Can’t we just shot the waste into the sun? It doesn’t have to be fast. Just launch it into space, aim it at the sun, and give it a kick. It can take as long as it needs to.
The worry I have with Nuclear power is the heated water used to cool down the react. If just thrown back, it can damage the local environment.
Take care of that, and I am happy.
I’m developing an app that will allow you to share recipes for cooking and eating neighbors, loved ones and beloved family pets! Not much of a market now but I think it’s a growth industry.
I think that results in an elliptical orbit where the nuclear waste collides back with the Earth at some future date and gets scattered across the atmosphere.
So basically the same as coal.
Okay, so you have to give it a slightly bigger kick than. If we can get to Jupiter, and put a satellite around it, surely, we can hit the biggest target in the Solar System without too much effort.
Okay, this answered it.
Well, I mean, it is a fair amount of effort in terms of cost, esp since you’re launching something you aren’t going to recover a lot of.
And all it takes is one Challenger-esque failure for you to accidentally high-altitude nuke yourself. . .
Really all you need to do is build a giant artificial lake and dump it in. Radiation reduces geometrically over distance through water. You can literally swim within 10-15 feet of nuclear waste underwater and experience no harmful amount of radiation.
Water is amazingly non conductive for this.
Edit: I am, of course, being slightly tongue in cheek. But the reality is that reactors hosting waste on site in a giant water bath isn’t really a terrible solution.
Yeah, that hasn’t happened for a while.
Fun fact, Nuclear melt downs produce less radiation than a coal plant over the course of a coal plants life. Take into account that chance of a well regulated Nuclear power plant melting down, and you have coal plants outproducing nuclear power plants by a large margin.
Also, you can always just bury the damn stuff deep underground in concrete. That would be fine. A bit expansive, but probably well worth it if we care about the environment.
Keep in mind, the more you focus on the negative outcome of a nuclear disaster, the more likely you’ll assume the risk of it happening is high.
Page 48 it what I’m talking about. http://www.decisionresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/Slovic.pdf
http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.589.6788&rep=rep1&type=pdf
Original source. It’s been a while since I looked at it (like 14 years).
To be clear, I’m fully in support of nuclear and think we should rely on it much more in the short term.
I just don’t think trying to lob the minute amount of waste into the sun is necessarily the best solution to its principle downside.
I guess you also don’t like the idea a mega corporation building a giant orbital solar panels that can collect energy directly from the sun and beam it to a receiving station because said company might, just might be evil, and use it as an orbital space cannon, do you?
You are so paranoid.
So long as I have the override codes for the space station and the precise GPS coordinates of everyone who pees on toilet seats and doesn’t wipe it up, it’s fine.
Turning the moon into a “Deathstar” perhaps?
It’s actually really hard to launch something at the sun. It’s easier to leave the solar system.
Depending on just how long Trump remains president, we should probably be working on those plans already.
going to conflate Climate with Environment for this post:
The expected move is yet another sign of the administration’s reluctance to aggressively deal with the chemicals, which have been used for decades in products such as Teflon-coated cookware and military firefighting foam and are present in the bloodstreams of an estimated 98 percent of Americans. And it comes less than a year after the White House and the Environmental Protection Agency faced criticism for delaying publication of a health study on the chemicals, which a White House aide had warned could trigger a “public relations nightmare.”
EPA’s decision means the chemicals will remain unregulated under the Safe Drinking Water Act,…
… Federal scientists last summer concluded that PFOA and PFOS pose dangers at extremely low concentrations in a health assessment that POLITICO reported Trump administration officials initially sought to block.
EPA-mandated testing has found the chemicals at unsafe levels in at least 16 million Americans’ tap water, but activists say the problem is even more widespread.
When an advocacy group reanalyzed federal monitoring data to include lower levels of contamination, it estimated that as many as 110 million Americans may be drinking water with levels of the chemical that could cause harm. The problem is particularly acute near military bases, more than 400 of which the Pentagon suspects to be contaminated with the chemicals.
If these chemicals are used in Teflon and other non stick coatings, then are those coatings also dangerous?
Probably, though they stopped making them in America from what I gather. Of course most pans and shit are probably made in China any more, so you can pretty much assume they are using them still.
It’s generally not as safe to use non stick pans if the coating is scratched or failing. Some of the newer “green” pans, while not as good at not being sticky are safer.
Edit: side older data, it’s the heat more than the scratches :
I’m not a chemist, and so I’m not sure if they are actually including PFAS as part of the related and now unlimited chemical families of PFOA and PFOS, or if they are still trying to protect against PFAS contamination. But from what I hear, this PFAS stuff is a nightmare.