...Why not send a rocket loaded with powerful nuclear waste into space and shoot it into the sun. I doubt that extremely powerful or revolutionary engines or guidance systems would be needed, and anytime any pollutants or dangerous, toxic materials we found that could not be disposed of safetly on Earth we could just hurl it into the sun.

I thought of this in the wake of ole georgey-porgey trying to send hazardous nuclear waste into Nevada, and I do realize that loading a rocket with nuclear materials is dangerous because it may [obviously] explode at one point. For a precaution couldn't we just launch it in a remote desert (like the Gobi, Sahara, or even Siberia) where the effects wouldn't be as terrible as if it had been launched at Cape Canaveral?

Your thoughts, please...

Radiation spreads further the higher that it spreads out from, Namely a bomb dropped on the ground might cause localised weather to alter, and a radioactive area, But if that contamination was to rain down from 5 km-7km's above you'll find the area of contamination about 8 times larger.

If you did manage to get your nuclear waste into Space, and did shoot it at the sun, if you missed or hit a rock on route you could end up with a nuclear vapour trail that the earths tractory could interact with later on.

Of course it's not a Cost viable solution, shooting that stuff up there. It would make more sense if there could be some use found for the waste.

I'm suprised you didn't suggest dumping it in the mouth of a Volcanoe lol. (of course the last thing you need is a Plutonium vapour cloud covering a vaste area.)

I know that in the future we won't need to work about using such Polluting forms of Energy creation, Even I have a few up my sleeve that work :D

Sure, sure, IN THE FUTURE. But, at the moment (pun intended), we're still stuck in the present. It might not be expensive if we used really cheap rockets, after all we only need to hurl it into space.

Now here is ANOTHER idea for a space travel device I've incorporated in my scifi novel.

Tachyons-theoretical subatomic (I believe) particles that can supposedly move faster than the speed of light. My basic idea says that if you can coax tachyons into shooting in front of you in one direction and hold onto them somehow you could pull entire ships, planets, stars, anything through space at incredible speeds. When I go in depth with the idea I say that tachyons are attracted to strong magnetic fields, so the ships that travel through space project magnetic fields in front of them and then hold onto the tachyons with a tractor beam. It acts the same way as if you were riding on an elephant and wanted to get it to move forward, so you dangle a piece of food in front of its mouth. There is next to no scientific grounding in this idea but I still think its pretty wild :cool:

It will take billions of dollars to figure out how to send the waste into space and much more to actually send it. How about spend that money by putting a nuclear tax on the consumers to develop a neutralization method using those esoteric physics we talk about in this forum?

Regarding non-nuclear pollution, there is technology already here (and used) to clean up everything else.

...in the wake of ole georgey-porgey trying to send hazardous nuclear waste into Nevada,...loading a rocket with nuclear materials is dangerous....a precaution couldn't we just launch it in ... the Gobi, Sahara, or ... Siberia ...where the effects wouldn't be as terrible as if it had been launched at Cape Canaveral?

Although dropping the stuff into the sun is a very good idea, trying to get it there is a very bad idea, as you've stated.

And what about all the residents of the Gobi, Sahara and Siberia? What will they think of us sending our hazardous waste materials into their backyards -- there to potentially pollute their air, their land and water -- rather than burying our own garbage in a our own deep hole where the stuff can be mostly contained within a far, far smaller area/volume for the duration?

There are no easy solutions to the problems of nuclear waste storage. There are no perfect solutions. There are solutions less imperfect than others. Those are the ones we should choose: like burying the stuff in a very deep hole where it is as contained as we can affect.

In our own backyard. It is our garbage, after all.

You are right, Mr. G, I figured we could just launch them from more desolate areas of the desert(s), but there's always antartica and the whole of the South Pacific. The problem with burying waste is that you really don't quite get rid of the problem, the stuff is there, and its dangerous, and you never know, maybe a well from a small town would intersect with the hazardous material and kill lots of people.

Now Kmuh this is what I'm unclear of:is there a way to deplete every type of radioactive waste or substance found or created on Earth? Can it be done safetly?

