Edit: even on a round trip it wouldn't be a big deal, the reactor can just be jettisoned before re-entering Earth's gravity well. You just can't have a fission reactor with spent fuel anywhere near Earth orbit. Space reactors in general are pretty interesting, because the design criteria are so different from terrestrial power reactors.
I think if there’s one thing to be learned from previous missions, it’s that nothing will „just work“. If the ejection mechanism is damaged, or the spacecraft is hit by some object and rendered useless shortly before ejection, then the radioactive payload will make it to Earth. I think a roundtrip would be dangerous, and the core should be left at Mars.
Polluting the new homeland from the start, eh?
More seriously, we can afford to have a small amount of nuclear waste there, but we need to plan for it better than we have previously. First, document where it is and what it contains. Second, I don't know.
The correct response is reprocessing. Most of the "waste" generated by power reactors is actually still usable as fuel. It also eliminates the really long-lived stuff, so that the small amount of leftover waste only has to be kept stored for a much more manageable 500-1000 years.
Uranium 235 is a very low level radioactive metal. Even if the rocket blew up, the isotopic fuel would remain intact (that is, not vaporized into breathable particles). The radioactivity from a Uranium 235 isotopic reactor comes after the reactor has been running for some period of time (from byproducts of the nuclear reaction), not the original fuel itself.
When you talk of radiatoxicity what is usually meant is the hot particle theory which says that a bit of radioactive material lodged in one place is more likely to cause cancer, because the radiation given off repeatedly hits the same tissue. It turns out that in cohort studies done this is not true. Specifically people who have inhaled plutonium, an inadvisable thing to do, actually have lower rates of lung cancer.
Pu-238 has some radioactivity, although not as much as many fission products. Radioactivity is bad. But the fear over plutonium toxicity is actually overblown beyond the baseline radioactive dose it provides.
Renaming things with bad public images is a popular trick.
Windscale > Sellafield
Blackwater > Xe Services > Academi
Philip Morris > Altria
原子力(atomic, using atoms)+発電所(power plant) is the common term
eg 福島(Fukushima)第一(No. 1)原子力(nuclear)発電所(power plant)
I am not sure about the readings of the first two kanji (atomic) so I used generic ones heehe.
Thanks in advance.
原子 genshi means atom. 力 means power (strength). Stick them together and it means using the power of the atom.
Japan has completely shut down all operations of Nuclear Plants since 2011. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_Japan
Not to mention, in this case specifically, they're going to strap it to a rocket and send it to Mars.
Gonna be hard to sell people on the safety of the mission if we're potentially spewing nuclear material over thousands of square miles in the worst case scenario.
https://listverse.com/2012/01/20/top-10-space-age-radiation-...