Ed Kyle wrote:

Here is the thing about an RTG space launch. The worst case
would be a launch failure on or near the pad - an explosion
and a big nasty fire that spread everything around and burned
for awhile with an onshore seabreeze blowing the smoke back
toward Merritt Island. Maybe the RTG modules stay mostly
intact as designed, etc., but what are the locals going to do?
They are going to beat it, that's what, hurricane evacuation
style, abandoning their cars roadside when the gas stations
run out as usual, etc.. A few will die during the evacuation, as
they usally do, from accidents or fistfights or whatever.

Unfortunate, and based on the unreasoning fear of anything "nuclear".
In the Titan 4B / Cassini launch, the greater immediate hazard from an
on pad or early launch explosion would have been from the nitrogen
tetroxide rather than the plutonium.

And who is going to handle the cleanup situation to the survivor's
satisfaction? FEMA? The Air Force? The Government that
has won its citizens over with its competence recently? And
given their rumor-spreading performance during Katrina, just
how well should we expect the national media to cover this
crises?

I expect the media to spread unreasoning fear. Particularly if they
get Mr Grossman on an interview. They will cause more immediate damage
than the any actual hazard from plutonium.

What of the Port Canaveral fisheries? What of Port
Canaveral, with its cargo and passenger ships? What of
the Cape Canaveral and Kennedy Space Center launch sites?
How much money to clean the mess?

How these are affected will depend on the nature of the accident. The
greatest fear comes from the most unlikely scenarios, e.g., the intact
stack lands on top of Port Canaveral. As Grossman cites from the EIS,
the potential decontamination cost estimate is up to 1.3 billion per
square mile. This is for mixed-use urban areas. Rangeland
decontamination estimates is 241 million per square mile.

Remember, Lockheed Martin is flying this particular RTG
aboard an unproven Atlas 5 variant (551, never flown before)
- on a particular rocket that was damaged, by the way, during
a recent hurricane - on a machine that was designed to meet
a 2% acceptable mission loss rate criteria.

As I am sure you are aware, the damage was to the SRB that was already
attached to the Atlas V. The SRB was replaced. The 2% loss rate is
not from launch pad explosions and early launch failures but for the
entire mission up to spacecraft separation. Even with launch pad
explosions and early launch failures, the vast majority of accident
scenarios is for the RTG to survive intact.

The odds are against failure, but the odds of failure are still very
real. I look at it this way. I might go watch the launch myself,
but I wouldn't take my kids.

- Ed Kyle