by Karl Grossman
by Karl Grossman
IN NOVEMBER, A RUSSIAN PROBE CRASHED TO EARTH ALONG THE BOLIVIA/CHILE BORDER. US OFFICIALS ADMIT THEY DON'T HAVE A CLUE WHAT HAPPENED TO THE DEADLY PLUTONIUM IT CARRIED.
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It was brighter than the brightest star, said John Van
der Brink, and had a tail about 12 times the width of
the full moon with "sparkling bits sort of coming off
the back of it. This was an extraordinarily spectacular
event." From his vantage point in the mountains of
northern Chile where he and his wife had gone to watch
meteors, he had "no illusions that it was anything other
than a piece of space debris" falling to Earth through
the ink black night sky. Van der Brink recently retired
as an electronics specialist from the European Southern
Observatory in Chile.
Leo Alvarado, a postgraduate student of geology from Chile's Universidad Cat¢lica del Norte, |
who had been
driving with four colleagues across the Atacama Desert
in northern Chile, saw it too, changing brilliant colors
as it came down. "We watched it break up into many
pieces and burn," he recounted.
What they and other eyewitnesses saw last November 16 was Russia's Mars 96 space probe descending along a swath of Chile and Bolivia and scattering its remains across a 10,000 square mile area. The probe carried about a half pound of deadly plutonium divided into four battery canisters that were to serve as electricity sources for Mars rovers. Like their US counterparts, the containers were touted as sufficiently strong and heat resistant to remain intact, no matter what. |
The US is now admitting that may not have been the case.
"There are two possibilities," said Gordon Bendick, director of legislative affairs of the National Security Council, about the fate of the canisters. "One, they were destroyed coming through the atmosphere [and the plutonium dispersed]. Two, they survived and impacted the earth and drove through penetrating the surface ... or could have hit rock and bounced off like an agate marble. ... I don't give any credence for any one [possibility] because I don't know." "Named after Pluto, god of the underworld, [plutonium] is so toxic that less than one-millionth of a gram, an invisible particle, |
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is a carcinogenic dose," emphasized
Dr. Helen Caldicott, president emeritus of Physicians
for Social Responsibility. "One pound, if uniformly
distributed, could hypothetically induce lung cancer in
every person on Earth."
If the probe "burned up and formed fine plutonium oxide particles...[t]here would be an increased hazard of lung cancer," commented Dr. John Gofman, professor emeritus of radiological physics at the University of California at Berkeley, who investigated the 1964 crash back to Earth of a US SNAP-9A (Systems for Nuclear Auxiliary Power). When its plutonium-fueled |
space power system burned up in the atmosphere, 2.l pounds of plutonium
vaporized and dispersed worldwide. Dr. Gofman has long
linked that accident with an increased level of lung
cancer.
If the battery canisters somehow landed intact, there is also the question of nuclear proliferation. The US displays concern over the spread of nuclear material that could be used by "rogue" states, terrorist groups, and the like. Although the probe's plutonium-238 could not be used to make bombs it does not fission (split) like the plutonium-239 used in nuclear weapons it could still be extremely dangerous in the wrong hands. |
Plutonium-238's relatively shorter half-life of 87.8
years, compared to a half-life of 24,500 years for
plutonium-239, is why it is used in space probes its
comparatively rapid disintegration produces heat which
is translated into electricity. The quick decay also
makes plutonium-238 some 280 times more radioactive than
plutonium-239, and thus a more extraordinarily toxic
nuclear poison if inhaled as vapor or small particles
that become lodged in the lung.
HOT PANTS AND COOL RESPONSES |
| enough to stand what I would call a non-standard reentry pattern, the release was maybe up to 200 grams of plutonium, which is like a drop of blood in the Pacific Ocean. There is no environmental problem with a couple of hundred grams. ... If in fact this thing survived reentry into the atmosphere and these things came down and crash-impacted on the earth they were meant to penetrate the earth, much as the containers with the plutonium-238 were meant to penetrate Mars, their original target they'll never be found. And even if they did and were found, people could walk around with them in their pants pockets for the rest of their lives and never be bothered. ... If it became particulate matter after |
diffusing in the
atmosphere, burned plutonium would be much similar to
open air testing that the French did in the Pacific as Australia got a phone call from Clinton; Chile "got a two-week-old fax." recently as a few years ago." Nor was that possibility dangerous, since "we can find no positive causal link" between radioactivity released |
in atomic bomb testing
done by the US in Utah, for example, and cancer, the NSC
director of legislative affairs claimed.
