Reply To: Energy Output – MW & GW

[belbear42]

AaronB wrote: Radioactive waste is a big problem, but I have a possible solution. I think we could install big accelerator tracks on the sides of Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta in Colombia. Then we take 500 lb. capsules of radioactive waste and shoot them into the sun. We could also shoot things into other parts of the solar system as the earth turns. It would be easy enought to do the timing, and a little bit of directional control while still in the atmosphere could do most of the course correcting. Each day, you could probably shoot 10,000 lbs. into the sun. That’s only 20 shots, which should be easy to do in 10 minutes. The technology is the same as the high speed roller coaster rides, only the track would be two miles in length. When it wasn’t shooting payloads into space, it could shoot people into the stratosphere on suborbital joyrides. Colombia could make a fortune getting rid of other countries’ waste, and get a booming tourist industry as well.

Since astronomy and spaceflight is one of my hobbies I wish to comment on this:

To begin: You can’t shoot an object into space using a railgun from earth, the atmospheric drag at sea level is just much too high. But you could transport your waste to the moon and build your big railgun there.

To shoot an object into the sun you need not only to overcome the escape velocity of the Earth, but also the much larger orbital velocity of the earth around the sun. If you launch at the roughly 11.5km/s Earth escape velocity your object will have an orbit roughly equal to Earths, risking a re-entry many years later.

To launch into the sun you need to add another 29.8km/s on top of Earth’s escape velocity, to stop the object “dead into the earth’s orbit” so it starts the long drop straight into the sun. Any other velocity is undesirable since your waste will orbit the sun rather than plummet into it.
And then there is the risk of the Sun catapulting vaporized nuclear waste back to earth in a coronal mass ejection.

Actually it takes much less velocity to shoot the waste into a solar escape orbit to disappear forever into deep space, about 20km/s, like they did with the New Horizons spacecraft toward Pluto. This is much less than the velocity needed to launch an object directly into the sun, since the 30 km/s earth orbital velocity can be used as an advantage.