People get tired of doing the numbers for the ignorant...

During the Cassini debate Helen Caldicott made the claim that the Cassini RTG could kill every single person on Earth...

I went through a several page derivation using physics and medical studies showing just how insanely untrue that statement was... people still made the claim... at some point it IS justified to laugh at morons and call them the fools that they are...

The columbia and challenger disasters were among the most violent space disasters we have had, yet in each accident many fragile objects that were in no way designed to withstand extremes survived (including video tape). RTG's are designed to withstand these extremes... they have been tested in the lab and, as you say, real world disaster... they have held up. The chicken littles start with non-realistic assumptions (that the fuel will become an atomized fine powder) and the pervert the science and the numbers to make it seem like a global catastrophe.

The arguments by Kaku and Caldicot essentially boiled down to: If you were to finely divide the fuel elements of an RTG up into equal portions for every human being on Earth, and IF you were to place these portions into everyones lungs, and IF these portions caused a fatal cancer (Impossibly unlikely) in every person, THEN the Cassini RTG COULD kill everyone on Earth....

When dealing with arguments like these it is fair to call the proponents dishonest scum...