Such serenity did not always reign. When the US Space Command announced on November 17, 1996, that the wayward Russian probe "will reenter the Earth's atmosphere ... with a predicted impact point ... in east-central Australia" in a matter of hours, President Bill Clinton telephoned Australian Prime Minister John Howard. He offered the "assets we have in the Department of Energy" to deal with any radioactive contamination. (Clinton was planning to fly to Australia the following day for a state visit, the first stop before an Asia tour.) | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Howard placed the Australian military and government on
full alert. He held a press conference to inform the
Australian people of the potential danger and called on
them to remain calm. "I can't tell you where it is going
to land. I can't tell you when," the prime minister
declared.8 He thanked Clinton for his call and warned
Australians to use "extreme caution" if they come in
contact with remnants of the Russian space probe. The
US television networks all featured stories on their
Sunday evening news programs. "Mars probe expected to
fall within hours," reported CNN.
Russian Space Agency |
spokesman Vladimir Ananyev
admitted: "We've got a problem." Russian NTV
television reported: "Unburned bits of the station could
hit the Earth. To make matters worse the station has
four thermoelectric generators fueled by radioactive
plutonium." The global media attention made "the
danger of a disaster involving a plutonium space project
real ... to people of the world," commented Bruce
Gagnon, co-coordinator of the Global Network Against
Weapons and Nuclear Power in Space.
Back in Australia, some people "hit the panic button when President Clinton rang the |
Prime Minister," reported the Irish Times from Adelaide: A "national crisis" had been "sparked by this interplanetary ballistic bungle." Others hit the bottle: "A barkeeper in the tiny outback town of Tibooburra offered his customers free beer after officials announced the probe might land in a nearby swamp. A bookmaker in central Australia's Alice Springs said dozens of gamblers tried to place bets on where the Russian probe would crash." In fact, belying its motto "Masters of Space," the US Space Command (USSPACECOM) the arm of the US Air Force |
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charged with space warfare and tracking man-made objects
in space had made the first of a series of blunders.
Through November 17, the day after the Mars 96 space
probe had already fallen on South America, the Space
Command remained focused down under.
The succession of errors caused "a government source" to tell Space News: "I think it's a real black eye for the U.S. Space Command and their space tracking capabilities." In fact, on November 17, the Space Command made another |
not-so-masterly prediction: The probe would fall not on
Australia, but to the east, in the Pacific. It then
updated this report with news that Mars 96 had fallen in
the Pacific just west of South America between Easter
Island and the coast of Chile. Meanwhile, Russia's
Rossiiskiye Vesti news announced the probe had "crashed
to its doom in the Pacific Ocean west of
Australia,"[sic] and then put the site in another
patch of Pacific, east of Australia and west of South
America.
"The thing both agree on is that the Mars '96 probe landed in the water," heralded USA Today."That means the radioactive batteries |
in its lander vehicles with their
... ounces of potentially lethal plutonium, lie at the
bottom of the ocean."
Prime Minister Howard went before Australia's House of Representatives: "It does appear that what we all have is a happy ending to the saga of the Russian spacecraft." The Washington Post ran the headline: "Errant Russian Spacecraft Crashes Harmlessly After Scaring Australia."
BORDERLINE SCANDALOUS |
| Space Command completely revised its account yet again: It changed not only where but also when the probe fell not off South America but on Chile and Bolivia, and not on November 17 but the night before. "We now believe that the object that reentered on November 17, which we first thought to be the Mars 96 probe, was in fact the fourth stage of the booster rocket [rather than the probe itself and the batteries]. Confusion has surrounded key events and times in this mission, including the last stages of the rocket burn, the separation of the Mars 96 probe from the rocket, and the final reentry into the Earth's atmosphere of the booster and the probe.USSPACECOM has now completed an extensive post-event |
analysis that has led to this new conclusion
which supports Russian statements about when their Mars
96 probe reentered the atmosphere. The area where any
debris surviving this re-entry could have fallen is
located along an approximately 50-mile-wide and
200-mile-long path, oriented southwest to northeast.
