Can We Launch Nuclear Waste Into the Sun? Why This is a Terrible Idea
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- Опубліковано 8 лют 2017
- We've got all this nuclear waste to dispose of, and we've got this superheated fusion ball in the sky. Couldn't we just blast our nuclear waste into the Sun and be done with it?
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Team: Fraser Cain - @fcain / frasercain@gmail.com
Karla Thompson - @karlaii
Chad Weber - weber.chad@gmail.com
When I look at the Sun, I don’t see a warm life-giving orb, nourishing all living creatures here on Earth. No, I see that fiery ball as a cosmic garbage compactor. A place I can dump all my household garbage, to make room for new impulse purchases.
I mean, the Sun is right there, not doing anything right? It’s hotter than any garbage incinerator, and it’s the gravitational well at the heart of the Solar System. Get me a rocket, let’s blast that waste into oblivion.
Okay, I suspect it’s going to get expensive, so let’s just start with the worst garbage on Earth: nuclear waste. You know, the byproduct of nuclear reactors that generate electricity for many parts of the world. This stuff is highly toxic and it’s going to be around for hundreds of thousands of years.
It’s also pretty dense, maybe it does make sense to get this stuff off Earth and into the Sun?
Let’s run the numbers.
Nuclear waste, or radioactive waste, of course, is anything leftover material that still has radioactivity. For the most part, we get this as the leftover material from nuclear power reactors, but it’s also generated by hospitals, and nuclear weapons manufacturing. We’ve got leftover nuclear waste from uranium mining, radium processing, and various civil and military research projects.
For example, when you mine uranium from the ground, you get leftover radium and radioactive rock, soil, and even the water. When you power a nuclear reactor, the spent fuel rods are still highly radioactive and dangerous. In the United States alone, there are hundreds of different sites which are heavily contaminated, over thousands of acres.
According to the World Nuclear Association, OPEC nations generate 300 million tonnes of toxic waste every year. We’re talking about poisonous chemicals, medical waste, coal dust. Really anything that you don’t want anywhere near you, or inside you.
Just to give you a sense of scale, that’s a cube of toxic poisons nearly a kilometer to a side, assuming the stuff is a little more dense than water.
Out of this, only 97,000 tonnes of nuclear waste is generated across the planet every year. This is radioactive wastes of all types. That’s only .03% of all the toxic waste.
But for the purpose of our calculations, I’m going to zero in on the most toxic, most radioactive material we’re dealing with: the high-level waste produced by nuclear reactors. Now we’re merely talking about 12,000 tonnes per year, or 12% of the nuclear waste showing up on our planet every year.
Now, let’s look at launch costs.
Most rocket companies are going to charge you $10,000 to $20,000 per kilogram to blast a payload into Low Earth Orbit. The best deal on the market right now is SpaceX at around $4,000 USD per kilogram. And if they get the Falcon Heavy flying this year, it could bring the price down to around $2,500 per kilogram.
If all we wanted to do was blast all this waste into Low Earth Orbit, the calculations are pretty simple. 12,000 tonnes is 12 million kilograms. Multiply that by $2,500 per kilogram, and you get 30 billion dollars. You’re looking at 240 Falcon Heavy launches per year. Almost a launch every single day carrying a payload of high-level nuclear waste. Out of sight, out of mind.
That’s a lot of money, but in theory, the world could afford it if they wanted to stop having wars, or something. If they wanted to blast off all the nuclear waste, it would be more like 250 billion. Again. An incomprehensible amount of money, but still within the realm of possibility, assuming that SpaceX gets the Falcon Heavy launching, lofting payloads of nuclear waste 50 tonnes at a time.
But this is Low Earth Orbit, and we don’t want to go there. Anything in LEO still experiences friction from the Earth’s atmosphere, and eventually it’s going to return back to Earth. Imagine regular meteor showers of highly radioactive plutonium. That would be bad.
It would be more safer to launch this stuff into Geostationary Orbit, where the television satellites are broadcasting from. Material in this orbit can be expected to hang around for a long long time.
You’re looking at twice the price to blast off to GEO, so go ahead and double your costs to put that stuff safely out into space. 60 billion dollars for high-level waste. 500 billion for all the nuclear waste. - Наука та технологія
If we wait around long enough the sun will come to us for our waste. Think of the cost savings!
hehe..
if we wait even longer we are going to collide with our nearest neighbor Galaxy, they're coming straight at us.
I can't wait to be dead when that happens...
MAXNAZ 47 Don't worry we human beings are mortals , and our average life span is reducing any way. Prophet Noah lived 900 years 4000 years ago and present day human beings live on average 100 years . 5000 years later human beings will live on average less than 50 years .
MAXNAZ 47 The point is that we mortal human beings will die anyway , either the Earth collide with the sun or with the Galaxy .
Thorium can be the answer to supplying Earth's energy needs!
*A launch malfunction will shower the waste on mankind. No thanks.*
Exactly, and launch malfunctions still happen a lot.
arlrmr If jet fighters can be made to travel in the space , may be drone jet fighters loaded with missiles loaded with radioactive nuclear waste and made to travel into space heading towards the sun and the missiles with the content launched into the sun could be easy method to launch the nuclear waste into the sun .
