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A Nuclear Powered Nuclear Waste Dispenser
Nuclear power has many advantages but the few disadvantages are severe. One of the major ones is leftover nuclear waste of nuclear power plants. It is highly toxic and stays radioactive for thousands of years, leaving a pandora box of nuclear death for future humans to deal with. We urgently need to clean up after our nuclear shit trail.
Currently we bury it somewhere and hope it will not escape any time soon. This is rather naive. Give it enough time and it will leak into our environment. So how can we improve? Shooting the nuclear waste straight into space is a compelling option, either on a stable orbit leaving our solar system or directly into the sun.
Current rocket technology is not gonna do it. So let’s try something else: Make a big bullet containing our nuclear waste. Accompanied with a giant cannon that is fueled by water steam produced by nuclear power. Build up high enough pressure to accelerate the bullet to earth's escape velocity.
How to build the capable cannon? Dig a cylindrical hole down into earth, add a sufficient amount of pressure chambers along the cannon barrel. The shooting mechanism: Release pressure of the chambers from the bottom to the top sequentially, accelerating the waste bullet to the needed escape velocity. Before all that, calculate where to dig the hole according to the needed trajectory. There it is: A nuclear powered nuclear waste dispensing cannon.
Biggest potential hurdle: This nuclear waste dispenser design only works out if it can dispense more waste than is produced in order to operate it. Figuring that out is key to success and is left as an exercise for the curious reader.
Biggest potential failure: The nuclear waste bullet does not reach escape velocity and comes right back at spaceship earth. Mitigation: Simulate several failures without real nuclear waste but the same bullet case design and a realistic non-toxic replacement material for the waste.
- sean_pedersen 6y agoJust an idea that occurred to me. Curious if this could work out.
- sean_pedersen 6y agoFound an image that visualizes the multistage concept of the cannon I image: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Haskell_USP484011_1892_01_09.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Haskell_USP484011_1892_01...
- sean_pedersen 6y agoAnother possible propulsion method: Build a giant Gauss cannon [0]. Using electricity though would add another energy transformation step reducing overall efficiency. Water steam would be directly produced off the nuclear reactors heat. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coilgun https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coilgun
- PaulHoule 6y agoSee https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Orion_(nuclear_propulsion) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Orion_(nuclear_propuls... or this (incredible) legend https://www.businessinsider.com/fastest-object-robert-brownlee-2016-2 https://www.businessinsider.com/fastest-object-robert-brownl...
- sean_pedersen 6y agoInteresting, thanks. The second link is kinda related to my idea but would produce fallout for every launch, so not really practical.
- gus_massa 6y agoThe failure of rockets launches is about 1%. (For example the space shuttle has 135 launces and 2 failures.) It's much much much safer to dig a giant hole in a stable zone and put the nuclear waste there. Launching a rocket to the Sun is very difficult, it's much easier to launch it to deep space. The idea of using a canon is also impractical. There is just too much friction. Have you calculated the speed that the "bullet" need to reach orbit?