The earth equatorial radius is ~6378km. The ISS is just 400km above that, or less than 6%.

99% of the energy is expended just to get into a suborbital trajectory. Its only the last couple of seconds in any spaceflight that raise the perigee from being below ground to being above the atmosphere.

In order to deorbit the station, they just need to lower the perigee enough so that drag does the rest. And a huge space station with huge solar panels has much more drag then a small, cylinder shaped capsule.

And then instead of one problem, you have half a dozen or more problems.

Currently, the problem is somewhat simple:

Attach to Node 2 forward, and be able to produce 47m/s of delta-v attacked to a station of 450 tons.

Boost-de-boost maneuvers of the whole station are well researched at this point, so we know the force vectors and what happens to the station when doing so. The station itself can also help with attitude control.

If you break it up in pieces, you would need to find out where to attach, what the force vectors need to be to properly boost of module through its CoM without spinning out of control. Most pieces won't be able to support the burn with attitude control.

You'd also have to disassemble the station, which in itself might take months or longer. All while diminishing the capabilities of the station further and further while doing so.

Honestly, keeping it as one piece looks a lot simpler. You basically just need to do a stronger de-boost burn. So basically business as usual, just more fuel.

Heat can be transferred in three ways: Radiation, Conduction and Convection. Conduction is heat transfer by two solids touching. Or when you put your hand on your heater, you feel your hand getting warmer. Convection is heat transfer to fluids (gases). That is why the air in your room heats up when you put a heater in it. Radiation is the weakest form of heat transfer, by far. But if you aren't surrounded by an atmosphere or ocean to dump heat into, and instead are surrounded by a vacuum, radiation is the only way to get rid of heat. Conductive transfer will constantly heat up the spacecraft until parts start to melt if you cannot radiate the heat fast enough. Hence the need for large radiators on spacecraft that produce a lot of heat, e.g. the ISS or even the shuttle, whose whole payload bay doors were used as radiators and needed to be opened somewhat quickly once in orbit or the shuttle would overheat.

First of all, I'm an opponent of nuclear power here on earth.

But I'm absolutely for nuclear propulsion in space. These rockets can be made safe, the thing to be concerned about is the waste product. Prior to launch, the fuel can be encased safely as was done with the Apollo RTGs. So even the explosion of a fully fueled rocket on the pad will not be a problem. The engine is then only activated once safely in space.

There is no reason by have any panic reaction just because it has the word nuclear in it.

The article is very carefully crafted to word things in a supposedly neutral way, but fails to provide the proper context, actually.

The proper context would be to say that back in the days, people were just learning about space exploration, and many lessons were learned -- some of them quite bloody I might add. Skylab being plastered all over Australia was kind of an event that led to huge changes in how disposal is approach today by almost all nations.

The proper context to provide would be to highlight which changes were implemented after each of these events and how nowadays you are supposed to make sure this doesn't happen again, because it is obvious a bad thing if debris falls down uncontrolled.

The articles that get posted again and again -- and this one is no exception -- fail to provide that context and instead under a guise of neutrality try to provide a platform to justify that China doesn't care about proper disposal.

This is an article that carefully tries to shape opinion, and does so expertly I might add, as the comments here show.