OK, I was/am, planning on doing a video about this, there is a video out there that mentions that USA spends about a 1 billion dollars per year, just in controlling radioactive leakage and other maintenance costs... so when you send this stuff into space you are effectively creating a surplus of capital, that, as explained is already sent into maintaining the dump sites... so if you reduce the dimensions of these dump sites you end up with a surplus in capital, the idea of sending these radioactive stuff into space is a good one but it is indeed dangerous, as if there is a poor design somewhere in the method... the consequences can indeed be bad... the idea of putting a lot of the wayste into a single roket is the 1st mistake, it would probably be better to send a small quantity, the type of rocket would need to be a specific one and not generic, (most of them are made to get out fast at the expense of structure fatigue and at the expense of the materials used... the common roket dances in a fine thin line of equilibrium, where its gut is put to the limit, so to reduce the odds of failure, we should not approach it in that way, we instead go for nice steady and slow, we don't care if it takes it a day to leave the planet, nor do we care if it takes it 30 days, as long as the rocket doesn't fail ho cares if it leaves slow... so it's not about speed... and the strength of the materials play a role, it is cheap to send a aluminium rocket, but aluminium is not the strongest metal, yes it can be mixed creating alloys but even then there are stronger alloys, the containers where we put the nuclear waste, these would probably need to composed of different layers, we want to prevent the radiation from polluting the device, and we also want to make it so if the rocket explodes it can take the beating, and it needs to be strong enough to be able to take the blow of falling to the ground from miles up... there could be different approaches on how to deal with that, one could be to add into the design a foam or a thing that creates foam, so after the rocket explodes, the foam covers the nuclear stuff like a pillow/parachute, slowing down its fall, like leaves falling from a tree, this would need some serious design as one omission is all that it takes for all to go to shit... and the idea of sending the waste to the sun is not good as that would age the sun, making it older, thus it expands... we don't want that... we can send it to a moon and to planets, pluto, mars and probably venus would do all others are not good options, mostly due to a gravity increase and the risk of them tossing particles with this toxins onto our ships... so at the end we end up with a 1 billion dollar surplus that can be used to do a ton of things, like to help the homeless and to clean the oceans and to reforest... etc....
THAT's What he said in the Video!
Yes it would be like nuking ourselves
small correction:
earth's horizontal velocity is 30 kms per second, not 30 metres. Otherwise great video, keep up the work!
Yeah, I know, I know. A mental typo that I'm paying for. :-)
Thorium based nuclear reactors are much safer and are also able to 'burn up' the nuclear waste from uranium reactors. This was already known when the technology was being developed but the Nixon administration decided to suppress the thorium reactor and go for the uranium reactor because that last one is able to produce material for nuclear bombs. However, india has recently finished building its first thorium reactor and china is also going this way. usa and europe are lagging behind now.
You spelled out my message exactly as I was going to. THX:))
Only one reason for uranium power plants, to get plutonium for the bomb. Otherwise thorium power plants are the way to go.
Erba Lumkan ii
Yeah... the thorium myth is bs and has been debunked.
There are unsolved issues with thorium rectors. Likely solvable if people would just start building them again, but I urge you to look into the commissioning time for a thorium reactor, which is the primary reason they are not feasible at the moment.
Canadian CANDU reactors are capable of sustaining a thorium cycle right now, without modification.
We need to keep the nuclear waste. Some of it can be used by certain reactor designs. Depleted uranium also has useful applications.
Anything that can't be used is easily stored.
Why at 1:02 do they show an MRI machine? That does not use or create radioactive waste? It uses magnets and radio waves none which are radioactive or created by radioactive materiel. The closest thing to radioactivity in a MRI is what is injected into as contrast that shows up in MRI but no waste is created by that.
thats a CT
Which uses X-rays.
Still doesn't create radioactive waste.
It’s a PET scanner
more like a CT,... I guess,... not that I know,... but,...this:
healthcare-in-europe.com/en/news/new-160-slice-toshiba-ct-aquilion-prime-speeds-up-workflow-reduces-exposure-dose.html
One thing to consider is if there is just ONE failed launch or accident, whether on the launch pad or up in the atmosphere, imagine what those radiation levels would do
9:16 "Now, I've done the numbers". Yeah and you've had an absolute 'mare, by 3 orders of magnitude.
Everyone who has every played Kerbal Space Program knows why launching something into the sun is a really tough thing to do. ;)
I thought Kerbals were always nervous/scared until I watched a video of someone playing who doesn't suck.
Easier to launch it into Jupiter.
I was thinking of the same thing..because there is hardly any chance for a human to put his foot there..so, why not..
Yup, it's the hardest place in the Solar System to reach.
MalfunctionM1Ke Launching anything into the sun should not be tough , it is just like firing a ballistic missile into the sun , instead of the ballistic warhead it will be the radioactive nuclear waste launched into the sun . Here the subject of concern is the radio active fallout , does it fall on Earth as it burn on the outer reaches of the sun .
It's not a terrible idea; it's a good idea that doesn't work without significant technological advances such as space elevators and solar powered waste pods.
It's prohibitively expensive and dangerous. But it does get cheaper and less dangerous with those technologies you mentioned.
Agreed. Something along the lines of a Project HARP gun would help remove the risk of launch failure as well... maybe. Space Elevators FTW.
Space elevator would help you avoid the burn up in our atmosphere and raining down on Disney with plutonium...
I'm somewhat enamored of the "thermal brick" concept that traps radioactive waste inside concrete blocks. The concrete reduces the external radiation to background radiation levels naturally occurring on Earth. The bricks stay *warm* and are useful in building in Arctic and Antarctic environments.
earth is flat so we can just move it to edge and drop :>
Leouch After so many centuries or thousands of years we are still in the Stone age , we think the world is flat , but I know Mr. Leouch is just joking and just trying to make us laugh for a while .
If the world is flat or round we can't just drop the nuclear waste any where without a accelerated velocity Carrier vehicle i.e, the rocket , the rocket will be the projectile .
