🚀 go-pugleaf

> According to activist and musician Jello Biafra, the next flight of the
> shuttle was to carring a payload of 46 pounds of *plutonium*.

He's misinformed in several ways.  For one thing, it wasn't the next
flight; two flights circa June were scheduled to carry isotope-powered
planetary probes (Ulysses and Galileo).  For another thing, he's using that
great scare word "plutonium" without mentioning that it would go up in
an armored canister designed to survive a launch failure.  (There have
been some doubts expressed about whether the canisters are in fact tough
enough for all possible cases, but they definitely would have survived
the Challenger disaster.)  This is not just speculation:  such a canister
went into the ocean some years ago after an expendable launcher failed;
it was recovered intact, wiped clean, and re-used.

> 2. If so, I thought there was a law or treaty or something that we're
>    involved with that prohibits the launching of radioactive material
>    into space; and that this treaty was the reason we don't put nuclear
>    reactors into space.

Nope.  There is no such treaty.  In any case it would probably exempt
armored isotope canisters, because there is just no other satisfactory
way of powering outer-planet missions -- there isn't enough sunlight out
there for solar panels.

The US has put one reactor into space, although not recently.  The Soviet
Union routinely uses small reactors to power its military radarsats.
-- 
Those who do not understand Unix are |  Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology
condemned to reinvent it, poorly.    | {allegra,ihnp4,decvax,utai}!utzoo!henry