Gallery: Seven Big-Thinking Proposals For Dealing With Nuclear Waste

Can we not just build a rail gun an fire the stuff at Mars then recover it after it has spent some of its energy to begin the Terraforming process on the red planet. Or into the sun, at the moon, Venus, or really anywhere else we feel might be fun. Like playing fetch with ourselves.

Think harder fellas...not one of these sounds like a happy ending

- wise up

Create a radioactive virus that eats the stuff!

Can we not just build a rail gun an fire the stuff at Mars?

No we can't. No one has built a rail gun even remotely close to the power required to launch something into orbit much less beyond.

I don't know. Maybe run tests on thousands of types of flora and fauna and see if something good comes out of the reaction? Come on we shouldn't make plans to learn how to keep relying on something so dangerous some of the smartest people in the world don't even know what to do with it.

?Send it in to the Sun?
An oldy and a goody...
Sounds good... the Sun is damn hot 2M degrees – more or less (20M in the hot spots)
That's hot enough to burn up whatever is carrying the radioactive crap.

but,

and, there is always a butt with radio isotopes...
Plutonium doesn't burn... in general…
Even if it did, it wouldn’t necessarily burn into sumthun non radioactive.
You can phase change it from a solid to a liquid to a gas.
Then you could ionize the gas...
With enough heat you can get a radioactive plasma..
You could further destabilize it.
Bottom line, the Sun doesn’t burn stuff down to nothing.
But, shooting it in to the Sun doesn’t get rid of it… it just relocates it….
It’s just a very hot – radioactive – something else.
Plus, once the transport vehicle and the radioactive stuff are vaporized in to a gas, the gasses are going to be blown back out towards Earth.
Earth has a difficult enough time with Coronal Mass Ejections on a good day.
Satellites fail, power grids fail, the polar aurora’s look cool… - but, that’s the only up side.

Making the solar wind radioactive - some how – just seems wrong.

One doesn’t want to do sumthun that one can not undo, with little or no understanding of just how damn stupid that sumthun is.

We haven’t had to deal with massively radioactive solar winds, so far….
Maybe the universe expects sentient beings to be too smart to do some thing like that to themselves.
I’m not sure that the Earth’s magnetic field was designed to deflect large ionized radioactive particles.
It’s ok with molecules up to Nitrogen… after that, it’s anyone’s guess.
Even if the Earth’s magnetic field worked and successfully deflected the particles – they would wind up at the poles…

Why not just store the stuff up there to begin with and, eliminate the trip to the Sun?

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

The Sun trick is reminiscent of how particulate air pollution was dealt with in the 60s and 70s.
Pollution was quantified by measuring the density of solid particulates per square meter at reference distances down wind of the source.
So, a coal fired power plant was not rated as to how much crap it was throwing into the air (tons per hour FYI) – the rating was based on how thick the layer of crud was where it landed….
The engineering solution - the higher you throw the stuff = the greater the area that it spreads out over = the thinner the layer of crud measured at any given reference distance. This was great until they built the stacks so tall that the pollution could lap the planet.

I had a car that did the same thing. Rather than design an engine that burned gasoline down to CO2 and H2O – it was easier to meet a standard of unburned hydro carbons per cubic meter of exhaust…. Here again, it didn’t matter how much crud there was – just the density of the crud when it left the tail pipe.
Now, all the actual exhaust was crap… (Unburned gas, partially burned gas, lead, oil, etc…) But, those were mitigated by the location of the measurement. The pollutants were not measured where they emitted from the engine… but, where the emitted from the tailpipe… The solution = add fresh air to the exhaust stream (effectively making the factory’s smoke stack taller).
Just add another belt driven fan to suck in outside air… mix it with the exhaust until you get a hydrocarbon percentage that’s acceptable.

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

Shooting radioactive crap in to the Sun would be the ultimate “tall smoke stack.”
Only a mere fraction of the stuff blown back from the Sun would hit the Earth…

As far as we know, there are no other life-forms in our solar system that would sue us for polluting their environments….

And, our environmental policies from the 60s and 70s have worked – so, well – so, far - why not stick with a winning game plan.

It kinda shoots that theory that there is intelligent life on Earth in the ass… - but, really what could possibly go wrong once we smear a radioactive cloud around the Sun with a half life of 25,000 years or so….?