Leouch #win
Leouch you will die if the Earth was flat
Leouch... these flat earthers like you need a brain
Even if we could safely and efficiently shoot that waste into high orbit or into the sun, doing so would be incredibly short sighted. At present nuclear reactors use about 4% of their fuel rods'/pellets' energy potential before it is disgarded as nuclear waste, BUT the next gen reactors (the so-called Salt Plug reactors) have the potential to flip that number around, using 96% of the uranium/plutonium fuel's potential. The upcoming Traveling Wave reactors have even more promise! Bottom line is, these new technologies will turn all that waste into usable energy resources once more. You may not want to build a preschool on those waste sites, but there be gold in them there hills!!
Without watching the video, the worst aspect of this idea would be the possibility of the launch vehicle breaking up during launch and spreading hazardous waste over a huge area. This is also the reason why scientific apparatus sent in to space such as probes, launch vehicles etc aren't nuclear powered because the risk of destruction and contamination is too great. Considering the failure rate of launches worldwide, it is definently a concern.
You got half the reasons why it's so terrible, the other one is the mind bending expense.
we need to design a system that actually depletes the radiation from waste. like a radiation recycler. there has to be some elements that attract radioactive isotopes naturally. think of it as a radiation magnet or scrubber. this would also help us clean up radiation hotspots like fukushima and Tranoble. imagine sending in some of these of these machines to hotspots and cleaning up the local atmosphere. and then using the radiation to charge nuclear fuel cells or something.
now, i am very well aware that this is extremely hypothetical. but it should be realistic eventually.
There is a nice documentary somewhere about various proposals of such technology, they are just not built because of monetary and legal issues.
If I am right, the main problem is about plutonium. So an element like uranium or nickel or whatever, and there will be ways to isolate and purify that plutonium. Still industry and governments do seal the whole fuel elements into huge airtight containers, very probably because a) it's just always been done so b) the way costs are calculated - one huge investment to make it afterwards easier and cheaper is still a huge sum at one time, while otherwise there is a much lower cost but one that incurs for each and every dump.. and c) whoever'd be the first to do it would have to take the risk of unforeseen problems, costs increasing exponentially and that's a sure thing to scare any investors away, especially gov'mt ones which are used to calculate in periods of legislature ..
Same question but different - why don't we have molten salt reactors instead of these risky pressurised water ones.
Fukushima is like Chernobyl, the land is intoxicated and done for the many years to come. Even if you remove the radioactive material, the land was exposed for long enough for the radium to stick. Chernobyl to this day will still be uninhabitable even though they are well on track in to removing and "cleaning" Reactor #4.
@@nachtrune Xenon-135 is the killing by-product of Uranium 235 when it is rapidly cooled, its like a poison substance but for making a negative to counter a negative does not become positive. Xenon is highly toxic to human contact. Only one way to cleaning Xenon is by Super Heating the area / core which would possible re "ignite" the Uranium.
ET's would not allow this just the same way the ET crafts shut down the Nuclear weapons during the cold war. This is why it ended
The sun is the perfect garbage can once it become safe and affordable to do so. Perhaps in a thousand years or so?
I think we'll always have more valuable things to launch into space than garbage.
It’s always worth keeping in mind that a large amount of huge cost numbers are some guy saying, “I gots to get paid!” That bothers me in most, “Hey, how can we save the planet?” conversations.
What's so crazy is that I've thought about the scenario/solution a million times, but I know it's not feasible right now. I wish we could just send all our bad stuff into the sun LOL. Glad you made this video.
Yeah, it turns out we'll need to deal with our problems here on Earth.
@@frasercain Many undesirable materials are "dissolved" in molten glass, so they cannot spread. Not being molten glass, it can also be a non-thermoplastic resin or plastic.
The radioactive material can be dispersed in a solid matrix and also contained in a container that is highly resistant to an eventual impact with the ground. Hazardous material will reach the ground but will not spread.
Rockets can miss. How many have failed to take off, when carrying astronauts to the ISS, "space tourists" or the James Webb Telescope?
In case of failure, the space capsule has a "life rocket", which fires automatically, carrying the capsule and its crew far away, unharmed. The same can be done with a nuclear waste container.
If we have our nuclear waste in orbit coincident with the plane of the Ecliptic and when it is at the midnight location we start accelerating above the orbital speed and reach an even higher speed (not "circular" nor "elliptical") parabolic or hyperbolic at sunrise, when the mobile moves "towards the sunrise Sun", it will leave orbit going radially or obliquely towards the Sun and will no longer return to Earth. In the long run it will make an impact on him.
At the right time, the cargo is released towards the Sun. All the booster stages of the rockets return to Earth, to be reused and lower costs (Elon Musk already does it with the first stages).
I understand that the greater the initial acceleration, the less fuel is required to reach a given orbit. In the case of non-living material, the acceleration can be really HIGH, which would also help lower costs.
Greetings.
At 6:20 you said 30m/s rather than 30km/s.
Ethan Roberts after he said it wrong 3x i thought he really thinks the earth travveles that slow!
Ethan Roberts
thank you, I was wondering what could possibly be so hard about accelerating just 30 m/s, that clears up a lot.
Ethan Roberts no kidding. I was thinking "I could beat New Horizons in a race with my 4runner"
Came to comment section to ensure someone mentioned the 30m/s thing. Was not disappointed.
which is why anyone who follows these threads should speak fluent typo. it reminds me of the time someone insisted he had a 30 meter lens. i laughed my ass off for almost an hour.
Okay it's gonna take more than 30 m/s to knock you out of orbit I'm just saying
Yeah, I messed up, it was supposed to be 30 km/s.
Thanks for your video, Fraser. My long comment below.... could write a whole book on this subject!
The biggest advantage of dropping nuclear waste into the sun is to "tint" the solar spectrum with the signature of heavy elements not normally found in stars. This acts as a beacon to any extraterrestrial astronomers spotting it some time in the future - it's a big arrow saying "Look more closely here!" and hence a means of sending a signal simultaneously in all directions out into the Galaxy (and beyond). I agree that with current technology it is both unsafe (unreliable) and prohibitively expensive, but in a couple of hundred years, who knows?
