[ RadSafe ] Was there a Plutonium Power source aboard Apollo XIII

Jason Meade meadeja at vcu.edu
Mon Apr 2 08:39:28 CDT 2018


Plutonium is not remotely the most dangerous or deadly substance ever
created by humans.

Just one of the "scariest."

Karen Wetterhahn, for example, died from exposure to two drops of dimethyl
mercury absorbed through her gloves, for example.  While technically an
organic compound, researchers have distilled it into astonishingly lethal
concentrations.

And let's not even get into viral and infectious agents being toyed with in
labs across the globe.

On Mon, Apr 2, 2018 at 5:28 AM, Roger Helbig <rwhelbig at gmail.com> wrote:

> Was there a Plutonium power source aboard Apollo XIII?  This article
> claims that there was, but the source is Nuclear News, so it is not
> exactly known for its journalistic excellence.
>
> Roger Helbig
>
> https://beyondnuclearinternational.org/2018/03/31/the-real-houston-problem
>
> Has the world forgotten the catastrophic danger if a plutonium-powered
> space rocket crashed to Earth
>
> by Christina MacPherson
>
> Beyond Nuclear 31st March 2018, President Trump has announced that he
> wants the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) to
> “lead an innovative space exploration program to send American
> astronauts back to the moon, and eventually
> Mars.” But the risks such ventures would entail have scarcely been touched
> upon.
>
> For those of us who watched Ron Howard’s nail-biter of a
> motion picture, Apollo 13, and for others who remember the real-life drama
> as it unfolded in April 1970, collective breaths were held that the
> three-man crew would return safely to Earth. They did.
>
> What hardly anyone remembers now — and certainly few knew at the time
> — was that the
> greater catastrophe averted was not just the potential loss of three lives,
> tragic though that would have been. There was a lethal cargo on board that,
> if the craft had crashed or broken up, might have cost the lives of
> thousands and affected generations to come. It is a piece of history so
> rarely told that NASA has continued to take the same risk over and over
> again, as well as before Apollo 13. And that risk is to send rockets into
> space carrying the deadliest substance ever created by humans: plutonium.
> https://beyondnuclearinternational.org/2018/03/31/the-real-
> houston-problem/
>
> Christina MacPherson | April 2, 2018 at 4:04 am | Categories: safety,
> technology | URL: https://wp.me/phgse-zEL
>
> Trouble clicking? Copy and paste this URL into your browser:
> http://nuclear-news.net/2018/04/02/has-the-world-forgotten-
> the-catastrophic-danger-if-a-plutonium-powered-space-
> rocket-crashed-to-earth/
>
> Tell Word Press to get out of the Fake News business!
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-- 
Thanks,
Jason A Meade, AS, BS, MHSA, RRPT, R.T.(T)
Senior Radiation Safety Specialist
Virginia Commonwealth University


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meadeja at vcu.edu

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"A society grows great
when old men plant trees
whose shade they know
they shall never sit in."
-Old Greek proverb

"You call this bad? I'll tell you what bad is....
Bad is passing test depth at 80 feet per second with a thirty degree down
bubble.
Compared to that, this is a walk in the park."
-Carlo Ciliberti


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