Neptune using
only the Sun's energy for spacecraft and
instrument power.It is all but certain the next
U.S. deep-space missions will be solar-powered."

            The piece went on describe the new
giant solar energy systems that will be used to
harvest solar energy at record efficiencies vast
distances from the Sun.

            Bruce Gagnon, coordinator of the
Global Network Against Weapons & Nuclear Power in
Space, comments that "for years NASA said that the
Global Network didn't know what we were talking
about when it came to solar power working in deep
space.  Now NASA is planning to do what we've been
saying all along they could do. It just goes to
show that if you are willing to stay on-top of an
issue for a long time that something good can come
from your hard work."

            Jeremy Maxand, executive director of
the Snake River Alliance, an Idaho group that's
been challenging the use of Idaho National
Laboratory to produce plutonium for space power
systems, says, "It's good to see plutonium space
batteries following in the steps of the now
demoted planet Pluto. We've said since day one
that plutonium is unnecessary and dangerous, and
that we can do the same job a better way, and now
we're seeing what that better way is-solar."

            What's to happen in space is what
should also happen on Earth. The Bush
administration and nuclear industry are pushing
for a "revival" of nuclear power.

            We don't need to take the enormous
risk of building new nuclear plants-or having
nuclear poisons over our heads. Safe energy
technologies are here.

                                                  
          -30-

Karl Grossman, professor of journalism at the
State University of New York/College at Old
Westbury, is the author of The Wrong Stuff (Common
Courage Press) and narrator of the TV documentary
Nukes In Space (www.envirovideo.com).

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Global Network Against Weapons & Nuclear Power in
Space
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http://www.space4peace.org
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