I wonder how long it would last in the upper atmosphere before it filtered down. That said, if there are aliens nearby with powerful enough telescopes, they already know we're here.
Our radio transmissions have a century long head start on informing the ( hypothetical) galactic community of our presence.
Tldr: Its too expensive and risky. No we cant.
or you can run it through a new reactor that uses 75% of waste !!!
Absolutely, we need to learn to use this stuff here on Earth, not try to throw it away.
It's strange that we can't do anything useful with something so powerful
The newer reactors can use what is considered waste in nuclear reactors now. That being said with the beginning of net gain nuclear fusion means we could have less toxic nuclear fuel (heavy hydrogen isotopes) which is extremely plentiful on Earth.
Some of those fission products are quite valuable. Ruthenium in particular. Storing the waste for a few hundred years would allow dangerous fission products to decay to the point where extraction of valuable materials becomes practical... and the total mass to be dealt with for permanent disposal is vastly reduced.
I totally understand, and I agree with you. We need to learn to work with this stuff down here.
We already have so much waste circling the Earth now.
No reason to launch more.
And the rocket explodes over Florida. Heh
You'd have dozens of rockets exploding every year, dumping nuclear waste onto Florida.
Frig off
1) Nuclear waste is not going to disappear in the future but is going to accumulate: 2) Earth cannot afford to rocket the waste into space, and launch failure would be catastrophic. 3) The best solution is to find the most stable land area and place the waste as deep as possible in ceramic/glass envelope. 4) This may not be perfect but it is the only way affordable:
Yeah, we'll need to come up with a plan to deal with it here on Earth.
The problem is the lack of deaths from nuclear waste. There were 5 in the USSR in 1982 and one in Estonia in 1995. There are more deaths from the misuse of medical radioactive materials but that's not waste, we'd want to keep those anyway.
Just load the goddamn package into heavy explosive - proof containers.
That would be a definite improvement over what's currently going on. Of course, you still need to put the waste somewhere.
smh just place some bedrock over it
Great video! Though, likely to become moot, once we develop new propulsion technologies to get into orbit with a reliability rate similar to aircraft, and have far more efficient engines. When that happens, it would likely become far more affordable.
But if we get that, there'll be higher priority things to launch into space instead of garbage.
This video is really good. Wacth the last 10 seconds though lmaoo
I've seen the Hanford Nuclear Reservation. That alone would be like launching a medium sized city into orbit.
Ugh, I can imagine. We need a better solution for it.
By definition radioactive waste is radiactive for a maximum of 100 000 years. Because if its radiactive for longer than that period, the activity is that low so its classified as low activity and there for unclassified as radioactive waste.
Assuming its not more dense than water? Really... Uranium is like 20g/cm^2 and water is 1.
Also, calming that Uranium is toxic is really not that correct. The toxicity of Uranium is really quite low. While its not safe for consumption, is have a much lower toxicity than lead for example.
4:10 will eventually return to earth
Well yea. Eventually. But this is really wrong because the plutonium will decay away in space to. So by the time it reenters there will really not be much plutonium left.
5:00. No that is also not really accurate. If the rocket exlode there is really nothing to say that it will split the cargo. It will probably just drop right down. It will defently not spreed around the earth.
Plutonium and Uranium is way to heavy to be airborn.
6:40 This part is also very wrong. While its true in theory, its would not be how you do it.
The way one would do this would probably be to send it out to Mars or Jupiter than gravity accelerate it to the sun. This will also decrease the dV needed quite a lite because the longer distance you are a way from the sun, the less speed you have.
Even with no Gravity assit, the way to do this is to increase the eccentricity of the orbit, then its very little dV needed to blast into the sun
7:40 "Would take hundres of years"
Eeeh. No. If its done smartly it would probably take 3-5 years.
The whole question is the problem to begin with.
There exist no nuclear waste. There exist used nuclear fuel. But its not waste. The only reason its not reused today is because a bureaucracy and stupid laws. The technology for reusing nuclear fuel have been around for decades and some contrary like France and Sweden have used some of the more primitive methods.
In 2013 Russia started the first full commercial fast breeder reactor. This burn up all the long lasting radioactive materials, as well as producing more power. China is building two other breaders with diffrent technology that will be finished up later this year.
India is building light water thorium reactors that don´t create the long lasted radioactive material to start with. Totaly eliminating the problem to start with
matsv201 cm^3
Jano Mladonicky of cause
matsv201
Yes but the oilindustry would never tell us that so we are domed.
then explain the half life of Uranium 233 which has a half life of 160,000 years and will still be just as dangerous then as it is now.
Nuclear is the futureeee
I got a little distracted looking at the voyager golden record model behind you. Where did you get it!?!?!
Noah Knox The Voyager has performed excellent . Such excellent achievements by NASA .The Voyager left the solar system in the year 1999 and is heading beyond but is still function _ al by the plutonium powered .
he flew after the probe with a jetpack and brought it back
If you’re in a hole & want to get out, first stop digging. Best strategy with high-level radioactive waste (very dangerous & poisonous stuff) is first stop producing yet more of it. We can satisfy our energy needs with renewables, geothermal & efficiency measures instead. If I suggested, say, a way of decaffinating coffee which involved nerve gas, people would say go away & find a less dangerous method, rather than trying to merely contain a danger which is entirely avoidable!
We should also learn to reuse and recycle the waste instead of just storing it. There's still energy to be extracted from it.
Nuclear power is still the least polluting energy generation method, not to mention the only one where the waste can actually be stored and not just pumped out into the atmosphere
Yup, nuclear power is still a viable method of generating energy, we need to do a better job of dealing with the waste here on Earth.
