Dear Jack:  Many thanks for reading my page and also for writing such a nice message.

It is indeed exciting to consider future travel in space and how this might be made easier via nuclear power. Not only for faster rocket engines, but also for sources of power for astronauts living on the moon or Mars. The latter is something I've written of in past columns.

Of course, as our friend Joe is indicating, there is certainly a history of concern over nuclear power, and there have been notable accidents - Chernoble and then the one in Japan in 2012 that happened when they had the tsunami.

And there have been people interested in making power plants based on nuclear fusion for a long time, at least since the 1970's and still today without success after 50 years of effort. One might also wonder whether new ideas for "quantum computing" might meet with similar lack of success or might have better luck.

In spite of accidents that have occurred at Chernobyl and also in Japan, the conquest of space poses such massive challenges that making safe nuclear engines and fission nuclear power plants could well be the only option we have. There are no fossil fuels on the moon or Mars and thus hydroelectric or fossil power are impossible. And the travel to Mars might be done only via ships that can get there much faster to allow for humans to better withstand the rigors of space travel.

Should nuclear fusion ever overcome the long 50 year development phase, then perhaps it might also prove to be a viable research direction. Certainly Hydrogen fuel is a lot easier to scrounge up than Uranium.

However nuclear fusion power - beyond the fact that fifty years of effort have still failed us - is still not without dangers. Trying to harness the basic energy source of the sun and stars carries the risk that the extremely hot process could get away from us and create a nuclear explosion which would dwarf Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Thanks,  Doug