Sending Plutonium to Pluto?

[Undertoad]

Right UG. The first launch containing plutonium was questionned hard and made it into Project Censored's annual list of unreported stories. A large amount of alarm went up that NASA could poison the entire state of Florida if a Challenger-esque explosion happened. Someone finally did the math and said, no it wouldn't. But the math is rarely news-worthy. I think any panic over this is due to leftovers from the previous panic, where people heard the alarm but not the explanation. Although NASA is often a miserable failure, I'm thinkin' many engineers have anticipated the question and developed an answer and nobody much thinks to ask them. This happens often in news beacuse the general alarm is so much more interesting than the debunking.