You would need a lot of rockets, fuel and luck if a rocket fails on the launch pad.
It would bankrupt the world economy, and cause immense damage when the rockets explode, spraying nuclear waste into the air. It's not a great idea.
@@frasercain maybe put it in a good solid shell and emergency eject with parachutes like the soyuz's capsule
If you are getting rid of every single countries nuclear waste. You could combine a ton of money and funding from each country into a global Project and get top notch scientists so also help. Since every nuclear waste plant in the world is profiting the government of the area should be the ones to contribute to that funding.
I think a global plan to deal with nuclear waste is a great idea.
THANK YOU, Fraser, for not falling into the dunce-trap and using the word 'Nuclear' as a verb or as a noun, when the correct usage is as an adjective. Thank you for maintaining commendably high standards.
The reason I bring this up is because, as a science communicator, were you to make the aforementioned mistake (as happens on other, quite prominent channels purporting to be educational), you'd potentially be teaching people laughable mistakes that they'd then go on to spread, not even knowing that they're not making sense.
Example: The sentence "I support Nuclear," is missing something. It's like saying "I support Red." You support 'red' what? Red firetrucks? Red houses? "Red" is an adjective here, same as "Nuclear" is an adjective there. For the sentence to make sense, you need to specify what it is that you support, such as "I support Nuclear Energy," or "... Nuclear Reactors," or "...Nuclear Isotope Research," or "...Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Imaging," more commonly known as MRI's.
Anyway, channels like D-News, SciShow and a few others frequently and amateurishly use the adjective 'nuclear' as a verb sometimes and a noun other times, which not only shows a lack of familiarity with the subject (ie: that they don't know what they're talking about), but it also spreads bad practices and a high potential for misunderstanding through miscommunication.
1. Build a space elevator. No need for costly propellants, can be used for other stuff, and a massive failure likely wouldn't cause a huge spray of nuclear material.
2. Place a huge rail gun in orbit at the top of the elevator. Or make it any size as long as it can keep up with the supply of materials.
3. Take nuclear material into orbit, load it into a magnetic container like present day DU sabot rounds, and take aim.
4. Launch that stuff into the sun or into oncoming alien spacecraft for relative pennies on the space-faring dollar.
Safe, secure, and could even be modified for regular trash.
Space elevators are going to be tough to build here on Earth, we can't make long chains of carbon nanotubes yet, and even they are only theoretically strong enough to form the elevator. I do like the idea of railguns, though, especially for non-living cargo when you can accelerate at massive velocities.
Key word there is yet. The nuclear waste isn't going away any time soon. Here's a related/unrelated question. If we managed to tack a rope ladder or other low weight object to the moon and extend it all the way to just above the earth's surface, would we have a rope ladder swinging through the sky?
The gravity of earth ought to be able to pull the ladder towards it harder than the moon's gravity could pull it to its own surface. The material should be lightweight enough that it wouldn't break under its own weight. The only foil I could think of would be the relative motion being stronger than the force of earth's gravity and we instead have a rope ladder dangling perpendicular to the earth behind the moon.
Only reason I ask is that this could be a potential workaround for a space elevator. If it is built on the moon extending to LEO or GEO, you no longer have half the structural issues of building it on earth and you now have a way to get something all the way out to the moon with minimal fuel needed. I'd imagine you'd have to account for stuff like Van Allen radiation and all the space garbage we've strewn into the area between us and the moon, but would it be doable?
The day Fraser Cain's channel has more followers than Kylie Jenner's channel is the day humanity is ready for direct democracy.
That's when the aliens show up and let us join the Galactic Federation.
Novitatis Veritatis I'm sure the world would be a better place if Kylie got less followers and Fraser got more. It's not like Kylie has any real relevance.
6:25 He means 30 km/s
Yup, I slipped that one up.
😎😂😂😂🤣😉
Good video. There was some talk a while back about using rail guns or similar kinetic machines to cheaply launch materials into space. I think the rail gun technology is mature enough now since the military is starting to deploy it operationally. The bigger problem was the harsh acceleration forces on the payload, which isn't a problem with trash that doesn't need to do anything other than hold together long enough for launch. The reliability should be much higher too. Someone else made a good point in the comments; we don't have to aim at anything, just get it clear of earth orbit and on its way out of the solar system. No need to try and hit a specific target like the sun. @ Fraser: since this video focused on the launch cost and launch reliability, how does the answer change using a rail / gun launch system?
If we can actually get a railgun launch system going, there are so many other things that we'll want to launch into space.
Late to the party but I agree in the need to explore this topic. For giggles, assume over the next 30 years we solve the 20 impossible challenges of today and could put waste fuel pellets into LEO cheaply using a rail gun in such a way that there is no risk to the environment for rail gun failures and we can collect the pellets and try again. Assume only 5% of the mass of the pellets is waste fuel and the rest is protective shells and shielding and communication tech and so on. Assuming we can place these payloads in orbit so precisely that an automated satellite drone can efficiently gather the pellets and bundle them in batches of 200-500 at a time over a few weeks time. The number I’m curious to know is how much additional boost is needed to get a bundle into an escape trajectory and do we have the technology needed to do that without using chemical rockets? Can ion thrust or other low energy propulsion options achieve an escape orbit (given unlimited time) but in a safe way? How much would that cost to boost from LEO to a Sun destination ignoring the rail gun component for now?
Damn It ! back to the drawing Board
Maybe we have to just deal with the mess we've made right here on the Earth. :-(
What if we just got a big ass catapult and we used it to throw it all into space?
