Viewing 14 posts - 16 through 29 (of 29 total)
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  • #3312
    Axil
    Participant

    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.

    To leave planet Earth an escape velocity of 11.2 km/s is required, that escape velocity for Earth (to escape its “gravity well”) is about 25,000 mph (or 36, 700 ft per second).

    It is impossible to achieve that velocity passing through the lower levels of the earth’s atmosphere because of the fictional heat generated by passage through that dense layer of air beginning at 15,000 feet elevation that your plan would entail. That fictional heating would vaporize all known materials.

    The consequence is that the waste package would vaporize and radioactive vapor would contaminant Colombia and the other surrounding nations. I am sorry to have disabused you of your fantasy.

    #3314
    Brian H
    Participant

    Axil 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.

    To leave planet Earth an escape velocity of 11.2 km/s is required, that escape velocity for Earth (to escape its “gravity well”) is about 25,000 mph (or 36, 700 ft per second).

    It is impossible to achieve that velocity passing through the lower levels of the earth’s atmosphere because of the fictional heat generated by passage through that dense layer of air beginning at 15,000 feet elevation that your plan would entail. That fictional heating would vaporize all known materials.

    The consequence is that the waste package would vaporize and radioactive vapor would contaminant Colombia and the other surrounding nations. I am sorry to have disabused you of your fantasy.

    True, but the heating is not “fictional” it’s quite real. Frictional, even! 😆

    And you can’t “contaminant” anything, though you can “contaminate” it. (The latter term is called a “verb”, whereas contaminant is an example of a “noun”.) YCLIU. 😛

    #3315
    JimmyT
    Participant

    An interesting factoid is that the earth with its orbital velocity is more than half way out of the sun’s gravitational well. (Actually the figure is closer to 98%) That means that once you are out of the earth’s gravitational well, you would have to apply less acceleration (about 50 times less) to an object to eject it from the solar system then to plunge it into the sun.

    I think that fourth generation molten salt reactors are a better way to dispose of long term nuclear waste anyway. They eliminate them by bombarding the wastes with neutrons. This causes them to decay into short lived isotopes and in the process of doing so they serve as part of the fuel.

    One of the chief expenses of running nuclear fission reactors is the fabrication of the fuel rod Assemblies. This is a very labor intensive operation and one which is entirely eliminated in this type of reactor.

    Also the radioactive fuel/salt mixture is not pressurized, so they have a safety advantage.

    We could discuss many of the design details of this type of reactor, but I’m not sure that this is the appropriate venue.

    #3316
    AaronB
    Participant

    Axil wrote:
    To leave planet Earth an escape velocity of 11.2 km/s is required, that escape velocity for Earth (to escape its “gravity well”) is about 25,000 mph (or 36, 700 ft per second).

    It is impossible to achieve that velocity passing through the lower levels of the earth’s atmosphere because of the fictional heat generated by passage through that dense layer of air beginning at 15,000 feet elevation that your plan would entail. That fictional heating would vaporize all known materials.

    The consequence is that the waste package would vaporize and radioactive vapor would contaminant Colombia and the other surrounding nations. I am sorry to have disabused you of your fantasy.

    I anticipated a bit of material would be lost from the nose cone. The whole capsule would be made of an encased uranium rod and a ceramic nose cone that would be very pointy and long, allowing several inches to burn away as it exited the atmosphere. Since uranium is so dense and heavy, the rod wouldn’t have to be very big to weigh 500 lbs. The whole thing would be probably 25 ft. long and 1 ft. in diameter, and a good portion of the length would be the nose cone. Also, there would be a lot of testing with non-hazardous materials before uranium was used. I’m not saying that this would be completely easy to do, but engineers are smart. If given the challenge and resources, they could come up with a way to make it work. It could also open up a whole new level of access to space.

    #3317
    JimmyT
    Participant

    A launch velocity equal to the 11.2Km/sec escape velocity means this: Regardless of which way you “point” your launch vehicle, once it gets out of the earth’s gravitational well, its velocity with respect to the earth is zero. Its entire velocity will be dissipated climbing out of the well. That means it is in the same orbital path around the sun as the earth. You still have to further accelerate it or decelerate it to either plunge it into the sun or fling it out of the solar system.

    O.K. realistically you are never going to exactly achieve escape velocity so……

    Case 1: Launch vehicle is slightly BELOW escape velocity. The object will continue in a very high earth orbit. Slowly orbiting the earth as the earth orbits the sun.

    Case 2: launch vehicle is slightly ABOVE escape velocity. The object will slowly drift away from the earth as they both orbit the sun.

    #3318
    Transmute
    Participant

    All this talk of launching waste into space is just silly, lets try to do something reasonable and maybe profitable with the waste like convert it into energy.

    #3333
    Axil
    Participant

    Brian H 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.

    To leave planet Earth an escape velocity of 11.2 km/s is required, that escape velocity for Earth (to escape its “gravity well”) is about 25,000 mph (or 36, 700 ft per second).

    It is impossible to achieve that velocity passing through the lower levels of the earth’s atmosphere because of the fictional heat generated by passage through that dense layer of air beginning at 15,000 feet elevation that your plan would entail. That fictional heating would vaporize all known materials.

    The consequence is that the waste package would vaporize and radioactive vapor would contaminant Colombia and the other surrounding nations. I am sorry to have disabused you of your fantasy.

