Reply to: Just how long does it take to cool a reactor?

[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.

[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.)

[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

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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 !

[Board Game Geek]

What happens if we accidentally litter someone elses patch? We'd have a bunch of angry aliens demanding we pick up our litter. Then where would we be.

Go to the back of the class.

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 honour 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.

[doodab]

Has the cost of loading it up in to space-capable dumpsters and blasting them in to the Sun been assessed ?

People will usually say "Ohh, that's going to be expensive", but considering the cost of cleanup operations, and the environmental cost for generations to come, I would have thought that if there was a "Nuclear Waste Disposal Club", funded by all the nations using nuclear power, then surely it would still be more cost-effective to blast it in to the Sun.

With the decreasing costs of space travel, and the economies of scale contributions from all parties to central programme, surely it should be worth a consideration ?

I don't know how many fuel rods are globally used each year, and how much tonnage we are looking at, (10 ? 20 ? 50 ?), but chucking it at the Sun isn't going to bother it much.

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.

[AtW]

Has the cost of loading it up in to space-capable dumpsters and blasting them in to the Sun been assessed ?

The expensive part there is getting 3rd party insurance until the moment it leaves Earth and sets course to the Sun. I guess it will remain so until Tesco gets into that business.

HTH

[suityou01]

Has the cost of loading it up in to space-capable dumpsters and blasting them in to the Sun been assessed ?

People will usually say "Ohh, that's going to be expensive", but considering the cost of cleanup operations, and the environmental cost for generations to come, I would have thought that if there was a "Nuclear Waste Disposal Club", funded by all the nations using nuclear power, then surely it would still be more cost-effective to blast it in to the Sun.

With the decreasing costs of space travel, and the economies of scale contributions from all parties to central programme, surely it should be worth a consideration ?

I don't know how many fuel rods are globally used each year, and how much tonnage we are looking at, (10 ? 20 ? 50 ?), but chucking it at the Sun isn't going to bother it much.

What happens if we accidentally litter someone elses patch? We'd have a bunch of angry aliens demanding we pick up our litter. Then where would we be.

Go to the back of the class.

[suityou01]

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

Surprisingliy patient and diplomatic of you. Are you demob happy or something?

[Board Game Geek]

Waste Disposal

Has the cost of loading it up in to space-capable dumpsters and blasting them in to the Sun been assessed ?

People will usually say "Ohh, that's going to be expensive", but considering the cost of cleanup operations, and the environmental cost for generations to come, I would have thought that if there was a "Nuclear Waste Disposal Club", funded by all the nations using nuclear power, then surely it would still be more cost-effective to blast it in to the Sun.

With the decreasing costs of space travel, and the economies of scale contributions from all parties to central programme, surely it should be worth a consideration ?

I don't know how many fuel rods are globally used each year, and how much tonnage we are looking at, (10 ? 20 ? 50 ?), but chucking it at the Sun isn't going to bother it much.

[doodab]

That's a rather surprisingly benign figure, 10W/kg, with only passive cooling required. I thought some had reportedly caught fire and were becoming a real menace.

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

[AtW]

That's an idea - Stick a load of nuclear power stations under Mare Imbrium on the Moon, and beam the energy back to Earth via microwaves.

You got it ...