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0 pointsCthulhu_5y ago0 comments

Not sure how serious you are with the radioactive waste thing but I'll do the HN thing and bite (nerdsnipe!), because that's not going to work. You can't launch things into the sun, you need to decelerate objects. The earth travels at 30 km / s (70K MPH) around the sun, so you need to decelerate about that much the other way. And orbiting radioactive waste is just asking for trouble.

The total amount of radioactive waste on the earth is about the size of a swimming pool (or was that the total amount of gold? I forgot, either way in terms of quantity it's not that much), burying it deep and forgetting about it for the next 100.000 years is the way to go I think.

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piker5y ago

> The total amount of radioactive waste on the earth is about the size of a swimming pool (or was that the total amount of gold? I forgot, either way in terms of quantity it's not that much)

This seems wrong in both places. There are probably enough gold rings manufactured per year to fill a swimming pool. In pictures: Fort Knox itself seems to have at least a swimming pool of gold [1] and Thailand a swimming pool of waste.[2]

[1] https://external-preview.redd.it/rgD0FO1pELgkuXZzWC2NQk0vJZU... [2] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/93/TINT_Rad...

nitrogen5y ago

Those piles of bars are shallow, and those barrels are probably mostly non-spent-fuel by volume.

fanf25y ago

In the 1930s they put about 13,000 tonnes of gold in Fort Knox. (It now has about 4,500 tonnes). Density of gold is about 20g/cm^3, or 20 tonnes per cubic metre. So Fort Knox held up to 650m^3 of gold.

A normal swimming pool is about 25m x 12.5m x 2m which is 625m^3.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Bullion_Deposito...

This page indicates Sellafield has 2000m^3 of high level nuclear waste.

https://ukinventory.nda.gov.uk/site/sellafield/

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extraduder_ire5y ago

> burying it deep and forgetting about it for the next 100.000 years is the way to go I think.

Is there a problem with burying it in a subducting plate boundary, so it is eventually pulled back into the earth's mantle? There's already fission going on down there.

Havoc5y ago

>The earth travels at 30 km / s (70K MPH) around the sun, so you need to decelerate about that much the other way.

Surely you’d just need enough to end up in a decaying orbit? Then it’ll eventually reach the sun

hollerith5y ago

Low-earth orbits decay because of friction between the spacecraft and the Earth's upper atmosphere. What do you imagine would guarantee the decay of a solar orbit before a perturbation (by, e.g., the gravity of the Earth's moon or a comet) sends the orbiting object into a collision course with Earth?

jl27185y ago

All you need to do is hit the Lagrange point.

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