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I guess plutonium is right out then. I hope they make exceptions for sufficiently safe launch vehicles that put their payloads beyond Earth orbit.




Plutonium is not a propellant.



It’s still not a propellant, and use of nuclear explosives in the atmosphere or near earth orbit is already covered by other treaties.


There’s nuclear thermal rocket engines that have been explored, but those don’t actually use the nuclear fuel as a propellant either. They use hydrogen. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NERVA


NASA was even beginning to study gas–core nuclear engines, where the nuclear fuel is a superheated gas or plasma. Some open–cycle designs where proposed, but NASA choose to study closed–cycle engines such as the nuclear lightbulb engine instead because they don’t leak fissile fuel into the propellant stream. Leaving aside the safety problems, it is uneconomical to lift a fuel into space only to have it escape the rocket unused.


It's technically a propellant - the reaction mass is the spent fragments of each explosion.


The article mentions an exception to allow mercury use:

“The Minamata Convention on Mercury seeks to eliminate all mercury uses where technically-achievable non-mercury alternatives are available,”

By comparison, plutonium is not particularly toxic. I see no reason a similar treaty wouldn't have a similar exception.




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