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Culture War Roundup for the week of March 2, 2026

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The interesting part is the "vaporizing" here. I'm pretty sure that most failure modes of such a launch would not vaporize a significant fraction of the payload or even the engine cores. The "fallout" would quite literally be tens of thousands of 1-kg pits (and a few fuel pellets) raining down from the explosion. Compared with the alternative, that contaminates a much smaller area. Manual clean-up would be possible, economical and necessary from a proliferation (and ecological, of course) perspective.

Uranium is not the problem unless you vaporize tons of it (and I do mean vaporize, not just scatter tiny nuggets around). It's far more dangerous as a toxic heavy metal than due to radiation due to its very long half life of a billion years or more. Reactor meltdowns on earth are a problem because the reactors contain significant quantities of shorter lived and thus very strongly radioactive components, most notably Cesium-137 and Iodine-131. A reactor that has barely begun operation hasn't yet had time to accumulate significant quantities of those.

Fallout really doesn't apply here as it means small heavily radioactive particles that fall down downwind of the detonation. Those particles are generated by the neutron activation of the surrounding materials and mixing up the tiny debris with radiation products from a surface burst. For airburst the quantities are smaller and are so high in the atmosphere that they've had time to decay to safer isotopes by the time they fall down in months to years.