What if we dig a big hole in the earth until we reach the lower part of a tectonic plate and throw all the radioactive...

Geologist here
>until we reach the lower part of a tectonic plate

God I wish.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kola_Superdeep_Borehole
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chikyū

what im don´t understand why don´t we put all radioactive waste of the world in the shity Sarkophag of tchernobyl i mean its already radioactive

If we reach a point that we need to throught that shit away the safest thing is to send it to the deep space (or towards the sun but you never know what could happen so i choose deep space)

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Why don't we just make a huge rocket engine that points up into the sky and then we can fly through space on our own spaceship earth

Radioactive volcanic eruptions?

Spent fuel inventory alone is about 180000 metric tons of heavy metal (MTHM). For practical reasons power plants keep it on-site (spent fuel pools) and either cool it or it goes fukushima.

Yeah until the rocket explodes on take off and you've essentially created a giant dirty bomb

Why bother? If you want to return it to the mantle, encase it in a penetrator and drop it into a oceanic trench. It'll initially be covered in heavy clay, then eventually subducted.

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How about we privatize the entire issue and let the Japs open a business encasing each fuel rod in whatever protects it long enough to load it on a cheep rocket and send them to the sun???

This is the only correct answer, if it isn't going to be recycled in some way.

Probably not, else some crackpot billionaire would've gone public about it by now

>container breaks
>entire ocean irradiated
good idea

the amount of radioactive waste in the world is very small, only about a football field's worth every year is made by the USA

not to mention the fact that you can slab it in metal jars and reduce the radiation to background
there is no radioactivity problem OP, stop listening to pothead hippies

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So that's a no then to my idea of send the rods to the sun?

The solution to pollution is dilution.

And it would take so long for currents to bring it out of the deep ocean that it would've had multiple half lives to reduce its radioactivity.

>Radioactive volcanic eruptions?
Dude that sounds cool :^)

I'm not sure you understand the time scales we're talking about here.

kek'd, thanks user

what would happen if radioactive waste reached the sun?

Sun would turn green

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>the solution to pollution is dilution
No.

t. Environmental engineer

Deep ocean trench currents can take tens of thousands of years to reach surface waters.

So diluting in trillions of cubic metres of water isn't helpful? Biological feedback from deep ocean trenches is practically negligible.

do you have any fucking idea how hard it is to actually reach the surface of the sun

the half lives of nuclear fuel is in the billions of years you idiot

treehugger detected

It is harder to send it to our sun than to shoot it out of our solar system. Much harder

OR we can just put it in Yucca mountain at the facility we already built to store that shit .

no, really in the hundreds of thousands to millions. this doesn't matter though
Most of the dangerous high energy reactions burn away in a few thousand years.

U-235's half life is 0.7 billion years.

We're talking about spent fissile material you simpleton.

just read more into it, I shouldn't have been making dumb assumptions, my bad.

You're not getting rid of it, only spreading radioactive material over a large area.
And once it begins poisoning the oceans it will be far too late to take it back out

Masterplan: fuck ecos and build more reprocessing plants for spent nuclear fuel; sort it in 4 categories: 1. Usable Fuel (Pu; U; other materials able to be of future use) 2. Materials with acceptable half lives for storage (everything with under 50a should be acceptable to store until it has decayed into mostly stable isotopes) 3. Materials with secure half lives (everything with a half life of more than a few million years is not too dangerous as it has a constant but low activity) 4. Materials that we should worry about (Half lives which are too long for storage until decay but short enough for dangerous activity, basically anything 50a

Thats ounds like a great plan, and I would have been 100% behind it a few years ago. However, who would you trust to run all that shit? As disasters like Fukishima have shown us, no amount of good design can withstand bribery and forged maintenance. If you want a safe nuclear reactor (or reprocessing facility), you need to actually be able to trust the people running it.

I don't get it, why not just commit mass genocide. At least then we'd be ending it there before destroying our own planet.

wouldn't drilling such hole create an artificial vulcan?

Why?

