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Maybe someone here can inform me, howuch does the waste weigh? Would it be viable to launch it into space then send it on a course to the sun?
by marak830 10y ago
Maybe someone here can inform me, howuch does the waste weigh? Would it be viable to launch it into space then send it on a course to the sun?
- tremon 10y agoI don't think anyone wants to take the risk of having the launch vessel explode while still in the atmosphere.
- wiredfool 10y agoIt's easier/less deltaV to send things out of the solar system than it is to hit the sun. (Basically, to hit the sun, you have to scrub out all/most of the velocity from the Earth's orbit, or what you've done is put your waste in an orbit around the Sun that may intersect the Earth's at some point in the future)
- mac01021 10y agoIt isn't sufficient to launch in the general direction of the sun, using the minimum energy required to escape earth's gravity?
- cmrx64 10y agoNo. For an entertaining explanation why, see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uNS6VKNXY6s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uNS6VKNXY6s
- gus_massa 10y agoObligatory xkcd: https://xkcd.com/1244/ https://xkcd.com/1244/ (explanation and more details https://explainxkcd.com/1244/ https://explainxkcd.com/1244/ )
- Symmetry 10y agoThe reason the Earth doesn't fall into the sun is that it's moving quickly enough that the centripetal force balances the Sun's gravity. If you escape the Earth's gravity well and give it a small push it would still have nearly as much orbital energy as the Earth and way more than Venus, which hadn't fallen into the sun either. To slow down enough that you could fall into the sun you need to kill 30 km/s of velocity. To go fast enough to escape the solar system you only need about 15 km/s. And crashing into Jupiter is even cheaper than that.
- mrfusion 10y agoWhy not do an elliptical orbit that takes you close enough to the sun to burn up? That seems like less energy than dropping to zero no?
- adwn 10y agoAn elliptical orbit that gets close to the sun is nearly the same as an orbit that goes through the sun. Besides, exposing radioactive materials to heat does not affect their radioactivity.
- msandford 10y agoThat's only true up to a point. I suspect that if you exposed just about anything to 100,000 kelvin it ceased to look like any kind of matter we know anything about.
- adwn 10y ago> I suspect that if you exposed just about anything to 100,000 kelvin it ceased to look like any kind of matter we know anything about. 1e5 K? You're missing a couple orders of magnitude, there. The hottest parts of the Sun's surface go up to 20 million Kelvin, and that doesn't "cease to look like any kind of matter we know anything about".
- msandford 10y agoYes, but there is SOME temperature at which heating things up does start to cause things to act weirdly. You know, like in a fusion reactor. That definitely changes the radioactivity of certain elements.
- mikeash 10y agoThis experiment was performed thousands of times back in the 1950s and 1960s. A nuclear weapon's fireball is way hotter than 100,000K, and the exploding weapon contains lots of fissionable material and fission byproducts. The extreme temperatures don't destroy them, they just help spread it around.
- TeMPOraL 10y agoTechnically you could try some clever gravity assists with Jupiter to greatly reduce the ∆v requirements. But that's still a very expensive way of solving a non-problem. We know how to deal with nuclear waste. The problem is with people being scared out of proportion by it.
- shaqbert 10y agoAmount of radioactive waste: A couple of tons every year per power plant is realistic. Space dumping is a terrible idea. Expensive and risky. Best storage solution so far found is what we've mostly been doing so far. Just having a sealed of area and store it for 20 or so years in a special low population and high security area that is protected from rain, frost, and temperature swings and have a good containment in case of container leaks. And then repackage in 20 years time for another 20 years. And so on. I.e. "actively managing" nuclear waste until the end of time. Fun fact: The inner core of earth is not cooling mostly because of naturally occurring nuclear fission... so in a way our very own planet is full of radioactive waste already :)
- Gibbon1 10y agoMy observation that tends to annoy people is to point out that the best place to store spent nuclear fuel is inside the original fuel rods. The best place to store those is next to the nuclear reactor. The objection seems to center around reprocessing. Course the longer you wait before reprocessing the less radio isotopes you have to worry about.
- outworlder 10y agoTERRIBLY hard to send anything to the sun. Stuff does not just "falls" there, you have to cancel the enormous translation speed that the Earth has. Plus, putting the stuff on top of a highly energetic vehicle is not the safest thing we can do with it.