This path is centered approximately 20 miles east of the
Chilean city of Iquique and includes Chilean territory,
the border area of Bolivia and the Pacific Ocean."
"The fact that the U.S. government initially missed the reentry of the Mars 96 space probe is embarrassing and worse," commented Steven |
Aftergood, a senior research
analyst for the Federation of American Scientists. "It
calls into question the quality of our space tracking
abilities. When you consider that this issue reached all
the way up to the White House and had the president
contacting the prime minister of Australia over a
re-entry that already occurred, it's borderline
scandalous."
RACISM AND SPACISM |
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the President, and
[Chile] got a two-week-old fax from somebody." Manuel
Baquedano, director of the Institute for Ecological
Policy in Chile, asked, "Are the lives of Australians
worth more than the lives [of Chileans]?"
Months later, the fate of the probe and the plutonium it carried remains unclear. The US, which gave a presidential-level pledge of "assets" to Australia to deal with any radioactive contamination when it looked like the probe was falling on Australia, was not providing any major assistance to Chile or Bolivia. |
Dr. Luis Barrera, an astrophysicist and director of the Astronomy Institute at the Universidad Catolica del Norte, said that NASA officials had e-mailed him early on and congratulated him for gathering eyewitness accounts of the probe's disintegration. Then the agency's interest subsided. He suspects NASA doesn't want too much attention paid because bad publicity might impact on NASA's already controversial plan to launch a record 72.3 pounds of plutonium on its Cassini probe scheduled for October. The Russian government has been "uncooperative," said Barrera, still not giving Chile a description of the canisters so that searchers would know what to look for if the batteries remained intact. |
The US news media were similarly blast about the
implications for Latin America. The New York Times
relegated the story to a five-paragraph Reuters dispatch
under "World News Briefs" buried inside its December 14
edition.
As to why the US was not providing the "assets we have in the Department of Energy" that Clinton promised Australia, Space News reported in January that it was told by a "U.S. government source" that "specially-equipped Department of Energy aircraft capable of spotting from the air the nuclear material carried in the Russian spacecraft ... were not deployed |
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as the aircraft cannot operate at the altitudes and
terrain where Mars 96 may have hit Earth." According
to Bendick at the NSC, "It's not the United States'
responsibility to protect the world from this. ... We
told Bolivia and Chile that we would provide technical
assistance, but they haven't requested any. They asked
for technical data and we provided [information on] the
radioactive combination of the air, the ground and the
water, and we said it is negligible."
There did not, however, seem to be any hard evidence for that optimistic assessment. In January, the Chilean |
government asked its ministries of Defense and Interior
and the Chilean Nuclear Energy Commission to conduct a
study "to determine with absolute certainty [if there
was] radioactive contamination." "The impacts on
health are not clear," said Barrera, but there is
concern because the water source for several cities is
in the impacted region. Scientists from his university,
Barrera explained, have gone to the approximate scene to
test water for plutonium.
Also, Bolivian officials reported that a police unit had found debris of the Mars |
96 space probe in Bolivia near
the Chilean border, but that report was later called
"unofficial" and is not supported by other reports.