The problem with centralized waste storage facilities a la yucca mountain is the inevitable accidents that will occur while the material is being transported there from far and wide. Sooner or later someone is gonna fuck up, jack knife the semi, and that is going to create several levels of unholy mess

Just so you all know, that isn't why the Yucca Mountain nuclear containment vault was cancelled.....

Sounds like that one new Gundam series

A spacecraft would still be orbiting the sun along with the earth. You would have to slow down the craft by an insane amount to have it go on a trajectory that impacts the sun.

>jack knife the semi,
The solution is to use small trucks, or just one van per container.

because the earth is hollow.

Simple enough.

Nuclear Powerplants should be abandoned.

Make better Solar / Wind w/e plants instead.

Flying waste up into space is insanely expensive and super risky - useless option.

Same with drilling a hole. Maybe not as risky, but super expensive so you can take them monnies and invest in more clean power instead.

There's no way around, nuclear power gotta go (fucking remnant of ww2 technology anyway).

If we coud do that easily we could just use the massive geothermal energy.

You don't have to go that deep. That is the go-to solution: deep bore hole disposal. Super safe and cheap.

Trying to waste the hell... Poor demons.

>implying being a remnant or rather an improvement of war technology is a bad thing

>Scientist

No it's not. Deep bore holes have diameters measured in inches, and they still cost an ungodly amount of money to drill. Now compare that to the the sheer volume of waste, as well as the fact that not all of it is liquid, and you begin to see why you are full of shit.

Ugg. You're using a very specific definition of the term, whereas I meant something much more general. IIRC, you just need to get well below the water table. Anything put there will stay there forever.

I laughed hard.

Play KSP, then you know!

>what is a decaying orbit

>and that is going to create several levels of unholy mess
on the american continent, so who cares trololol

Or put lots of helium balloons in one place on earth

And how do you suggest we do that?

Tidal decay works on retrograde orbits and synchronous orbits, mainly for large bodies.
Atmospheric drag? Fucking kek.
The Poynting-Robertson effect doesn't work for spacecraft.
Gravitational radiation only works in the case of compact stars.

So, with all that said, how would you propose we send spent nuclear fuel into a decaying orbit?

Sure, you could utilise the Yarkovsky effect, but fuck man, that works on timescales of millions or billions of years.

Huge distance from the sun means even a decaying orbit could take millions of years. The orbital speed you'd need to shave off for a quick route is around 30km/s... Good luck fitting that into any delta-v budget.

How many trucks would you need? What would that amount of traffic do to highways? The more trucks going thru, the more likely an accident is.

>high-fiving your own post

Why not just shoot the rocket at an angle opposite the direction of the earths orbit and towards the sun

I mean if its mathematically possible I'm sure nasa can manage

The sun is pretty big

You can't run from Earth's orbital speed. Any typical thrust a rocket can apply will only be a drop in the ocean compared to that. In orbital maneuvering, firing directly toward your target is one of least efficient ways of getting there.

Go fuck a plant

for science.

Because we store it in a mountain in AZ or some place which performs the same task for cheaper

Plants are qt

The delta-v required to completely eliminate all angular momentum from Earth's orbit is greater than the delta-v required to reach exit velocity from the solar system.

Yes, it's literally easy to leave the solar system than reach the sun.

Yucca Mountain never got funding from Congress.

>The more trucks going thru, the more likely an accident is.
You're mistaking minimizing mistakes for minimizing risk.

Small trucks are easier to drive, and if an accident does happen, the consequences won't be so severe, and possibly inconsequential. All they have to do is wrap the drum in a few other drums, put it in a single vehicle, then drive it to it's destination. A crash would just mean transferring the drum to a new vehicle.

Just refit a wartank to transport it.

This isn't remotely a concern. Anything strong enough to break open the steel casks they hail nuclear waste in will do more damage than the waste.
Also, this is stupid for other obvious reasons like waste being hauled in a solid form and other, much jucier targets for terror attacks on the road. We haul chlorine and gasoline on the roads, after all.

Thorium reactors eat spent fuel from light water uranium reactors. Reducing the high grade waste mass by 90 percent.

the solution to nuclear waste, is more nuclear power.