Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.
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"When Chernobyl reached peak x power during its explosion it was about 350 gigawatts for a fraction of a second. This is 700 gigawatts continuously, right, it's a non-stop Chernobyl going on."
Well, maybe? For obvious reasons we'll never get the EPA to approve a ground test, and I'd be a bit leery about LEO too, which leaves us just hoping that Zubrin's paper was solid.
Of course, the 66 km/s exhaust version was his conservative design; the really speculative version upgrades the uranium enrichment level from "20%" to "weapons grade" and bumps up the yield, to get the delta-V to a few percent of the speed of light. YOLO, right?
Either way, while I'm generally a big fan of the SpaceX "get hardware flying so if it breaks you learn more faster" strategy, I think I'd be cool with taking things more slowly before assembling a 200,000 megaton hopefully-not-a-bomb in orbit.
Chernobyl also released radiation from reactions that have taken place in the months before, so it's not really a good approximation of harm that'd be caused by using nuclear saltwater rockets for space launches.
It is, however, in essence similar to Orion launches, and the radiation release there was found to not be particularly bad by the engineers worrying about it. I'm not sure what approaches they used, but if they were using LNTR and got a figure of "may give 1 person cancer" then it's probably not a big deal.
In any case, it's one of those questions that can't be answered without a good simulation.
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