Stupid computers. . . . eating my posts . . . . .let me try to rethink what I had said before.
MSN did an article about using the moon for a depository of nuclear waste instead of the Yucca Mountains. But why not just send the n.w. into space and let it float out indefinately? Wouldnt’ it be easier and cheaper to do it that way than use a rock which we might inhabit some day?
Too much chance of a disasterous launch.
But isn’t a launch going to be needed whether or not the n.w. goes to the moon or deep space?
How about just launching it into the sun?
Wait, we wouldn’t want the sun to get all radioactive and stuff…
Assuming the launch doesn’t go horribly awry, why not launch it to Venus? It’s closer (for the most part) and it is unlikely there’s any life there (as we know it).
It takes a lot of energy to send any appreciable payload to any of those places. (For one thing, remember that it takes as much energy to get something from Earth orbit down to the Sun, as it would to get something from the Sun up into Earth orbit.) I don’t know how many tons of radioactive waste we have, but it’s a lot. It would be far easier to set up stable storage on Earth, and perhaps in the future have a way to convert the waste into harmless material.
Besides, if you put a lot of nuclear waste on the Moon, it’ll explode and send the whole Moon off into interstellar space with a bunch of British actors. Will they ever get home?
Finally, a thread I feel I’m able to comment on.
We all know how baaaaddd nuclear waste is and it is one of the main reasons people are opposed to nuclear energy. Well actually, a considerable amount of fuel can be extracted from the spent fuel (i.e - nuclear waste) after being taken out of the reactors. The natural Uranium supply on Earth is something like 99.3% Uranium 238, and the remaining .7% is U-235. For reactors in the US, the uranium ore goes through an enrichment process to bring the U-235 levels up to 5-7% because U-235 is fissile; it undergoes fission very easily (starting the chain reaction for the U-238). The U-238 also fissions, but initial energy is required and not all of the U-238 atoms are “spent” by the time the fuel rods must be changed.
In France and other countries, they are using breeder reactors to extract the left over U-238 atoms which produce the fissile Plutonium 239 when it undergoes fission. The breeder reactors also extract other elements which can be used in other industries, so there is very little waste in the end (I don’t remember the exact proportions, sorry. And just because I’m talking about atoms, don’t think the scales are microscopic). The new Plutonium 239 is used to produce energy in the reactors, thus recycling the excess U-238 from before.
Back in the Carter administration, known for being green, the government thought that breeder reactors must be evil, since Plutonium goes into nuclear bombs. So, a policy was issued that there would be no breeder reactors in the US, and a buildup of nuclear waste was bound to occur. So now we’re up to present day. By the time Yucca Mountain is finished, there will still be an abundance of nuclear waste. Sure, sending the spent fuel into space will get rid of it for good, but uranium isn’t an unlimited resource, so you’re just throwing away fuel.
For the time being, US reactor companies must deal with the idocy of the government and store their waste instead of reprocessing it. But, at least, by storing it you reserve the ability to reprocess it in the future. I’ve haven’t studied breeder reactors in depth, but the lowest figure I’ve seen is that for every four years of spent fuel a reactor produces, it can run one more year on reprocessed fuel. Why again are the greens opposed to nuclear power???
Yo,
If U238 is used in other countries, why not sell the unused nuclear waste to other (friendly) countries? Plus a very safe, cheap way to get objects into space: Rail Guns. Im surprised noone is working on that for super cheap satelitte launching.
Baldwin: You’re wrong about “it takes as much to get something from the sun to the earth as from the earth to the sun”, it takes MUCH less to get from the earth from the sun because the sun has a much larger gravity well, and also all you need to do is get the junk in orbit around the earth then push the waste in the proper trajectory using as much or as little energy/fuel as you want, b/c noone would really care how long it took to get to the sun. You could even send it on a sun loop trajectory out if the solor system.
-Blah
The problem with sendign something to the sun is you have to get rid of the starting velocity Basically you have to do a series of burns to lower the orbit which is about the same amount of feul you need to raise the orbit from the sun.
Because people are VERY hesitant to transport nuclear waste at ALL. A single disastrous accident could potentially make life (and death) miserable for many thousands of people. The farther you have to transport it, the greater the likelihood of an accident.
I believe the risks of transit are much overblown, simply due to the fact that engineers willl take some hefty safety precautions with nuclear transport containers that they will not with other things. You don’t want to do it every day, mind you, but it’d take a huge impact to break one of those nuclear shipping tanks.
Wouldn’t it take less energy to simply brake it, cancelling Earth’s orbital speed until it was stationary with respect to the Sun, then let it fall? 150 million km, straight down like a falling safe…
We have a fundamental misunderstanding here – you use that energy to “brake it”. It’s not like you can pull a lever and grind the package to a halt by rubbing against something – let the package go and it just continues to orbit the sun. In order to slow it down you gotta apply force in the opposite direction. The most efficient way to do this is by going into an elliptical orbit with one end at the earth’s orbit and the other at the surface of the sun – but it still takes a lot of oomph. It’s just not worth the cost in energy for garbage disposal.
Besides, as Heinlein notes in Expanded Universe, you’re probably gonna want that “waste” someday. It would be a good idea to put it somewhere where you can get at it.
American reactors don’t buy the overseas recycled fuel because newly mined Uranium is so cheap right now. It would be a waste of money to do it, mainly because of all of the expenses in shipping.
The transportation isn’t an issue to anyone slightly informed about nuclear safety. Transportation by ship is safe, although people may make a case about terrorists hijacking a shipment, which measures can be taken to prevent. The transportation by land is already incredibly safe (another reason why Yucca Mountain is better than sending the waste off to space). If anything, only a negligible amount of radiation penetrates the container and they have been tested for large crashes with very minimal damage.
Isn’t this exactly the situation that led to MoonBase Alpha being blasted off into the great unknown? Do we REALLY want to lose the moon?
Won’t someone think of the tides?
It would serve no purpose to send the stuff to the moon or into the Sun.
Ignoring any launch dangers, if you can achieve escape velocity (which you have to to get to the Moon or beyond) it would be perfectly safe to just shoot the stuff out into space. Space is enormous. The chances of ever accidentally encountering it again would be zero!
Your chances of running into it again would be zero if it were really likely to go “anywhere in space”. Achieving escape vlocity from the solar system (rather than just the Earth) would require even more energy than dropping it via Hihmann orbit into the sun. If you just achieve the Earth’s escape velocity, then th stuff stays relatively close to you in its orbit around the sun, and it becomes pretty probable that you’ll run into it again.
I’ve said it before. Space is big. Isopotentials aren’t.
So, just how dangerous is this stuff, anyway? As I understand it uranium and plutonium are alpha emitters, and therefore harmless to humans unless ingested or inhaled. What other radioactive elements or isotopes are present in nuclear waste, and what are their characteristics? How would an accident during transport of nuclear waste compare, ecologically with, say, an oil pipeline rupture, or an Exxon Valdez type accident? It’s hard to find unbiased information about this subject on the internet. I’ve always got the impression that nuclear power is not quite the bugaboo it’s been made out to be.
[minor hijack] satirewire has a very funny view on this particular issue
Genseric, I believe the Master has written a piece on this somewhere. The biggest problem with nuclear waste is that it tends to be like Herpies and hang around forever. It’s not so much the fact that it gives off radiation, it’s the fact that it does it for thousands of years or more.