Many nuclear things, big and small, were created for military reasons, and there even was no desire to use all that stuff for the intended purposes.
People became a little cleverer, a little more polite and civilized, and understood that hitting themselves with nuclear clubs was not right or humane.
They decided to use something from this nuclear arsenal for peaceful purposes.
There was no sense in constructing large, labor-consuming and expensive nuclear power stations, considering the huge territory of the USSR and the peculiarities of its climate. There were hundreds of thousands of rivers, but the construction of hydro-electric power stations is not that cheap…
Then they remembered about compact or portable low power nuclear devices. A project was conceived to create small, reliable, and the main thing – one hundred times cheaper nuclear power stations. It was planned to build such a station in practically each of the remote regions…After all, the country occupied 1/6 of the land; but the project was suspended…
The question of portability, weight and, the main thing, the weight of fuel was the most acute in space industry. It was the trend with the highest priority for the Soviet Union. The majority of the most talented scientists worked for the space. Solar batteries were cumbersome and produced little electricity, the first compact nuclear power facilities were developed and used for the satellites – for the only purpose of providing energy to the devices…
The work on the nuclear propulsion engine for rockets was finished back in 1981. The trial runs were mainly carried out on the same launch site where military atomic shells and bombs were tested – near Semipalatinsk.
The project was successful and almost complete, but… it was closed. There were a lot of reasons for that, but the main thing was connected with the start of the rocket from earth cosmodromes: due to a great amount of radiation emitted, a new launch pad or desk would have to be built for each new launch.
And problems with protection of the rocket’s living module seemed practically unresolvable back then…
The designer of MS 88 found a little different way to solve these problems.
The nuclear propulsion engine started as far from the Earth as possible, being the second or third stage engine of the spaceship. And it did not work directly, so its radiation background was just one and a half or two times higher than natural values.