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"If you think the stink raised over the plutonium used on deep space probes was bad, if this ever gets off the drawing board, expect a lot of outrage."

Outrage aside, it seems like the pollution wouldn't be too bad. Isn't there already a lot of radiation in open space? So nuclear blasts in space aren't really contaminating anything. So then you're saying we only have to worry about the danger of lofting radioactive materials into space from Earth (because of concerns of the craft breaking up in Earth's atmosphere and spreading radioactivity).

Then the solution is to mine the radioactive materials off-world. Question is, how difficult will that be?

That's a good question. If the theory is correct that everything in the solar system formed from the same nebula, then there should be fissionable materials elsewhere in the solar system. The problem comes with the concentration. Earth is the largest of the solid inner planets, so it probably gathered the most radioactive materials, most of which are actually below the crust (the intense heat of the mantle and the core come from both pressure and from the decay of radioactive materials). Even in the Earth's crust, the concentration of fissionable radioactive metals isn't high. It takes a lot of tons of rock to get the amount of nuclear material needed for nuclear fission, even with uranium ores. Then you need to build a reactor to produce plutonium, since it doesn't occur naturally (except in very minute quanities). So, the short answer is that we can do it, but it will be VERY expensive.