The Houston Chronicle had a good interview on this too, but I can't find it now.

[In fact, many say the real danger from an accident would come from public panic.

"It's the public hysteria that I think would cause most of the deaths and sickness that we would see related to this, with car accidents and pregnant women miscarrying and that kind of thing," said Mary-Ellen Masterson-McGary, a radiation health physicist who investigated the 1979 Three Mile Island nuclear power plant accident.

Masterson-McGary and other experts say the canisters are not nuclear reactors, such as those that triggered the Three Mile Island accident or the 1986 explosion at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in Russia.

Unlike nuclear reactors, Cassini's canisters use neither fission nor fusion processes to produce electricity. Rather, they convert heat from the natural decay of plutonium into electricity.

Experts also note the fuel is a ceramic form of plutonium oxide - not the material used in nuclear weapons or power plants. That means it cannot explode and create the radiation sickness that followed Three Mile Island and Chernobyl accidents.

Known as plutonium-238, Cassini's fuel is heat resistant, highly insoluble and breaks mainly into large chunks that cannot be inhaled. The large chunks also would make it easy to clean up.

In addition, the fuel is protected by a multilayer containment system designed to survive launch accidents.]

More:

http://www.flatoday.com/space/explore/probes/cassini/cass01.htm

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Marcia