Their basic claim is that NASA is a pawn of the Defense Department and all these space probes are simply baby steps to getting nuclear power death rays circling the planet so the U.S. can continue to systematically oppress our enemies. These people are the dumbest of the dumb. To them technology is evil in principle and they will not be happy until we are all eating organic food grown in local garden cooperatives with everything powered by windmills. One of the driving personalities of this ridiculous radiation scare is Karl Grossman, a journalist. His book, The Wrong Stuff, is a pseudoscientific diatribe about technology run amok.
Activist journalists seem to favor using irrational fears of radiation as attention getters.
The University's own professor of journalism Robert Jensen and his shameless Anti-War Committee pushed a propaganda video on campus last year called Metal of Dishonor about depleted Uranium bullets. This video supported a bizarre notion of vaporized radioactive material blowing around the globe, or at least around Iraq, causing sickness everywhere it goes, for ever and ever. We are among the first in history to benefit from space exploration. Perhaps we should refer to experts regarding how the space program should be run. NASA rightly insists that Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generation is the method of choice to energize a deep space probe.