The Toxic Crash of Phobos-Grunt
Russia’s Phobos-Grunt space probe, with 22 pounds of radioactive
Cobalt-57 on board, fell to Earth Sunday. The probe was launched in
November to go to Phobos, a moon of Mars, but its rocket system failed
to fire it onward from low Earth orbit.
There is some confusion as to where pieces of the 14.9-ton probe
fell. The Associated Press reported Sunday that “pieces…landed in water
1,250 kilometers west of Wellington Island in Chile’s south, the Russian
military Air and Space Defense Forces said in a statement.” The AP
dispatch, datelined Moscow, quoted a spokesman, Colonel Alexei
Zolotukhin, as saying that this “deserted ocean area is where Russia
guides its discarded space cargo ships serving the International Space
Station.”
But, the article went on: “RIA Novosti news agency, however, cited
Russian ballistic experts who said the fragments fell over a broader
patch of Earth’s surface, spreading from the Atlantic and including the
territory of Brazil. It said the midpoint of the crash zone was located
in the Brazilian state of Goias.”
“The $170 million craft was one of the heaviest and most toxic pieces
of space junk ever to crash to Earth, but space officials and experts
said the risks posed by its crash were minimal because the toxic rocket
fuel on board and most of the craft’s structure would burn up in the
atmosphere high above the Earth anyway,” said the article by Vladimir
Isachenkov.
What happened demonstrates what could have occurred to the
plutonium-fueled rover which NASA calls Curiosity which it launched on
November 26 on a voyage to Mars. Curiosity’s launch went without
incident. It is now on its way to Mars. But it could have ended up like
Phobos-Grunt—falling back to Earth from orbit, its 10.6 pounds of
plutonium released as deadly radioactive dust.
Moreover, the United States and Russia are both planning to launch
other space devices with nuclear materials on board. Accidents involving
discharge of nuclear materials is inevitable—they’ve already occurred
in both the U.S. and Russian/Soviet space programs.
NASA is not only planning more space missions using plutonium but it
is developing nuclear-powered rockets. Some of the rocket designs go
back to the 1950s and 60s and the projects had come to an end out of
concern of such a rocket blowing up on launch or falling back to Earth.
Further, NASA is planning nuclear-powered colonies on the Moon and Mars.
These nuclear power systems would be launched from Earth—and there
could be release of radioactive material in an accident on launch or a
subsequent crash back to Earth.
Involved is a lethal game of space-borne nuclear Russian roulette.
The Phobos-Grunt space probe “got stranded in Earth’s orbit after its
Nov. 9 launch,” said the AP, “and efforts by Russian and European Space
Agency exports to bring it back to life failed.” Roscosmos, the
Russian space agency, then estimated that Phobos-Grunt would fall to
Earth in January and it would come down along a swatch that included
southern Europe, the Atlantic, South America and the Pacific.
Roscosmos “predicted that only between 20 and 40 fragments” of the
probe “with a total weight of up to 200 kilograms—440 pounds—would
survive the re-entry and plummet to Earth,” the AP said.
The Cobalt-57 was contained in “one of the craft’s instruments,” said
AP. Roscomos, it said, claimed the Cobalt-57 posed “no threat of
radioactive contamination.”
Indeed, Cobalt-57 is not plutonium, considered the most deadly radioactive substance. Nevertheless, it still can be harmful.
As the U.S. Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory says
in a “Human Health Fact Sheet,” available at
http://www.evs.anl.gov/pub/doc/Cobalt.pdf, Cobalt-57 has a half-life of
270 days, “long enough to warrant concern.” (The hazardous lifetime of a
radioactive material is 10 to 20 times its half-life.) The “Human
Health Fact Sheets” notes that Cobalt-57 can cause cancer. It “can be
taken into the body by eating food, drinking water, or breathing.”
The AP article Sunday said the $170 million Phobos-Grunt involved “Russia’s
most expensive and most ambitious space mission since Soviet times.”
The last Soviet interplanetary mission occurred in 1996: a probe to go
to Mars “built by the same Moscow-based NPO Lavochkin company” which
constructed Phobos-Grunt, said AP. The Mars 96 space probe had plutonium
on board.
It also “experienced an engine failure and crashed shortly after its
launch,” said AP. The Mars 96 space probe “crash drew strong
international fears because of around 200 grams of plutonium on board.
The craft eventually showered its fragments over the Chile-Bolivia
border in the Andes Mountains, and the pieces were never recovered.”
