9 ms·
This is probably one of those hacker news comments where it sounds good for 1 second then when you stop to think about it it falls apart, bu here goes. throw t
by Multicomp 6y ago
This is probably one of those hacker news comments where it sounds good for 1 second then when you stop to think about it it falls apart, bu here goes.
throw the waste in a bucket strong enough to survive hitting earth at terminal velocitty. place bucket in spacex falcon9 rocket. launch rocket into orbit with escape velocity. watch nuclear waste vanish into vacuum of space forever. if crash, collect bucket and restart with new rocket.
financially costly? yes. solves the 'what about in 5000 years when someone opens it or it leaks?' questions, yes.
- cperciva 6y agoThe standard answer is "there's too much of a risk that an explosion would spread nuclear waste through the atmosphere". These days I'm not sure if it's true -- we've learned a lot about building containers which are safe even during rapid unscheduled disassemblies, and used them e.g. when sending nuclear powered rovers to Mars -- but that's the usual concern.
- throwaway894345 6y agoI mean we’re wishing for a bucket that can survive terminal velocity impact with the earth and is yet light enough to ride a rocket, why not add to that wish that it could survive explosion from said rocket?
- perardi 6y agoI think there’s a few orders of magnitude difference in the amount of radioactive material in an RTG in a probe bounds for Mars, and the total radioactive daughter particle output of a nuclear reactor.
- shadowgovt 6y agoIronically perhaps, the best reason not to do this is "It is extremely likely that, given sufficient time, we will either figure out a way to use the waste besides high-yield weapons or a cheaper way to dispose of the waste." Earth is huge. At the rate reactors create waste, the amount of land consumed by storing it is staggeringly low (the higher risks are transportation, which unfortunately the rocket idea doesn't solve unless we build a dedicated rocket site next to each reactor). Low enough to justify the risk-over-time of securely sequestering it instead of throwing it away.
- whatshisface 6y agoOne hundred million years later, a tribe of evolved cats sees an asteroid streak through the sky...
- secfirstmd 6y agoHaha. I've often said cats would likely take over.
- yellowapple 6y agoAnother crazy idea would be to put nuclear reactors themselves in orbit, and then beam the energy down to the surface. Space is already pretty thoroughly radioactive, so a meltdown goes from "ZOMG WE'RE GONNA GROW EXTRA ARMS AND DIE OF CANCER" to "meh, just another Tuesday".
- cpeterso 6y agoBut then you have nuclear-powered space lasers, which will scare people.
- yellowapple 6y agoYeah, but if people don't like it, what are they gonna do? Complain? That'll just draw the attention of the nuclear-powered space lasers :)
- ed25519FUUU 6y agoHow does one efficiency “beam down” gigawatts of energy? Or at all?
- cthalupa 6y agoLight. Focusing mirrors or lasers. But as others have pointed out, why would you bother with building space based nuclear plants and then converting that energy to light when you could just use the sun?
- DennisP 6y agoMicrowaves. Ground station has to be several square kilometers, but it's cheap and birds can fly through the beam without harm. For economic reasons you pretty much have to use phased array transmitters, with a reference signal from the ground to make it coherent, so if the beam gets repointed it gets a lot more diffuse than that.
- zdragnar 6y agoI've seen how this plays out in SimCity. No thank you!
- VT_Dude 6y agoI'm torn on which one second response is best. Contenders are: 1. Reprocessing is a better technological solution. 2. That waste is much safer in it's current location in a dry cask in the back lot behind a power plant than it would be on even the safest rocket. 3. Even if we punt waste disposal or reprocessing to future generations, we are still better off stacking waste in dry casks in the back lot behind power plants than burning coal.
- numpad0 6y ago4. “Actually, giving up nuclear and politics on Earth and using said rockets to start building space habitat on L2, L4, L5, Moon surface and so on and do life and society and nuclear up there makes far more sense”
- BurningFrog 6y agoThere are a lot of schemes that will solve the factual problem. But I think the real problem is emotional. People are afraid of mushroom clouds and mutants. They don't say that because that's not how we're wired. We come up with better sounding arguments to believe. But what need to be solved is the emotional problem.
- Blackthorn 6y agoNuclear waste is a lot more than spent fuel. It's water, piping, tubes, maintenance tools...basically anything that went through or was part of a reactor. The fuel itself is just a small part of it.