5 ms·
Honest to god, isn’t shooting it just any direction in space safer?!
by marricks 6y ago
Honest to god, isn’t shooting it just any direction in space safer?!
- MattGaiser 6y agoUnless the rocket explodes and spreads it everywhere.
- Robotbeat 6y agoMost likely would spread it into the ocean. So same thing as status quo. (Not like it’s actually a problem FWIW.)
- formerly_proven 6y ago> more than 1.2 million tons of treated water Good luck with that. That's about 100 times more than the mass of all cargo send into space so far.
- rangibaby 6y agoI read a book or something online by Michio Kaku where he was passionately against launching any kind of nuclear material because of the possibility of the rocket exploding before reaching space.
- greptomania 6y agoSafer option would be to bury it deep underground. Much ado has been said about this approach due to long-term uncertainty, but even 100-1000 years of safe storage is better than dumping it into the ocean, or having it explode on the launchpad - at least imo. Future us can always go back and improve storage as technology brings new possibilities.
- ceejayoz 6y ago> The treated water has been building up because more than 100 tons of groundwater seeps into the wrecked reactor basements every day, mixing with highly radioactive debris. If you can put 100 tons a day into orbital escape velocity, various governments would love to talk to you.
- theandrewbailey 6y agoYes, but you'd have to get it into space first. Rocket equation tyranny is expensive to get past.
- ORioN63 6y agoHow is that in any way realistic? It is treated water that they're thinking of releasing. Still radioactive, but not Fukushima radioactive.
- varjag 6y agoYou don't want it to end up on an Earth orbit (let alone a decaying one) so you'll want to give it escape velocity. That's a lot more velocity than usual. And fission byproducts are heavy..
- amalcon 6y ago"Shooting it just any direction into space" is overwhelmingly likely to be suborbital, meaning that it will just crash back into Earth somewhere. An orbital trajectory might be safer, but it's probably not what anyone has in mind. An escape trajectory is in practice impossible for this much mass.
- wodenokoto 6y agowe are talking about 1.2 million tons of water. It’s about $2-3.000 per kg to launch stuff into out of space. So it’s about $2.400.000.000.000-3.600.000.000.000, not to talk about the environmental impact of all the rocket fuel being burned in the atmosphere.
- Robotbeat 6y agoBut what if the cost is reduced to $10-30/kg (the latter for escape)? https://youtu.be/C8JyvzU0CXU https://youtu.be/C8JyvzU0CXU
- StreamBright 6y agoAbsolutely not. A Challenger like even would be catastrophic with a payload like that even if the size and weight of the payload would not make it impossible for a liftoff with current technology. The other part is that there are safe ways of getting rid of the contaminated water on Earth.