The Astronomy Thread
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Big Phoenix
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Nuclear waste is some serious jimmy rustling as its mainly self inflicted. You can mitigate a lot of the serious waste by simply using breeder reactors which burn up almost all of the radioactive elements produced during reactor operation or you could significantly reduce handling/storage cost by storing it all in one location which we originally intended to do until the green retards killed Yucca Mountain.
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This is why I came up with my "two birds with one stone" plan. We can solve the energy crisis and the obesity crisis simultaneously by rigging up all the exercise equipment in all the health clubs to winding a giant spring, which will power a catapult to ballistically launch nuclear waste into the sun. Then you take your waste disposal budget and use it to pay people to work out.
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phisey
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Those are different discussions. The old MIT/JPL discussions about it dedicated 10-15% of the total mass budget to risk mitigation to keep the payload secure in case the rocket blew up (usually, suspend the material into something solid), and an additional 20-25% of the payload as pure shielding for transport and additional mitigation. So even back when spacelift costs were up around $50k per kilogram, the idea already blocked off 30-45% of each mission's payload mass as risk mitigation.
Once the costs come down, though, game is on.
Once the costs come down, though, game is on.
BrutulTM
Good, bad, I'm the guy with the gun.
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Nuclear waste is such a shit show. Taking it to space would be way more risky than just keeping it on earth, even if it's not very risky. The shit isn't really even dangerous unless you sleep next to it or something. All we need is somewhere that it's safe from terrorists and then keep everyone a couple hundred yards away from it. Burying it in the middle of the desert in Nevada was a pretty great plan.
If you want to get storage and security figured out right quickly, put the waste under the Capitol building.
phisey
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It's not about the risks, it's about the opportunity.
The DOE already has around $58 billion dollars for managing the estimated 80,000 tons of nuclear waste that already exists. That's money being spent every year, as we speak, even after decades of budget cuts. The proposition of yeeting it into the sun is as old (probably even older) than NASA precisely because it would eliminate those expenses permanently. Even back when the costs of boosting a kilogram of mass was extreme, that proposition of a permanent solution was enticing enough to be entertained.
Once Starship is operational and routinely boosting 150 tons of mass to orbit at a cost of $10m per launch, it becomes profitable.
Cybsled
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That cost is from reusability, though. If you’re just yeeting ships into the sun, that drives up costs
And no country is going to let you launch nuclear waste into orbit. Ignore failure above your own country, if it fails over another country now you suddenly have an international incident
And no country is going to let you launch nuclear waste into orbit. Ignore failure above your own country, if it fails over another country now you suddenly have an international incident
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Big Phoenix
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Even under the most optimistic scenario thats still 800+ launches to remove the current waste. That would take a few decades so the cost savings wouldnt be reaped for a very long time.
Its certainly the most ideal means of disposing of hazardous waste, but the cost to do so even with a perfect starship platform is extreme.
Already been done before. Soviets sent up numerous surveillance satellites powered by nuclear reactors. One of them ended up deorbiting over Canada and releasing all of its nuclear materials over Canada.
phisey
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I already posted the Stanford report on the costs on both ends of those. The costs are only extreme because spacelift is still in the late soyuz/falcon 9 paradigm of space access costs. DOE spends $18 billion of its own budget on nuclear waste and congress appropriates an additional $40 billion for nuclear waste management every year. That's $58 billion for about 80,000 tons of un-remediable nuclear waste, IE: waste unusable in third-gen breeder or molten-salt reactors. That's burning through all that taxpayer money as we speak. This includes $6 billion every year for waste produced by the fucking manhattan project 70 years ago.
At those numbers, 100 tons of nuclear waste is costing you, me and everyone who pays taxes $72,500,000 every year. If 100 tons of that mass were to end up on a trajectory to the sun or proxima centauri, that would be $72,500,000 less taxes wasted next year.
If someone were to come along and offer to make 100 tons of nuclear waste disappear off our books next year, for the same that it costs on our books this year, why wouldn't we take it?
If it takes them a few decades, that's on them. In spacex's case it would be $62 million in profit for every 100-ton payload so I don't know if they'd really give a shit how long it takes, it's just easy money for as long as anyone working there now lives.
BrutulTM
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I don't think storing nuclear waste needs to cost anywhere near $58B. The reason it's costing so much now is that they asked the nuclear companies to pay for part of Yucca Mountain and they did starting back in the 80's but then when they didn't deliver on it they have to pay that money back with interest plus pay the companies to keep storing it on their sites. It's a retarded deal but they thought that it was all going to Yucca mountain and didn't have a good alternate plan.
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There are about 250,000 tons of nuclear water globally. The mass of the sun is ~2,190,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 tons spread over the volume of 1.3 million Earths. I don't think it'll change much.
Big Phoenix
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They REALLY have it in for Elon;
bgr.com
NASA says SpaceX satellites could kill astronauts and threaten Earth
NASA says that adding more SpaceX satellites in orbit could endanger its astronauts and create problems with asteroid sighting systems.
bgr.com
This is absolutely pathetic and grasping at straws.
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