Well, the half life thing would, eventually, be the least of our problems….
Sooner or later, we are going to leave the outer cusp of our gravity well and do sumthun some where.
Granted, it won’t happen tomorrow. But, some day some one is going to come up with a viable way of putting around the inner planets without taking up an entire human life span.
In doing this, with whatever engines or technology they employ, they will be moving very, very fast…. Still sub light – but, getting there…
A consequence of approaching the speed of light… say 10%, is that – when one’s craft smacks in to other stuff (say a free molecule of hydrogen adrift in the solar wind) – that collision results in the release of radiation, too.

{go figure}

So, in order to zip around at practical interplanetary speeds, one not only needs an energy source and an engine – one, also, needs some sort of deflector shield… To date, we can only deflect charged particles with a magnetic field.
Let’s keep it simple, and say that there are only charged hydrogen particles out there. So, we are cruise’n fine and all our problems are solved… until we hit that cloud of radioactive plutonium that our great, great grandfathers spewed around the Sun… Our shields can handily deal with ultra light hydrogen… - but, these plutonium molecules are more like bowling balls. Assuming that they have a fixed amount of energy, they have to choose – Shields – or, Speed… Slowing down, also, means less energy required for the shields… So, slowing down it is…. We have provided them with interplanetary rumble strips.

{Don’t say we never did nuth’n for ya kid}

Meanwhile, back at the present, we are poised to take massive piles of very large molecules and toss them into the windshields of or great, great grandchildren….

No wonder our kids never visit or call.

Rail gun technology has advanced considerably during the past couple of decades. It shouldn't be too much longer before they are able to launch small loads into orbit, the idea being to use the materials in the small loads to build space ships and stations. This could allow nuclear waste to be assembled and launched into deep space. But, it would most likely be irretrievable should technology make the stuff useful.

Launching radioactive waste into the Sun would dilute it so much as to make the radiation insignificant. The surface of the Sun is a constantly roiling and boiling plasma moving at high speeds. There is nothing we can launch into it that wouldn't be quickly turned to plasma and spread around. If flashback was a concern, although I wouldn't know why, they can just drop the stuff on the opposite side of the Sun from where we happen to be.

Frankly, I don't think we are making enough effort to use the waste as a source of energy. Many years ago, research was conducted to make a battery fueled with radioactive material. A crude setup proved it was possible in principle. The method is similar to how solar cells function. Solar cells change light directly into electricity. Radiation is more energetic than light. So, nuclear waste might be made into batteries which can be buried deep into the ground and will generate electricity for a long time.

Currently, various satellites and spacecraft use thermal batteries with plutonium as a heat source. They aren't very powerful, but they last a long time. This probably wouldn't be scalable for our needs.

Another possibility is to bury hot nuclear waste deep into the ground and pump a gas into it to retrieve the heat. The heat would boil water in a closed loop to turn turbines and generate electricity. New turbine technology can generate electricity from relatively small thermal differentials.

I don't know, but al of these doesn't sound like real options that are good for the environment..

Might be better to think simple and small. Why not just DESTROY the waste outright, instead of storing it? It could be done right at the power plant. The process is simple, economical, safe, and produces useful by-products. Look for "Adventures in Energy Destruction".

@NASAWFF

Plutonium burns, actually. It is pyrophoric, as it turns out, so if you make a dust out of it, it can spontaneously ignite in the presence of oxygen. The metal itself burns nicely in powder form.

The decomposition is not always complete, so when you finish burning it, you have some Pu mixed with O2-bonded Pu. Still radioactive, so you are right on that count.

Coronal ejecta is largely in the form of ionized particles. The amount of Pu you'd get back from dumping our waste in the sun is below negligible... And it's not like TRU waste is just globs of hot Pu. It's cleaning rags, tools, gloves, containers, paper, etc. Dumping a complete bundle of spent fuel rods wouldn't even cause a blip in our impinged radiation profile.

You should also go check into the materials cross-section of our sun. You'll find it goes up to Iron really nicely, but heavier elements, not so much. You'll want to look up things like nucleosynthesis and iron-burning.

People are so focused on getting rid of it. Maybe this is naive, but couldn't we find some way we could use it somewhere else or recycle it instead of digging a big hole or chucking it into space?

Putting nuclear waste in the ground is utterly stupid. There is no way to make sure it stays safe. Nuclear energy is NOT the answer; solar and wind power create NO deadly waste materials. They are the only TRUE answer.