A Short History of Nuclear Folly by Rudolph Herzog

Author:Rudolph Herzog [Herzog, Rudolph]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-61219-174-4
Publisher: Melville House
Published: 2013-04-29T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER SEVEN

Flying Reactors

There are places where radioactive substances have no business being. One of them is space. That may sound like science fiction, but it is, in fact, everyday reality. Solar-powered sails generate insufficient power to keep many types of satellites and space probes running. The Cassini-Huygens spacecraft, for instance, which arrived at Saturn in 2004, used atomic batteries that generated energy by harnessing the decay of plutonium 238 atoms. The advantages of nuclear batteries for space travel are obvious. They are extremely durable and capable of reliably generating the amount of energy required for long trips through outer space.

By the end of the 1960s, leaders and technicians in the Soviet Union, the first country to develop satellite technology, began to see even the most powerful nuclear batteries as insufficient to their needs and focused on building reactors to power new satellites. Miniature atomic power plants with uranium 235 fuel were used to power RORSAT military surveillance satellites. These mechanical spies watched over enemy naval movements from low-earth orbit. At the end of their lifespan, they were simply blasted into higher orbits. The idea was that their nuclear fuel could continue to decay, for centuries, without harming anyone. In the years before 1998, dozens of RORSATs ended up in what amounted to a space junkyard.

The builders of these satellites didn’t want to acknowledge that eventually something would go wrong with the nuclear reactors orbiting the earth. They had equipped the satellites with emergency rockets to offload the reactors if necessary, and they claimed their system was foolproof. But in November 1977, they found out just how real a possibility a catastrophe could be. Cosmos 954, a fourteen-meter-long RORSAT with forty-five kilograms of uranium on board, suddenly began to lose altitude when technicians tried to send it into higher orbit. For reason that remained unknown, the emergency system failed. Attempts to detach the reactor failed. As Cosmos 954 approached closer and closer, there were frantic debates on the surface of the earth. On November 1977, the Soviets informed the U.S. State Department about the situation. A staff of American experts was set up, and they were able to predict the day on which the satellite would re-enter the earth’s atmosphere: January 24, 1978. But no one knew where the live nuclear reactor would crash. One of the experts involved described the enterprise as “playing night baseball with the lights out.”

Over the course of January, the press got wind of the impending Cosmos catastrophe. Newspapers immediately began speculating about what was in store for humanity should the reactor crash into New York, Paris, or Tokyo. Journalists made the situation sound like a gigantic game of Russian roulette. While the Soviets assured the world that there would be no meltdown, in the middle of the Cold War no one knew whether the Kremlin leadership could be taken at its word.

By the time Cosmos 954 began to plunge toward North America during its 2,089th orbit, people’s nerves were completely frayed, but the world got lucky.

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