Comment Re:Good luck (Score 1) 148
Yes, you could be hit by a large piece even so, but that would be amazing bad luck; space is damn big.
It's not up to luck if there is an explosion in LEO, if something in orbit dies it WILL eventually make it to the surface one way or another, that's just the nature f orbit. The concern is that those large pieces of the spacecraft would be radioactive and an explosion in orbit would undoubtedly send them back into our atmosphere. While the actual fallout from an explosion wouldn't likely cause any damage (the Earth's magnetic field protects us from far worse than nuclear fallout on a daily basis)) any debris left over from the probe and especially the reactor sections would likely be very irradiated and would poison wherever they landed/flew over, and since re-entry can cover a distance of thousands of miles I think you can imagine what kind of damage that could cause.
As has been discussed before fueling and launching the probe from a La Grange point or Lunar Orbit would be the safest way to do this, using chemical rockets to provide the initial thrust to fire it out of our immediate orbit will help to minimize this risk. Now getting the fuel into orbit is a bit trickier, you would need to send small amounts of fuel multiple times and I believe it could be performed safely, we already have casks used to transport nuclear material and these are already proven to be capable of withstanding large forces so I'm not too terribly concerned about that as long as most of it's launch transit occurs over ocean)