And as I mentioned in my post, it might be worthwhile as a tool to make hostile space environments more suitable for human exploration or settlement. I've always felt that space was the right place to do stupid things, like create hyper-polluting industries or environmentally hazardous processes because even if we misjudged it and did something really destructive, no one would get hurt and the damage would be localized to a place that was essentially uninhabitable anyway.

Places like the moon or the asteroid belt would be ideal to dump hazardous wastes, or build things that might accidentally go boom--providing that location already wasn't devoted to some important and productive human settlement or industry. But worlds where we had colonies or research facilities should be off limits.

The one exception that comes to mind is places that might harbor life, or fossil evidence of ancient life, such as Mars, Europa, Enceladus and so on. Another, non-terrestrial life form would be so scientifically important and of such enormous potential practical value that it would be a crime to threaten it, or the facilities studying it, with a waste dump or a toxic factory, or some planetary engineering scheme that wasn't thoroughly thought out. Fortunately, there's a lot of real estate up there that could probably be sacrificed, if a thorough survey showed it might not have potential for future human settlement or development.

As for protecting individual facilities or spacecraft, I don't think this kind of scheme would work. Earth protects us from radiation with natural physical barriers created by our planet itself. Maybe we can enhance or control these natural barriers with clever technology, but generating protection from say, cosmic rays, for one ship or base seems highly unlikely. Some radiation can only be stopped by lots of matter between you and the source.

Shielding is heavy. I suspect even most temporary habitats on most solar system bodies will have to be located underground. And some places are so "hot" we wouldn't even have the time to dig a hole after we got there. Even long missions to nearby places like Mars will be dangerous. Long travel times and waiting months for planets to line up for the return trip will expose crews to very long accumulated doses of radiation. We might be able to counteract the negative effects of zero-g with diet, drugs and exercise, but having ionizing radiation plowing through your tissues and wrecking cell chemistry is something else again.

Nobody in the space enthusiast community likes to dwell on this, but unless we can develop faster means of transport, space travel may be a lot more dangerous than we think. Crews may be limited to one mission per lifetime, or be forced to accept lifetime assignments to protected habitats because the return voyage is too toxic. Some of these problems can probably be mitigated, but I doubt they will all go away or be amenable to clever technological solutions.