edit: It's obvious the quoted person had no idea what they were doing -- even a few seconds at arms' length from a fresh nuclear reactor core would be fatal. And quite a few satellites in that era were nuclear-powered.
It's not as if accurate knowledge of radiation was readily available, in the 1970's.
You're right, I didn't realize they fired quite that many (31?!) BES-5s into space and those are really the only non-experimental ones. Still, the chances of one of those falling out of orbit as a functioning reactor are about nil.
(By the way, there's an documented instance [0] mentioned in the sibling comments. The hazard is much worse than you'd think: the space reactor didn't simply fall in one piece, but left a trail of fragments 600 km long, some of which were lethally radioactive. It's pretty lucky this one happened in an uninhabited wasteland).
Yes but those dangers are the dangers of radioactive material - it's naturally 'hot', much of it also chemically toxic, etc. It's not core-at-criticality-that-murders-you-as-you-stand-next-to-it type of dangerous. I think that's still an essentially hypothetical danger of nuclear space junk.
As a general rule, it's not reactors functioning inside design parameters that are cause for concern, but rather failed reactors that have spew their guts and stopped working. Those are the reactors that will fuck you up.
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It wouldn't.
edit: It's obvious the quoted person had no idea what they were doing -- even a few seconds at arms' length from a fresh nuclear reactor core would be fatal. And quite a few satellites in that era were nuclear-powered.
It's not as if accurate knowledge of radiation was readily available, in the 1970's.
They didn't shoot nuclear reactor cores into space. RTGs are still dangerous but people do stand next to them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioisotope_thermoelectric_ge...
Some of the Russian satellites had full-on liquid cooled nuclear reactors, not RTGs.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/TOPAZ_nuclear_reactor
The flight profile did indeed have the reactor core being ejected into a graveyard orbit before deorbiting the satellite:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kosmos_954
The US ran a couple of experiments but otherwise didn't officially use them:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SNAP-10A
Believe it or not, lots of nuclear fission satellites in the 1960's-70's.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_space#Fission...
You're right, I didn't realize they fired quite that many (31?!) BES-5s into space and those are really the only non-experimental ones. Still, the chances of one of those falling out of orbit as a functioning reactor are about nil.
The posterior probability, given that you've already found a very rare piece of space debris, would have been high.
https://xkcd.com/795/
(By the way, there's an documented instance [0] mentioned in the sibling comments. The hazard is much worse than you'd think: the space reactor didn't simply fall in one piece, but left a trail of fragments 600 km long, some of which were lethally radioactive. It's pretty lucky this one happened in an uninhabited wasteland).
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kosmos_954
Yes but those dangers are the dangers of radioactive material - it's naturally 'hot', much of it also chemically toxic, etc. It's not core-at-criticality-that-murders-you-as-you-stand-next-to-it type of dangerous. I think that's still an essentially hypothetical danger of nuclear space junk.
As a general rule, it's not reactors functioning inside design parameters that are cause for concern, but rather failed reactors that have spew their guts and stopped working. Those are the reactors that will fuck you up.