Sending Plutonium to Pluto?

[Urbane Guerrilla]

I thought those guys were dicked up when they raised the same squawk about Cassini, and I haven't seen much to change that opinion. There are more immediate contamination concerns with the wrecks of the USS Thresher, USS Scorpion, and the Soviet November and Mike sinkings -- all in various parts of the Atlantic. For the Pacific, we have that sunken Golf SSB. I think there are still nuclear warheads down there, and guaranteed those still have plutonium. Any tritium would be mainly gone, as it's been through three or four half-lives.

The CNN.com article contains a couple of eyebrow-raising questionable statements. One is probably a typo: it'd be plutonium-239, not -238. 238 is regular uranium, the most stable/least unstable isotope, half life approximately the age of the Earth. That's right, this old world has about half the U-238 it started with down there in the core, and a lot more lead. The other is the 5000fps velocity figure for a "large-caliber rifle." No; large bore velocities are typically half that and even the fastest-stepping bullets around are small-bore critters of the .17 caliber type and are nearer 4000 fps than 5000, and then only at the muzzle -- lighter bullets slow down more swiftly from drag than heavier ones will.

This is politics, and they are banking on our ignorance -- not much to do with the reality of the matter.