[Prime Choice]

Well, a comet isn't made of potentially fissionable material...but I digress. Hoagland is a kook-and-a-half, but even a broken clock is right twice a day. It at least bears a little additional fact-checking.

But the whole concept behind a thermonuclear reaction is generating enough heat to produce the nuclear fusion. Fission is not required to do this, but it is a convenient shortcut.

All that is required to initiate a thermonuclear reaction is something that can produce enough heat to excite the tritium or deuterium atoms to collide with enough force to fuse (hence the term "thermo" in "thermonuclear"). We've been experimenting with lasers to accomplish this.

Moreover, the fissionable material on Galileo is wildly insufficient to beget the alleged fission reaction. Galileo didn't even remotely possess enough material to qualify as critical mass. And that would be required for an appreciable fission reaction capable of generating enough heat to start a thermonuclear reaction. Somehow I doubt that Galileo was fitted with beryllium/polonium injectors to compensate for that plutonium deficit.

[beezdotcom]

But the whole concept behind a thermonuclear reaction is generating enough heat to produce the nuclear fusion. Fission is not required to do this, but it is a convenient shortcut

I'm really not disagreeing with you. Really. I simply took the additional shortcut of completely discounting the likelihood of a thermonuclear reaction, and only allowed for the highly improbable end result of a nice big disturbance caused by a fission reaction. I say "improbable" vs. "impossible" only because I'm too lazy to research the actual calculations for what would be required to create an implosion-induced reaction using Plutonium-238.

Besides, I've already posted that 'dark spots appear on Jupiter all the time; why worry about THIS one'...