Old glory you catapult peasants are nothing.
get on my level and use a trebuchet if you want to launch a 50 tons projectile 149 600 000 kms
to much airfirction. it will slow down to much and hit the earth a few 100 km from the start. and basicly starting nuclear war with what every country it hitted
we ( humanity) agreed to not litter space
+Kim Busschow To be honest I don't see how that would make any sense. At all. I'd rather put all trash in a stable higher orbit than having it polluting every beach in the only habitable planet we know of. I've the hunch it could even be useful to have it all in one pile on the moon in the future. I don't see how sending it to space could be less ethical than making our children sit on it.
Blood Beryl Calm down dip ass. It was just a joke you fucking loser lmao
it's something I've always wondered about
You're not the only one, I get this question from people all the time.
As part of my MBA I was able to talk with the people spearheading the Royal Commission for a nuclear waste dump in my part of the world. I asked them why we don''t just launch it into the sun and the issue isn't cost, but safety. If safety was 100% guaranteed then it would be happening already.
It's both cost and safety. Cost because the Sun is the most difficult place in the Solar System to reach.
How can something so radioactive be useless? There must be an application for it.
There are definitely ideas on how you can recycle waste down here on Earth.
3:05 See how easy is to do conversions in the metric system ? :D
You know that the US is the only country that uses imperial system
The only thing that could be used to place nuclear waste to the Sun is to place them into giant Asteroids that can house them
You need to find an asteroid that's already on a collision course with the Sun.
That's true.
And you need to place the nuclear waste into the giant asteroids. Already bringing it up there (by rockets?) triggers all the issues and costs discussed in the video. You can't just politely ask the asteroid to kindly stop by at the local nuclear power plant for embarking nuclear waste.
Or, you could reprocess it. 96% can be reused to make electricity and the other 4% has other uses. So, pretty much all of it can be reused.
Unlike GMO fears, nuclear fears have a touch of reason to them. It's hard to do anything with nuclear materials anyplace but an autocratic state.
why the sun just launch it venus, considering the fact that planet is not capable of supporting any life forms.
1. You don't know that there's no life there.
2. Getting the stuff off the earth is the dangerous part, not where we send it.
yes I know that getting off the earth is the dangerous part but what I meant was if we by any means figure out the way to launch rockets successfully then we can just send it to venus
impossible to have any life form at 450 degrees celsius
There's no such thing as impossible... and I didn't mean that life would be on the surface.. Just as most sea life lives near the surface, there could be organisms living in Venus' atmosphere.
GreyFang9 may be nuclear waste would just feed venus life
Dont worry, a rocket full of fission products exploding would only give off 3.6 roentgen. Its not great but not bad either.
The X-Ray tube in a CT ( Toshiba CT shown at the start of the video) don’t actually store radioactive materials or waste in them. The energy applied to the X-Ray tube creates the X-ray at the time needed.
Here's an idea though it is quite rough. It is my understanding that radioactive elements can be stopped by super-freezing. How about slicing the radioactive materials to a near atomic level, super-freezing it, physically removing the radioactive elements, repurposing the radioactivity and the remaining non-radioactive elements?
I don't know, do you know of any research that indicates you can do this by freezing it?
bit like the bed of procrustes ... better ideas stop using u235, switch to thorium, wait til we can launch payload for free or spend $50B on better replacement energy production.
Kilometers per second!
Behemoth29 You are correct it should be 30 kilometers per second not 30 meters per second .
Thanks for this explanation, apart from the size and the cost of this happening, I often wondered why it can't yet be done. Now I know. Cheers.
Massive expense, dangerous payloads, trying to reach the most difficult place in the Solar System.
Fraser Cain Gotcha, Does look easy but obviously not, thanks to someone like you putting it in laymans terms.
Is there anyway you could keep the orbital velocity but tweak it into a deteriorating orbit? It would probably be centuries if not millenniums before it hit the sun but if its orbit doesn't coincide with earth or preferably any of the planets closer to the sun then it could at least be considered a stopgap measure to dispose of what waste they can't develop a reasonable method of disposal on earth.
No, there's no deteriorating orbit until you're into the atmosphere of a planet.
What about dropping it in a subduction zone in the ocean and sending it back into the mantel? It would melt down and dissipate.
FishSticks wouldn't the heavier radioactive elements start sinking down toward the core?
the container would be crushed by the pressure, and all the waste would contaminate the ocean.
I think they could glassify it, then the container wouldn't be crushed.
+eric thatcher still risky. what if they will crack? what about corrsion? these wastes are corrosive. maybe glassified and surface depot. but hopa that a use of them is found and the thorium reactors take place of the actual ones.
Because why would you want to waste all that spent fuel? The irony of spent fuel is 95% unused fuel, so throwing it down a hole to never be seen again is wasting a lot of very valuable fuel.
Why not just throw it into the void? Point the rocket outwards of the solar system
It would still use up much of the world's economy building rockets to get rid of nuclear waste.
Actually, in energy orbital economics this does make sense. It takes less delta-v to leave the solar system.
What about dropping the waste into an active volcano (assuming the waste is put into some sort of casing, making it sink deeper into the volcano before the lava actually touch and destroy the nuclear waste)?
Then you'd get radioactive lava. Are you some kind of supervillain? We could put into a subduction zone though, where it would go into the Earth
Not only is this energy impractical and highly dangerous, it is wasteful. Every time we try to dispose of something as garbage or trash that cannot be recycled today, we seem to take pleasure in making that material unusable for all future time. Just imagine what our desserts and marginal farmland might look like today if all organic "waste" including wastewater from homes from 1800 until today had been used to fertilize that land and we'd planted native grasses on it.
Tried it in KSP. Not a good idea.
Exactly, the Earth's orbit around the Sun is tough to counteract.
9:48 what the hell was that all about?