Presently, I do not think there exists a neutralization process to neutralize the radioactive materials. There are metals that absorb the radiation (I can not remember it is zirconium or hafnium) ie, they act as shields like lead. There was an Utah company that was selling stock to neutralize the stuff, but I think it was a scam.

Having said that, I am sure if we put our money, and the best minds at it, we will come up with a solution. After all, if one can increase the enrgy level of a heavy metal, there must be a way to deplete the energy by chemical, magnetic or nuclear means. We just do not know how to do it yet.

That is why my proposal to actively do the research....

Your solution, kmguru, is better than mine but is more suited for the long-term. My solution to the nuclear waste problem is very short term and is almost no better than 'sweeping it under the carpet.' It probably wouldnt take billions of dollars to figure out how to send a rocket into the sun, all you really have to do is point it in the right direction and give it a push.

+calculate trajectory (sp) + make it so durable won't crack when hit by a small rock, but I agree , yes it's quite simple.

(that little rock impact is very strong with 10ths of k of speed so a really good protective layer is needed)

like all modern spacecraft.

They should make a survival show in the future where they hurl people into space with only heat and cold protection and see how long they'd last. Given recent shows like 'the chair,' and 'the chamber' who knows how long it'll be before we start watching people die on tv.

I for one can't wait until I start thinking:

"That's horrible, the poor guy is being eaten by alligators and piranahs. Look at all the blood. I sure wish someone would help him...ooooh I guess its too late."

Then, later: "Yeah, that's right, I will tune in next time!"

Eureka moment....

My nuclear engineering knowledge is a little rusty. So comments are welcome. How about blasting the semi spent nuclear fuels (after grinding them to 100 micron size) with a neutron blaster in an automated facility when the gamma burst is sent skyward and may be reclaim some energy....

I know it is not that simple but a start point to work out the detail engineering....

I know that Depleted Uranium make great 50MM shell caps...

As well as eating utensils for us school-goers.

This guy seems to think it may be a good idea:



[Audience comment, suggesting disposal of nuclear waste in the sun.]

moderator: Let me just slip in one comment here. You're talking to a person [Taylor] who, not too long ago, gave a seminar at Princeton on the very topic of shooting plutonium into the sun.

Ted Taylor: Well, it's a very complicated and long subject. Let me just sum it up by saying, most people I've run into - experts, non-experts, general interested members of the public - say, "Dump it into the sun? That's the scariest thing I've ever hear of. We'll have another Challenger accident, everything will blow up, and we'll contaminate the western half of the United States." That's without having given the subject any thought. If you give it thought, it looks better and better and better. I am not an advocate of doing this; I would not say this is what we should do, but only to say we should look at it carefully, which people have not done.

Some very close friends of mine in the National Academy of Sciences have written it off with one sentence; they say it's clearly too dangerous, but they've done no work on trying to make it not dangerous. One example: is it necessary to make an absolutely explosion- and crash-proof container, which cannot release any radioactive material if the worst thing imaginable happens to it? So far, the answer looks like, yes, such a container can be designed, and built, and tested over and over and over again. That's one little part of it; now, there are others, like ... it doesn't go up into a low orbit and fly parallel to the surface, [instead] it goes straight up to escape velocity and then just barely hangs on, and it's taken off from a remote - and that's a real tough word - a remote island, let's say, in the Atlantic. It goes straight up so that, if it explodes, it falls back down because it's so heavy that no open-fuel explosion could make it land much further away than within a hundred miles or so of where it was launched. And it's designed to float, and then it also has things on it that say, "Mommy, come get me." It all sounds kind of crazy, but it's even more crazy to just sit and do nothing. We need to get rid of the stuff so that it's gone.

[Audience comment, regarding the cost of such a plan.]