The AP article said the “worst ever radiation spill from a derelict
space vehicle,” the crash back to Earth in 1978 of the Cosmos 954
satellite that contained a working nuclear reactor. Radioactive debris
fell over northwestern Canada.
The worst U.S. accident involving a space device with nuclear
materials was the fall from orbit in 1964 of a satellite powered by 2.1
pounds of plutonium. The fiery re-entry resulted in a wide dusting of
fine particles of plutonium from its SNAP 9-A nuclear system over the
Earth, according to subsequent research. Dr. John Gofman, professor of
medical physics at the University of California at Berkeley, long linked
this accident to an increase in global lung cancer. A millionth of a
gram of plutonium is a fatal dose.
This mishap was cited in the Final Environmental Impact Statement
that NASA prepared for the Curiosity mission as being among the three
accidents which have occurred among the 26 U.S. space missions that have
used plutonium. In the wake of the SNAP 9-A accident, NASA switched to
solar energy on satellites. Now all satellites and the International
Space Station are solar powered.
Still, there has continued to be a push through the years for using
nuclear power in space with that drive accelerating in recent times.
Major U.S. space nuclear power work is now underway at NASA’s Marshall
Space Flight Center in Alabama.
“NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center here is expanding the scope of its nuclear technology work,” wrote Frank Morring, Jr. in Aviation Week on
November 15. Marshall has been working “with the Department of Energy
on nuclear power technology that might one day power a lunar outpost,”
said the article. “That work continues, but it has expanded to encompass
another technology goal under the new Obama policy: advanced in-space
propulsion.”
The Obama administration is also seeking construction of a facility
at Idaho National Laboratory to produce the isotope of plutonium that is
used in space nuclear systems, Plutonium-238. It is an “ill-conceived
plan” that risks the public’s safety, says James Powell, executive
director of Keep Yellowstone Nuclear Free. The organization has been
fighting the opening of the facility.
Because Florida is where the Kennedy Space Center is located, is on
the front line for launches in the U.S. space nuclear program. Pax
Christi of Tampa Bay and other Florida groups were active in protesting
the Curiosity launch. They took to the streets with signs declaring: “No
Nukes In Space” and “Danger: Launching of NASA Mars Probe With 10 Lbs.
Plutonium. Don’t Do Disney.” That referred to Disney theme parks in
Orlando.
NASA’s Final Environmental Impact Statement for the Curiosity mission
said a launch accident releasing plutonium had a 1-in-420 chance of
happening and could “release material into the regional area defined…to
be within…62 miles of the launch pad,” That would take in Orlando.
“Overall” on the Curiosity mission, NASA said the odds were 1-in-220
of plutonium being released. This included in a fall back to Earth, as
the Phobos-Grunt space probe suffered.
John Stewart of Pax Christi of Tampa Bay maintained before the
Curiosity launch: “NASA is planning a mission that could endanger not
only its future but the state of Florida and beyond. The absurd—and
maddening—aspect of this risk is that it is unnecessary. The locomotion
for NASA’s Sojourner Mars rover, launched in 1996, and the Spirit and
Opportunity Mars rovers, both launched in 2003, was solar powered, with
the latter two rovers performing well beyond what their engineers
expected. Curiosity’s locomotion could also be solar-powered. NASA
admits this in its EIS, but decided to put us all at risk because
plutonium-powered batteries last longer and they want to have the
‘flexibility to select the most scientifically interesting location on
the surface’ of Mars.”
Beyond the potential price in lives, space nuclear power has a high
cost financially. The potential clean-up costs for dispersal of the 10.6
pounds of plutonium on Curiosity would be, said the Final Environmental
Impact Statement for the mission, $267 million for each square mile of
farmland contaminated, $478 million for each square mile of forests and
$1.5 billion for each square mile of “mixed-use urban areas.” The
Curiosity mission itself costs $2.5 billion.
Bruce Gagnon, coordinator of the Global Network Against Weapons &
Nuclear Power in Space, contends: “The taxpayers are being asked once
again to pay for nuclear missions that could endanger the lives of all
the people on the planet. Have we not learned anything from Chernobyl
and Fukushima? We don’t need to be launching nukes into space. It’s not a
gamble we can afford to take.”
Karl Grossman, professor of journalism at the State University of New York/College of New York, is the author of the book, The Wrong Stuff: The Space’s Program’s Nuclear Threat to Our Planet (Common Courage Press) and wrote and presented the TV program Nukes In Space: The Nuclearization and Weaponization of the Heavens (www.envirovideo.com).
