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Comment by njarboe | Hacker News Reader

It is too bad that most people are so afraid of anything nuclear. I hate to say it, but maybe people working on nuclear power need to change the name. Isotopic power would have pretty bland associations.

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.

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Consider the thermal Plutonium power sources that have been sent on outer Solar System missions. One of those crashing is a much more serious problem than a new U-235 reactor, since Plutonium is very toxic.

Plutonium isn't toxic, not any more than any other heavy metal.

It is radiotoxic

Nope, it is not. Not anymore than the straight radiation you would get from it.

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.

That already happened. Not something we'd want to happen regularly, but not as dramatic as one (me) would have thought.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kosmos_954#Aftermath

"maybe people working on nuclear power need to change the name"

Renaming things with bad public images is a popular trick.

Windscale > Sellafield

Blackwater > Xe Services > Academi

Philip Morris > Altria

The Blackwater one always mystified me. It’s like they set out to be villains.

They aren't?

It was founded in North Carolina. The large number of freshwater waterways around there are generally known as black water.

That means something very different to sailors.

Pray tell?

Blackwater is sewage containing bodily waste.

In Japan they just call them 'thermal plants' or 'thermal generators' or something like that. Still, in Japan you have people who follow around US aircraft carriers and submarines to sample their wake for any signs of radioactive discharge.

> In Japan they just call them 'thermal plants'

Japan has completely shut down all operations of Nuclear Plants since 2011. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_Japan

And as that page also explains, has restarted some of them, and the long-term policy calls nuclear power "the country's most important power source".

I haven't heard that before.

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)

Gen-shi-ryoku Hatsu-den-sho? Let's see if I got it right, my Japanese is a bit rusty.

I am not sure about the readings of the first two kanji (atomic) so I used generic ones heehe.

Thanks in advance.

Yes you are right.

原子 genshi means atom. 力 means power (strength). Stick them together and it means using the power of the atom.

A good way to remember energy levels is "longer life, lower energy." Things with a long half life are not decaying very fast. Short half lives, well clearly they don't want to be there, so neither should you.

It's an extremely toxic, dangerous material overall. The fear is well-founded in a geopolitically chaotic, variable world.

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.

I mean, there is a bit of precedence for the fear. It's not that we can't deal with the fission, it's that we can't have really really smart people on deck at all times. The consequences of big failures are pretty bad and pretty newsworthy.

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