ACCIDENTS HAPPEN Bringing that message home in a |
| spectacular way was the January 17 explosion of a Delta II rocket lofting a $40 million Air Force navigational satellite. The 12-story,$55 million rocket blew up 13 seconds after launch,turning the winter sky over the Cape Canaveral Air Station into a distinctly unpatriotic Fourth of July-style fireworks display. "Take cover immediately from falling debris," announced an Air Force officer over the public address system at the launch site. "I say again, take cover immediately from falling debris." As the burning fragments descended over a wide area, a cloud of toxic chemicals formed above the site and began drifting out to sea, then back to land and then south along Florida's Atlantic | Coast. It contained nitrogen tetroxide and monomethylhydrazine, components of the rocket's fuel both described by NASA documents as "deadly if a person comes into contact" with them. Residents as far south as Vero Beach, 100 miles away, were told by the Cape Canaveral officials to stay inside, close all windows and doors, and turn off air conditioning and heating units. At the Cape Canaveral Elementary School, Brad Smith, a fourth- and fifth-grade teacher, described the cloud as having "weird purples and blues and reds." He said he pushed wet paper towels under the door to his classroom to keep the rocket fumes away from his students. | The accident occurred just where a Titan IV rocket is scheduled in October to launch the Cassini probe that will be carrying 72.3 pounds of plutonium. The Delta II blowup further demonstrates that "space technology can fail and accidents can happen," said Bruce Gagnon of the the Global Network Against Weapons and Nuclear Power in Space. Said Global Network co-coordinator Bill Sulzman, also director of the Colorado-based Citizens for Peace in Space: "They show that launch and flight failures are routine and that any claims that there is no real danger from Cassini is false. In fact, adding nuclear cargo to the situation is a setup for catastrophe." |
| In the wake of the Mars 96 and Delta II accidents, and with Cassini and other US space projects involving nuclear material planned, the Florida-based organization is stepping up its fight against nuclear power in space. In March, it plans a series of gatherings in Europe to rally support and will hold a protest at Florida's Kennedy Space Station on October 4, two days before the proposed Cassini launch. A sit-in on the launch pad to physically prevent the Cassini launch is one of the actions planned, said Gagnon. Said Gagnon, who is also coordinator of the Florida Coalition for Peace and Justice, |
"We're talking about attempting to get onto the
launch pad through whatever nonviolent means are
necessary.
We think it's important to try to stop this
launch."
DISPERSING DANGER
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plutonium will cause
increases in worker exposure." If the Cassini mission goes forward, many more people could be impacted. The initial danger is that a blowup on launch could break open or melt the plutonium-carrying canisters and spread radioactivity. The second potential flashpoint is the "slingshot maneuver" planned for 1999. In this "flyby" scheme, 22 months after launch, NASA will swing Cassini back toward Earth in order to use the planet's gravitational force to gain enough velocity to propel the probe on to Saturn, its final destination. During that passover, Cassini is to fly just 312 miles above the Earth's surface. But if there is a miscalculation or malfunction and |
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it comes in too close and undergoes what NASA calls
an "inadvertent reentry," it could burn up upon hitting
the 75-mile high atmosphere,
spreading plutonium over a
wide area.
NASA PR material gives the impression that even then,
the plutonium would not be dispersed as cancer-causing
vapor and respirable particles. But, in fact, the space agency's Final Environmental Impact Statement for the Cassini Mission totally contradicts that, saying, if the Cassini probe dips into the Earth's atmosphere during the "flyby," |
a sizeable portion of the plutonium fuel
would be released, including much of it as "vapor or
respirable particles." The NASA Final Environmental Impact Statement for the Cassini Mission also says that if there is such an "inadvertent reentry" during the planned Earth "flyby" of Cassini on August 16, 1999, and the probe breaks up dispersing plutonium, "approximately five billion of the estimated seven to eight billion world population ... could receive 99 percent or more of the radiation exposure."
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Despite the danger signs with which Mars 96 and Delta II lit the sky, the Clinton administration is pushing ahead not only with Cassini, but with other nukes in space. In September, the administration announced a national space policy that included the development of nuclear-propelled rockets for military and civilian uses. The Defense Special Weapons Agency will work on "multiple nuclear propulsion concepts" for military missions, while NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center's Advanced Concepts Division, along with Los Alamos National Laboratory, will develop nuclear propulsion for civilian uses. |
| Meanwhile, at the 14th Symposium on Space Nuclear Power and Propulsion in Albuquerque in January, scientists from Brookhaven National Laboratory recycled a plan to rocket high-level nuclear waste into space. The US government had proposed this same scheme decades ago, but rejected it out of fear that an accident on launch or a fall back to Earth would douse the planet with atomic waste. |
Recent events, says Gagnon, "show that despite all the
claims by NASA and others, technology can fail, that
spacecraft can fall out of the sky and burn up on
reentry. The Mars probe accident followed by the Delta II explosion gives us two clear examples of what can happen with Cassini. ... And Cassini, meanwhile, is one of many nuclear space missions to come lethal undertakings which we must stop." |
US acknowledgment that radiation may well have been
released over Chile and Bolivia when the Mars probe
nose-dived back to Earth is tacit admission that safety
systems are not foolproof.
Says John Pike, director of the Space Policy Project of the Federation of American Scientists: "If you liked Mars '96 you'll love Cassini." |
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