The recent debate about storing nuke waste in Nevada brought up the age old solution of flying the stuff into the sun. At least I heard some moron on the tube talking about it.
So…how close could something like a rocket ship get to the sun before it perished? A million miles? 10 million? And would nuclear waste have any effects on the sun? What about a million megaton bomb? Could we puny humans do anything that would affect the sun? Could we blow it up if there were enough bombs? Could the bombs get close enough to do damage?
Hey, the weather here sucks, I’m stuck indoors, and I’m bored!
The whole planet Earth could be dropped into the Sun without it even burping.
It’s got 100 times the diameter of the Earth, which gives it about 1,000,000 times the volume.
There shouldn’t be any environmental problems throwing waste into the Sun. But to actually get it there would be expensive. You’d have to use a lot of fuel to get it out of Earth’s gravity well, then to steer it straight to the Sun. If you miss it, the waste would just go into a comet-like orbit, eventually to return to the inner solar system and maybe hitting something and spreading its contents.
Your question has already been adequately answered so …
[hijack] I was at Beloit during July in 1943 at Beloit College for Avn Cadet college training. The temperature was never over about 85 but the dew point was never under 84. Our clothes went to the laundry wet, came back from the laundry wet and were worn wet. You couldn’t get salt out of the shaker and the sugar was just one indistiguishable mass in the bowl.
Having a great time, wish you were here! [/hijack]
The sun is the ultimate living source of energy, it’s pure hydrogen, radiation, and other forms of energy. You could pitch Jupiter into it and it wouldn’t even do anything. It’s more powerful than we can imagine and nothing that us puny humans could muster up would effect it in the slightest. By the way our nuclear bombs are crap in comparison to the sun’s energy. Splitting atoms and creating critical mass is absolutely nothing compared to what the sun does on a daily basis. The sun has daily flares which occur that are larger than the earth’s entire size.
We could dump anything into it but the problem is mainly practicality. It would be enormously expensive to blast that much waste into the sun. By the way any trash we shoot in its direction would probably melt by the time it got near venus. Extremely hazardous materials such as nuclear fallout with a half life of a couple million years might be worth shooting in that direction though.
The blackbody temperature at the orbit of Mercury, 35 million miles, is already 700 fahrenheit. That’s enough to make an unshielded spaceship glow a dull red.
Using T[sub]ss[/sub] = 395 (r[sub]p[/sub])[sup]-1/2[/sup], where T[sub]ss[/sub] is the subsolar blackbody temperature (degrees Kelvin), and r[sub]p[/sub] is the distance from the sun in A.U. (1 A.U. = 149.6 km) , the temperature gets up to the melting point of iron (1535 c) at 7,800,000 kilometers from the surface of the sun. Nothing we can make is going to get much closer than that.
[continuation of hijack] So was Beloit referred to as the sound of a Marble dropping into a Toilet back then, or is there truth to the rumor that Frank Zappa coined the description in the early 70’s ? [/continuation of hijack]
[continuation of continuation of hijack] We had a martinet 2[sup]nd[/sup] Looie CO who was apparently pissed that he hadn’t been given an opportunity to win the Congressional Medal so we didn’t see much of the town. School and drill kept us busy. However, my impression was that Beloit was a nice little midwestern town, like the one where I grew up, and the only thing bad was the weather. Even that might have been perfect every month but July for all I know. Although in Wisconsin (I was born in the state) I doubt it. [/contininuation of continuation of hijack]
And another thing. Nuclear waste may become something useful. As I recall gasoline was dumped in the old days because it was useless to settlers. Now it everywhere. Nuclear waste may have some unforseen use.
THe major drawback to shooting nuclear waste at the sun is that there would be horrible problems if the rocket used to get it there did an impression of the Challenger. It would be a great way to make a large area uninhabitable for 10000 years.
We’ve got folks having kittens about sending this stuff a thousand miles on railroads! Now someone wants to jack up the space program to the point that we can export a million tons of highly radioactive (not to even mention caustically toxic, in many cases) crap all the way to the sun.
What sort of fuel are we going to use to accomplish this outlandishly massive space program? Fifty launches a day for twenty or thirty years? It’s too absurd to even refute. I suppose we could get a vector boost out of Venus and save a portion of the fuel cost. Just getting off the ground with freight train sized loads of anything is not a reasonable program for our existing technology, even if the stuff we were lifting were benign as could be.
Safety is a joke, in any scenario you design. One accident in a thousand launches is a pretty certain event. A bad burn on a transition stage, and radioactive fire is raining down over a swath of the earth ten thousand miles long, and a hundred miles wide. That’s just the bad news on the Ground to Orbit phase of the trip. If you miss your orbit to orbit burn, you sit around having meetings for a few dozen years waiting for the orbit to decay, and your fire from the sky comes during a different Administration.
Or you could just have one of those mysterious loss of signal things. You know, like on the Mars mission. Where is the spacecraft with the ten thousand pound radioactive payload? “Well, we aren’t sure. It should be in orbit between Earth, and Venus. But we can’t find it. We are running computer simulations to try to predict if it will approach Earth, given certain assumptions about it’s last known orbital position.”
The idea is totally silly. Developing technology to handle, and eventually use the materials is a far more realistic, not to mention useful strategy. The unavoidable fact is that our society is just starting to produce this new type of waste product. We better learn how to deal with it here, and soon.
Rocket destroyed by sun waaaay before it gets there, bad stuff leaks out, washes back towards earth via solar wind… it would be like spitting into the wind. Not the best idea.
The Solar Probe is designed to approach the sun to a distance of 3 solar radii, i.e. about a million miles. With current technology, it’s difficult to get closer than that without burning up.
Sending nuclear waste into the sun is an insane idea and I don’t know why it comes up so often. Even if money was no object, there’s the danger of rockets failing during launch. And why the sun? A high earth orbit is good enough. It takes an enormous amount of energy to send things to the sun.