Bloopers are weird when there's no warning
Niels Daemen 😂
Great video! Would love to know the cost if we separate the long lived ones by reprocessing, highly radioactive ones, like hard gamma stuff...and launch them only? Maybe instead of one big rocket, a series of really small space drones so small that spread of contamination is as low as earnestly achievable, and we wont have the possibility of huge blast, better if it is powered by the radiations ? Why into the sun then, why not just spread them across the universe ?
too bad in the UK and other places they dump barrels into shallow waters and have pipes that directly drain waste into the water around communities that swim in the area.
I don't think they dump radioactive waste into the ocean any more, but they definitely still dump sewage.
Thorium msr ftw!
Yeah, let's recycle that waste into sweet sweet energy.
Fraser Cain
The so called waste is very valuable. I forgot the number of train cars of coal it takes to supply the energy needs for a family of 4 for 20 years. It was quite a few. But with nuclear, the waste would fit in a shoe box. If you reprocessed that so called waste, it would now fit into a shot glass.
Nuclear power plants can be quite safe. Yet we ant arnt building them. We, like Japan keep running, old, not as safe plants because we need all the power they produce, and don't have anything to replace them with. Can't get a new safe plant built.
Even the founder of Green Peace now supports nuclear plants. He left as it's been taken over by crazys and lawyers.
Fraser Cain I think after so much discussions you concluded very correctly along with others that this radioactive nuclear waste should be used as source of energy but measures should be taken to completely neutralize the radio active and make it all safe .
Wtf is your profile picture
we need fusion today 20 years there are 2 thorium reactors running now
Can you imagine what it would be like to have the majority (unlike the minority we have now) of the worlds population educated enough so that questions like this don't have to be explained!
I know, leave science fiction out of science but I can still hope.
The enthusiasm for Star Wars and other sci-fi shows us there's an interest. We just need to step up and help them take their enthusiasm to knowledge. I'll just keep dedicating my life to education.
Then thank you for that dedication and commitment and I apologize for my negative comment, I am just too old and grouchy to have the patience you possess. Keep up the good work.
Pecker Wood 8.doesnt mean they're uneducated if they don't know this one thing smh
' Back where I come from, we have universities, seats of great learning where men go to become great thinkers. And when they come out, they think deep thoughts - and with no more brains than you have. ' Wizard of Oz to the Scarecrow. If you have a degree and you think this means that the Scarecrow really does have brains then he is talking about you.
The point of the Wizard of Oz was that a lot of people with degrees aren't smart and a lot of people with medals aren't brave. Forget what he said to the tinman :)
@PW, in this better world, questions like this should still be explained ... to the children.
Agreed that dumping waste into the sun is a bad idea. But, Wouldn't a magnetic sail (magnetic break) greatly reduce the cost of zeroing velociry? Also, encasing waste in ceramic shield pellets would midigate rocket failures (and also increase weight, therefore cost). Failures might disperse potenrially dangrous pellets out of immediate reach but not radioactivity.
We definitely want to experiment with these technologies, but nuclear power plants are already much too expensive to run and can't compete against renewable energy.
I do like the idea of space industries but one thing I've always pondered myself with that is how we solve the problem of water. Those machines need a way of cooling (Some machines are water-cooled) and water is essential to many mass produced products. Water typically has a lot of weight to it (Which is also why they dehydrate food before sending it to the ISS). How will this problem be overcome. . ? Something I'm always wondering and thinking about.
Would it be cheaper to send it to another place like Venus?
Sure, Venus is still tough to get to. Jupiter would be easier, but it makes the most sense to just deal with it here on Earth.
Not a big difference, the real expense is getting out of Earth's gravity well.
Fraser Cain We can use fast reactors to destroy nuclear waste for electricity.
Christian McCracken The Sun is a much bigger target and closer depending on time of year
I think I know why Trump wants us to go to the moon again.
Step 1. Dig real big hole
Step 2. Dump nuclear waste inside
Step 3. ???
Step 4. Profit
Steal underpants.
Italian mafia does that.
and let everything near it to absorb the radiation?
out of sight, out of mind. That's what matters isn't it?
DangerousPie03 soil would be infertile and pretty much useless for anything it’s common sense buddy
Okay, I get that one. But considering the water is one of the best resources available to slow down neutrons and the radiation isolators, we should be able to make permanent waste zones underneath the ocean by creating hollow structures or even barrell wide holes underneath the ocean floor just like we do while searching for petroleum, dump the nuclear waste and fill it up with concrete before topping it off with solid lead. Can you tell me why wouldn't this work?
so was the same launch theory used when we sent the " Mariner 2" to venus…..sure didn't take a 1000 years to do that
lol so much math why not dig a nice deep hole mount a sling shot over the hole load up a few barrels of toxic waste and pull it down till there is enough stored energy to sling that junk out of the atmosphere? I'm sure there is some kind of crazy math to figure how much the sling shot will have to be pulled down to reach escape velocity and to keep going out passed the geo orbit and let it fall in to the sun.
the velocity needed to overcome the earth`s gravitational force with a slinging motion alone, to make it to LEO would be so high, that the air-resistance would create way too much heat, for any material to stand up to.
inside the earth`s athmosphere there is only a certain amount of speed you can possibly reach because of air-resistance which increases squared over the velocity! 2 times velocity, 4 times resistance and so forth...
the momentum needed for any object to be "slinged" ? is that a word? anyhow....it would would be simply impossible i would assume
last comment was a joke but hey why not do the math...
Sorry I’m only a builder but if we threw all the high radioactive waste into the sun for ever and a day wouldn’t it throw it back at us in some sort of poisonous way
Anyone elso noticed he kept sayin' "meters per second" when it should really be "KILOmeters per second" at least?
There's gotta be a way to dump nuclear waste into the sun. I get that there are challenges, but what it would mean is we could generate clean, reliable energy and eliminate the super toxic byproducts. It would be a monumental achievement for mankind. That's why I think it warrants some outside the box solutions, like a space elevator for instance.
