Just how long does it take to cool a reactor?

[Board Game Geek]

I think unreliability of launch vehicles is as much of a factor as cost.

You will need to blast thousands of tonnes (and it is thousands, apparently the US alone has over 60,000 tonnes of used fuel rods, and you would need to launch their containers as well) of payload into space, and space launchers just aren't that reliable. The US Delta IV Heavy rocket will lift about 9 tonnes on an escape trajectory, so that's at least 7000 launches, which I doubt is going to happen without a few failures, and those failures will involve tonnes of nuclear waste falling out of the sky in an uncontrolled manner.

The most viable long term solution is to bury the stuff deep deep underground.

Cheers for the facts, always good to know !

[doodab]

Cheers for the facts, always good to know !

That sciam link I posted earlier has a good, but very US centric, article about the "what to do with it" side of things.

[suityou01]

LOL !

Well, I'd like to hope that we can pretty much guarantee to hit the Sun, which is in our solar system and therefore ours.

As for littering someone else's patch, the nearest star is about 4.2ly away, and would take approx 40,000 years at current tech to reach, and there are no planets there.

Going further afield, the nearest extrasolar planet from earth is Epsilon Eridani B and it is about 10.5 light years from Earth. 100,000 years at current tech level to get there is a top end guess.

However... Epsilon Eridani B has not been verified 100% and remains unconfirmed due to the heavy magnetic field associated with that star system (which interferes with radial velocity measurements). If Epsilon Eridani B is not our nearest planetary neighbor, then that honor falls to the 3 planet system detected at Gilese 876 about 15 light years from our planet.

Still, that's assuming we cannot point and fire a rocket in to the biggest thing in the sky.

I wonder just how much we know of our current tech. I reckon some boffin somewhere has developed some kind of flux capacitor antimatter wormhole hyper drive we know nothing about.
As AtW said if we were exploring other worlds the first thing to go up would be a Tesco Metro though.

[TimberWolf]

I guess when you have several hundred tonnes of it, it's somewhat less benign.

Some interesting reading here. The Future of Nuclear Power: In-Depth Reports

Ah, but check out Thorium as a nuclear fuel which if memory serves correctly could consume spent fuel rods too. Japan has one or two small Thorium reactors and had proposals for more but I think India lead the way.

[EternalOptimist]

LOL !

Well, I'd like to hope that we can pretty much guarantee to hit the Sun, which is in our solar system and therefore ours.

You are ignoring the fact that there is a 50/50 chance that the stuff will land at night. So it wont be destroyed and it could be a danger to future manned expeditions

[suityou01]

You are ignoring the fact that there is a 50/50 chance that the stuff will land at night. So it wont be destroyed and it could be a danger to future manned expeditions

Coffee / keyboard moment of the day (C.K.M.O.T.D.)

[TimberWolf]

LOL !

Well, I'd like to hope that we can pretty much guarantee to hit the Sun...

Not really. Imagine swinging a ball around on the end of a piece of string and trying to fire something off that ball in order to hit the centre of rotation (you). Or flicking a peanut from the edge of a turning record LP and trying to hit the spindle. Almost guaranteed miss. You've got upwards of 30 km/s of speed to scrub off to fly into the Sun, whereas Solar system escape speed from Earth's orbit is only about 17 km/s.

Check out how long NASA have taken to get a probe to orbit Mercury (the nearest planet to the Sun) with the Messanger probe. Hitting the sun isn't easy.