I went through that in detail, and the cost is much less than the cost of doing anything else.


http://www.sondra.net/concerns/ttspeech.htm



Another paper on the subject:


Although not a viable option today, due to the excessive cost and potential danger of a catastrophic launch accident, propelling payloads of nuclear waste into the sun or into a stable solar orbit between Venus and Earth are both reasonable and interesting options to explore. NASA, Boeing, and MMI have all conducted some investigation into these two options. NASA’s Lewis Research Center studied the option of sending nuclear waste loads into an orbit between Venus and the Sun and concluded the missions were technically feasible (NASA Lewis Research Center). MMI studied the financial viability of sending payloads of waste into space using its proposed X Van Launch as the vehicle (Tour2Space). Although many studies have been conducted proving the feasibility and safety of launching high-level nuclear waste into orbit or the sun by space agencies, governments and the public continue to look to geologists for the answers. Further investigation into this option is the best plan because it offers a permanent and potentially safe alternative by keeping nuclear waste at a safe distance from earth.



http://www.geocities.com/portfolio23015/ResearchPaper.htm


The permanence of these potential measures is surely compelling enough to warrant further research?

May be we should look at alternatives too....like where these material originally came from? If it is part of the earth, why it can not go back to earth? and other ways like why we use the stuff?

In Australia we simply turn radioactive waste into synrock and you can play with the stuff or bury it.


If you want to send it to the sun use a big cannon and do it in one shot, nice and cheap.

The Iraqis or Iranians were trying to import them from England 20 years ago.

Why not find a way to insert it into the magma? That way our core never runs out of the material needed to keep it molten. Molten core is suspected of being the reason we have a magnasphere and we would not last long without one.

Very good idea wet1. The way to do it could be to drop it in an semi-active volcano with a setup where the core elements will open up so as it heat melt going down. The catch is, what if pressure from underground pushes the stuff out? Then we are in deep dodoo....

Why not use a mass driver istead of a rocket? Put the waste inside a capsule with a magnetic field (just some large magnets lining it's surface) then build a long tube with electromagnets in the walls and fire the capsule through there. Granted, it would cost a lot of money to build, but it would be a one time cost as opposed to building a new rocket for every payload. I doubt a capsule lined with magnets costs as much as an entire rocket.

If we do this long enough, won't it start to have some lasting effects on the sun itself? I realize it's a huge object, and firing comparitively puny chunks of nuclear waste at it isn't going to do much, but do we really want to start messing around with our only source of heat, light and energy?

If we do this long enough, won't it start to have some lasting effects on the sun itself?

The earth is so puny in size to the sun that we could drop the earth into it and not have any effect. What's the percentage of radioactives in the earth? Let's be generous and say 4% of the earth's total mass is radioactive. (A ridiculously high figure I grant you) Then everything you could manage to put into the sun would not be a gnat's poop to the mass of the sun.

Ever think of how the sun gets it's conversion fuel to burn?

That's what I thought. But still, I could see a lot of protesting going on if we ever start dumping nuclear waste into our only source of life.

Well, maybe to relax you we could aim the thing into one of the sun's poles, so if by chance it's ejected for whatever reason it has a smaller chance of hitting us. Wet1 is right, you could drop any of the inner rocky worlds into the sun and not a thing would change in the solar system. Sure these planets are big, but the sun is so much bigger and probably has already a gargantuan source of radioactivity. It'd be like tossing a salt crystal into a lake. The crystal dissolves and that's that.

If you wanted to melt it down using magma maybe a more contained environment would be in order...I'm thinking about either Jupiter's volcanic moon Io or a container that holds magma for radioactive material to be dropped in. This could be a remote island in the pacific or a seamount with moderate volcanic activity. We place the material on the volcanoes slope, then the lava buries it and its gone forever.

Actually what I had in mind is an area where the plate is thinner than normal and that also was located in the middle of the plate. Those spots are located around the world and while rare they do exist. The idea being to get it into the magma itself and not wait several millennia for plate tectonics to do the job. As kmguru pointed out, dumping it into a volcano would not be something we would want to do. But if you can get it into the magma, eventually heat convection will distribute it and dilute it. Being in the middle of the plate gives it time to do that very thing. It also has less chance of coming back to see you.

My only questions to the thing is that if we can make the material with a higher enough heat resistance factor to maintain the "passage" needed to be kept open for insertion.

Also the other question is what would we use to keep pressure equilibrium with the interior pressure of the magma. Without a method to contain the pressure and keep it equalized you will have created an artesian well of molten rock. Another scenario not desired.

Maybe instead we could just hurl it off into space and forget it? If it were a large enough vehicle I doubt that it would be dangerous to collide with.