What if nuclear waste turn off nuclear fusion of Sun. Our whole Solar system would be dead.
The Sun can handle as much waste as we could afford to throw into it.
@@frasercain Make sure you know what you talking about before killing our only 1 source of energy and with the source killing everything else in our solar system. Here is no room for mistake.
Fraser Cain It is amazing to me that in this day and age how unaware some people are of the universe they live. The thought that anything sent into the sun from Earth would have any effect on it is indicative of this kind of ignorance. The whole Earth could fall into the sun and the result would be a short term, barely noticeable event as far as the sun is concerned.
During the 1990’s, there was a proposal put forward that each state be made responsible for the nuclear waste it generated. The mayor of my town, Putnam, Connecticut, stated that it might be profitable to use the existing waste disposal landfill in town for that purpose. I stated my opposition to that idea and commented that it was too bad the radioactive material could not be rocketed into the sun. His reply was that we could not do that because it would f- up the sun. What ignorance! The idea that this man was making public policy decisions as mayor and later state representative was troubling to me. This kind of ignorance is evident in today’s climate change denying politicians and the electorate that put them in office. Chilling.
@@johnadams3254 I wounder what level of education you have, if any?
Maybe this is a bad idea, but... Could we not just dump the waste into volcanoes? Let Mother Earth recycle that garbage.
because volcanoes tend to spew thing out, not suck them in.
That's not true. The containment blocks used for Nuclear Waste would not explode or leak if something happened on the launch pad. They are designed to basically withstand a near nuclear blast. They would likely just be recovered on the site or wherever they landed and put on another rocket.
The heaver and more durable you make your containment, the less actual waste you can launch.
@@frasercain what does that have to do with anything. Each containment block can be separated from the other. We launch tons worth of equipment into space with each heavy launch. Launching tons of concrete is a non issue.
I'm very worried about the high level waste dropped into deep Pacific ocean, knowing that the containers were dated to fail years after the assholes were dead. Retrieving those timebombs will cost billions or more.
Yeah, that was a tragedy that we're going to experience for years.
What about dumping it on Venus?
It would still use up the economy of the planet to do that. It would make much more sense to try and learn to recycle and reduce it here.
Fraser Cain I agree but then compared to the sun idea, Venus is around 2 light minutes away, its around 3 months I'd say in falconx rocket time. Venus is already a ruined planet filled with radiation as it is, so the risks would be pretty low 😮.
Right, but if I offered to take out your garbage for $5,000 per pound, or recycle it for $1 per pound, my guess is that you'd choose recycling.
Mars then? Or the moon?
Get superman
Now that would be helpful.
Fraser Cain wishful at it's finest lol
Boils down to thermodynamics. There may be slightly cheaper lunches, but lunches aren't ever free, not even by a long shot. You have the option to pay for your lunch, or starve. Which would you choose?
Anyone who generates nuclear waste should be required to dispose of it WITHOUT being allowed to pass those costs onto the consumer. So in other words, the only problems with the plan of shooting the waste into the sun is cost? No technical problems.
Build a space elevator, build the space cargo hauler in orbit it wouldn't need to be fancy, load in the waste then launch it towards the sun or any other planet we can't colonize it would be cheaper and the space elevator will be ideal for our sending humans to colonize the inner and later outer solar system.
clerickolter All you've done is skip the easy part. Getting to LEO is simple. It's getting the waste from there TO the sun/other planet that is the harder part.
The space elevator would make it 10% easier/cheaper but still very difficult/expensive.
clerickolter Your idea is also excellent .
My idea was a space elevator...however how long would it take to design...then to build...and maybe 20yrs once we have a working model to check it's reliability. As usual the estimated cost goes up as each fringe group tries to block new tech by lawsuits. As usual we will forget that the swamp still needs draining when the alligators show up to protest.As usual a project this huge will take generations to complete. Too simplistic??? Remember the camel was a horse designed by a committee. There are ways to deal with all our trash..we just have to reach that critical junction where the garbage will overwhelm us....then we'll get busy...cost no problem.
I could be wrong, but I think it would be impossible to launch anything into the Sun. The rocket and its payload would vaporize long before they reached it, then those particles would be blown back out into the solar system by the solar winds.
Comets and asteroids fall into the Sun all the time, but it's the hardest place in the Solar System to reach.
What's the issue with nuclear waste? It's pretty benign stuff. Governments exaggerate the dangers of nuclear power in order to maintain the fear of nuclear weapons .
@Paul...LOLOL, fruitcake.
We need Arthur C. Clarke's space elevator.
A space elevator would be great for all kinds of reasons.
Proof that being the wealthiest man on the planet doesn't mean you have the best ideas: Rather than destroy our atmosphere from the surface of the Earth (transporting resources/products/services by truck driving), he proposes that we destroy it from up above (by regularly launching thousands of fuel guzzling super rockets)... Great solution!
The only reason why it's an absolutely terrible idea is because changing the composition of a star is a terrible idea. that's all you need to know.
>Why This is a Terrible Idea
1) Calculate the dV needed. Calculate the cost of the rocket. Burst in tears.
2) Today's nuclear waste is tomorrow's precious fuel reserve. There are reactor types that allow it.
If it’s “hot” enough to be dangerous it’s “hot” enough to be fuel.
I'd be interested to see what the annual costs are to store all of this waste. I mean the costs of the facility, the personnel, and the cleanup when something goes wrong.
There has to be some kind of way that the waste could be used to generate energy needed to propel itself. Make it a dirty reactor and use the heat still generated to power an ion drive, or something. We could also stockpile the waste in deep earth orbit until we accumulated enough to load up and make a bulk launch.
I am by no means a genius, so what I'm saying might sound ignorant. Just some thoughts I had after watching.
Thanks for the video.