Nuclear waste and the sun

[Yumblie]

@Yumblie

Think of it this way: you’re riding on the back of a pick-up truck on the highway and decide you want to get off. The truck bed is not that high off the ground, so jumping off should be no problem, right? While the height won’t be a problem, you’re going to end up skidding along the road at 60 mph because that’s how fast you were going relative to the ground. If you want to land on the ground straight down, you’d have to jump horizontally off the truck backwards at 60 mph, so you’d cancel out the horizontal component of your velocity (to visualize this you have to look at it from the point of view of someone on the side of the road, not a point of view moving with the truck).

Here’s a great example of this in action!

[Habeed]

@Yumblie

Here’s a great example of this in action!

They didn’t have Mythbusters in 1999, either. Shame that we can’t send this information back to the OP when they posted 15 years ago.

[Chronos]

On the other hand, while there’s a lot of waste in the form of old gloves and the like, that’s very low-intensity waste, and doesn’t need to be treated with anywhere near as much care as the high-level stuff like spent fuel rods.

[Stranger_On_A_Train]

@OldOlds

I think it’s also worth noting that there’s a lot more waste than people realize, and most of it isn’t spent fuel.

Perform maintenance work on something, and you’ve (maybe) just created some gloves and wrenches that are now waste. Run a cyclotron for a while, and the concrete walls of the room become waste (activation).

Most of this waste, however, is considered low level nuclear waste, and it is sufficient to merely contain it for a few decades until the radioactivity has decreased to a point that it is no greater than the normal background radiation. The real concern is the high level nuclear waste that comes from the fuel elements and processing stream which will take millennia to decay. This is what is planned to be vitrified and placed in a long term repository such as Yucca Mountain; however, it should be again noted that this “waste” today may be extremely valuable in the future when the technology and fiscal viability to recover the energy (about 98% of the total energy in fuel elements is retained by the “expended” fuel) and should neither be deposited in inaccessible locations nor launched into space, but rather kept in repositories where it can be monitored to assure that it does not escape and is available to future generations. That this is a costly endeavor requiring maintenance and skilled labor should be factored into the cost of nuclear fission power production rather than a deferred cost to be dealt with at some future time with an undetermined policy.

Stranger

[johnpost]

@Stranger_On_A_Train

… This is what is planned to be vitrified and placed in a long term repository such as Yucca Mountain; however, it should be again noted that this “waste” today may be extremely valuable in the future when the technology and fiscal viability to recover the energy (about 98% of the total energy in fuel elements is retained by the “expended” fuel) and should neither be deposited in inaccessible locations nor launched into space, but rather kept in repositories where it can be monitored to assure that it does not escape and is available to future generations. That this is a costly endeavor requiring maintenance and skilled labor should be factored into the cost of nuclear fission power production rather than a deferred cost to be dealt with at some future time with an undetermined policy.

Stranger

and not put into the wrong type of kitty litter.

[LSLGuy]

@OldOlds

… I shut down a facility once and found a large storage closet off of a lab full of various HPLC parts, all radioactive. …

And HPLC in this context would mean??

[Andy_L]

@LSLGuy

And HPLC in this context would mean??

Possibly “High-performance liquid chromatography”

[chorpler]

This concept can also be visualized in a spiffy 2D environment which is much simpler and faster to get working than Kerbal Space Program, using the SimpleRockets app. It is quite surprising how difficult it is to get your rocket to crash into the sun, even if you cheat with infinite fuel and whatnot.

[OldOlds]

@LSLGuy

And HPLC in this context would mean??

Sorry.

High Performance Liquid Chromatography.

It’s a very common test methodology in a chemistry lab, and there are a number of parts that get replaced periodically, whether due to breakdowns or routine maintenance. Google “Agilent 1100” or “Agilent 1200” to see what they look like- about the size of one of those very small refrigerators you might see in a dorm room.

In a “hot lab” (one where radioactive work is done) all these components become contaminated, and a busy lab running 10 or 15 of these things, over 20 years, can generate a metric shitload of bits and pieces. What should happen is that they are put into a holding area and EHS (Environmental Health and Safety) arranges for them to be disposed of through a proper radioactive waste hauler. Depending on the isotope, it may be possible to hold them for decay and treat as cold waste, or they may have to be disposed of as hot. In this case, the guy who ran the lab was just throwing them into a storage area and not dealing with them.

I should note: The items were stored in a proper manner, and they were ultimately disposed of properly. I did not mean to imply that they were mishandled, other than the lazy stockpiling.

[OldOlds]

@Stranger_On_A_Train

Most of this waste, however, is considered low level nuclear waste, and it is sufficient to merely contain it for a few decades until the radioactivity has decreased to a point that it is no greater than the normal background radiation. The real concern is the high level nuclear waste that comes from the fuel elements and processing stream which will take millennia to decay. This is what is planned to be vitrified and placed in a long term repository such as Yucca Mountain; however, it should be again noted that this “waste” today may be extremely valuable in the future when the technology and fiscal viability to recover the energy (about 98% of the total energy in fuel elements is retained by the “expended” fuel) and should neither be deposited in inaccessible locations nor launched into space, but rather kept in repositories where it can be monitored to assure that it does not escape and is available to future generations. That this is a costly endeavor requiring maintenance and skilled labor should be factored into the cost of nuclear fission power production rather than a deferred cost to be dealt with at some future time with an undetermined policy.

Stranger

Well, you’re correct that the actual field isn’t usually all that high, but in the places I have worked we used or made lots of stuff with very long half-lives, especially C14 and H3. And while those aren’t exactly Co60, they effectively last forever and can be hard to detect.

[Isilder]

@AK84

Ok this is a major zombie but

1. Why is it difficult to send things into the sun? The above discussion made my little head hurt. It’s not like they want it to orbit Venus, just simply put it in a trajectory where it intersects the suns surface.

2. Why do you need to send it to Sol anyway, just get it out of the Earth-Moon system. Might as well have fallen into the sun then.

Well point 2 is a good one, no one before mentioned the possibility of sling shots.
Its possible to use sling shot effects to save fuel, eg sling shot the moon and planets … in order to get free velocity changes.

But…

1. very expensive in fuel just to get to low earth orbit.

2. It seems pointless… why ?

The fuel used might make more net pollution by the production and use of that fuel, than the pollution the payload represents… fossil fuels contain radioactive elements at higher than background, since its the very dense remains of biological material. Its dense because water escaped, but the heavy metals, which includes uranium, remained behind in the carbon or hydrocarbon.

3. Its a rather dangerous system… what happens when there is a crash ?