Moon Seen As Nuclear Waste Repository

so many problems with nuclear waste these days ... maybe its about time I let other people use my perpetual motion machine ;>

Sending our general trash into the sun is not a wise thing to do. That trash is made out of finite resources, if you keep shooting it offplanet you keep reducing the amount of resources on earth. Nuclear waste is the only trash I can think of that genuinely needs to be sent to the sun as it has no role on this planet other than death and destruction through radiation.

Originally posted by MidnightDStroyer
It wouldn't have any effect on the sun. Merely *one* of its sunspots generates astronomically more amounts of radioactivity than all of the Earth's *combined* radioactive materials...

Sunspots don't generate any radioactivity!
Just normal electromagnetic radiation and actually sunspots radiate smaller amount of that than normal surface... because power and peak wavelength of radiation depends on temperature.

Originally posted by Kriz_4
Was it a Russian nuclear powered probe that broke up on take off?

They actually used real nuclear reactors in some of their spying satellites, and those reactors are now leaking their coolant to orbit.
Havoc in the Heavens: Soviet-Era Satellite's Leaky Reactor's Lethal Legacy

Originally posted by longbow
The best way how to get rid of the waste is to shoot it to the Jupiter, or outside the solar system. It takes less energy when compared to the "sun solution".

Nice logic... climbing out from hole requires smaller amount of energy than falling to it!

Don't you even remember how long it took from Galileo to reach Jupiter and how complex its flight was because it had to pass Earth two time and Venus once to get enough speed.
Also Cassini flied past Venus two times, once past Earth and once past Jupiter to get to Saturn.
en.wikipedia.org...


And neither sending stuff to sun would be without problems.
Any object launched from Earth will have Earth's orbital speed meaning it tends to stay in same orbit around sun than Earth. To get it falling to sun we'll have to accelerate it, this time that required acceleration is just backwards meaning we have to decelerate its orbital speed which also requires energy.

well,it's better to dump the waste on the moon,than it is to dump it down here on earth

"Nice logic... climbing out from hole requires smaller amount of energy than falling to it! "

Written like someone with NO understanding of orbital mechanics. It would take MUCH more energy to reach the sun then to go to the moon or other "near" planets. Try thinking of it like you are on a very fast carousel and trying to throw a ball to the center. It's much easier to throw it away from the center, not toward it!

"The hardest object to reach would be the Sun itself. Our imaginary spacecraft, freed from the Earth, would be moving like the Earth around the Sun at about 30 km/sec. The only way for it to reach the Sun is to somehow kill that velocity--for instance, by a rocket imparting 30 km/s in the opposite direction; if that were done, the spacecraft would be pulled in by the Sun. The people who propose sending nuclear waste by rocket into the Sun do not seem to know much about orbits! "

Originally posted by momo
Written like someone with NO understanding of orbital mechanics. It would take MUCH more energy to reach the sun then to go to the moon or other "near" planets. Try thinking of it like you are on a very fast carousel and trying to throw a ball to the center. It's much easier to throw it away from the center, not toward it!

I admit it wasn't best comparison.
If you haven't noticed I'm from "not English" speaking country and because "life" tends to disturb hobbies I don't always have time to write detailed replys (what those would require).
And my reply was to that idea of sending nuclear waste to Jupiter which is also far away from Earth's orbit.

Accelerating object's speed with 30 km/s requires as much energy as deccelarating its speed 30 km/s. Which way (Jupiter or Sun) is easier depends just from how much you have to change its velocity (accelerate, decelarate, change direction... doesn't matter) to achieve that goal.


PS. Your carousel doesn't have equivalent for gravity which would keep that ball in its current orbit, so it's fifty fifty.

Oh.. and welcome to ATS, the beer is in the fridge and nuts are all over the place.

[edit on 22-10-2004 by E_T]

I think nuclear waste should stay down here on Earth. My reasoning is simple.

Lets say 99.5% of all rockets successfully leave the atmosphere. That seams about right, maybe even a little generous. What do you suppose would happen if a rocket containing nuclear waste didn't make it out? I prefer my rain acidic, not isotopic.

Originally posted by necro99
they will never learn...
WHY DONT THEY SEND IT TO THE SUN?????????????????!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I AGREE, send it to the SUN!!!
and dont kill aliens on the moon

IMO a better idea is to just keep all the waste in one big huge giant megabig facility and make it radiation leak proof and leave it there forver and ever!

i think we can pretty much do anything with this nuclear waste that doesnt hurt us fer quite a few years. as long as we're dead what dif does it make what happens on earth?

Is there a way we can just dump down into a volcano (kinda stupid) or the bottom of the ocean, which sounds like a great idea. I say we dump into the Mariana Trench. How in the hell can it be a threat down so deep, it would never experience any human interaction.

I also like the sun idea.

.
Actually Frosty's volcano idea is not so far off the mark.

If you could bury the stuff in a tectonic subduction zone it does two things,

1) continues to bury the stuff deeper and deeper.

2) adds heat via radioactivity to the core the planet, forestalling the cooling of the planet's core to preserve the protective magnetic field and avoiding the Mars type 'dead planet syndrome'.
.

Hey at least chucking all that nuclear waste in a "tectonic subduction zone" sounds better than blasting it off to the moon, Jupiter or the Sun, if it would help the Earth and not come back.

I don't see whats wrong with that burying it in a mountain idea. The fact is that humans made the waste and they shouldn't send it out into space. Whatever country made it should have to live with it even if its residents are unhappy about that. I'm sure most people who are against these things have probably used electricity generated from a nuclear power station or benefited in some way.

Whatever is done with it, it has to be transported. Along the roads to a storage site sounds a lot safer than along the roads to be blasted into space.

You people are so funny. "No nuclear waste on Earth, where people live!" "But no nuclear waste on the Moon, where nobody lives!"

Let's store them in a mountain until the time when we are able to make use of antimatter technology to generate electricity comes. Then we annihilate them to produce electricity. This way they are a waste to be disposed of and yet a fuel too. By that time not only we are not producing any more such radioactive waste, we are reducing their amount too.

Uh...sounds stupid right?