    True, but the heating is not “fictional” it’s quite real. Frictional, even! 😆

    And you can’t “contaminant” anything, though you can “contaminate” it. (The latter term is called a “verb”, whereas contaminant is an example of a “noun”.) YCLIU. 😛

    I hear you. I will be more careful with my spelling. Do you hear me? Be more careful with your engineering!

    #3334
    Axil
    Participant

    JimmyT wrote: An interesting factoid is that the earth with its orbital velocity is more than half way out of the sun’s gravitational well. (Actually the figure is closer to 98%) That means that once you are out of the earth’s gravitational well, you would have to apply less acceleration (about 50 times less) to an object to eject it from the solar system then to plunge it into the sun.

    I think that fourth generation molten salt reactors are a better way to dispose of long term nuclear waste anyway. They eliminate them by bombarding the wastes with neutrons. This causes them to decay into short lived isotopes and in the process of doing so they serve as part of the fuel.

    One of the chief expenses of running nuclear fission reactors is the fabrication of the fuel rod Assemblies. This is a very labor intensive operation and one which is entirely eliminated in this type of reactor.

    Also the radioactive fuel/salt mixture is not pressurized, so they have a safety advantage.

    We could discuss many of the design details of this type of reactor, but I’m not sure that this is the appropriate venue.

    You are a very wise man.

    #3335
    Axil
    Participant

    AaronB wrote:

    To leave planet Earth an escape velocity of 11.2 km/s is required, that escape velocity for Earth (to escape its “gravity well”) is about 25,000 mph (or 36, 700 ft per second).

    It is impossible to achieve that velocity passing through the lower levels of the earth’s atmosphere because of the fictional heat generated by passage through that dense layer of air beginning at 15,000 feet elevation that your plan would entail. That fictional heating would vaporize all known materials.

    The consequence is that the waste package would vaporize and radioactive vapor would contaminant Colombia and the other surrounding nations. I am sorry to have disabused you of your fantasy.

    I anticipated a bit of material would be lost from the nose cone. The whole capsule would be made of an encased uranium rod and a ceramic nose cone that would be very pointy and long, allowing several inches to burn away as it exited the atmosphere. Since uranium is so dense and heavy, the rod wouldn’t have to be very big to weigh 500 lbs. The whole thing would be probably 25 ft. long and 1 ft. in diameter, and a good portion of the length would be the nose cone. Also, there would be a lot of testing with non-hazardous materials before uranium was used. I’m not saying that this would be completely easy to do, but engineers are smart. If given the challenge and resources, they could come up with a way to make it work. It could also open up a whole new level of access to space.

    People resist waste road and rail transport in indestructible casts and you want to use a space vehicle. Get real!

    #3338
    JimmyT
    Participant

    Axil wrote:

    An interesting factoid is that the earth with its orbital velocity is more than half way out of the sun’s gravitational well. (Actually the figure is closer to 98%) That means that once you are out of the earth’s gravitational well, you would have to apply less acceleration (about 50 times less) to an object to eject it from the solar system then to plunge it into the sun.

    I think that fourth generation molten salt reactors are a better way to dispose of long term nuclear waste anyway. They eliminate them by bombarding the wastes with neutrons. This causes them to decay into short lived isotopes and in the process of doing so they serve as part of the fuel.

    One of the chief expenses of running nuclear fission reactors is the fabrication of the fuel rod Assemblies. This is a very labor intensive operation and one which is entirely eliminated in this type of reactor.

    Also the radioactive fuel/salt mixture is not pressurized, so they have a safety advantage.

    We could discuss many of the design details of this type of reactor, but I’m not sure that this is the appropriate venue.

    You are a very wise man.

    I appreciate the complement. I really do! But in the end I’m just one of Eric’s groupies. Perhaps more dedicated than most.

    I feel sometimes like the researcher in Flowers for Algernon who claimed to be a man walking on stilts among giants.

    #3339
    belbear42
    Participant

    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.

    #3341
    Brian H
    Participant

    belbear42 wrote:

    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.

    Why take it beyond the moon? Just pick a particular crater, and crash your n-waste loads into it. With no atmosphere, any “splash” will fall back down quickly. That crater could be used by any any and all nations. It would never be a problem until the moon is terraformed and given a dome or atmosphere, by which time the tech to manage a few tons of isotopes would be readily available. 😉

    Or if you really want it gone with no return, drop it into Jupiter. It’ll never notice.

    #3342
    JimmyT
    Participant

    Brian H wrote:

    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.

    Why take it beyond the moon? Just pick a particular crater, and crash your n-waste loads into it. With no atmosphere, any “splash” will fall back down quickly. That crater could be used by any any and all nations. It would never be a problem until the moon is terraformed and given a dome or atmosphere, by which time the tech to manage a few tons of isotopes would be readily available. 😉

    Or if you really want it gone with no return, drop it into Jupiter. It’ll never notice.

    Ya’ know, Brian. I bet you could work that Jupiter thing into a decent science fiction story:

    Spacetugs (powered by focus fusion devices, of course) around the mining colonies in the asteroid belts start disappearing near Jupiter. This happens soon after we start disposing of our nuclear waste there. Turns out Jupiter is inhabitated by gasesous thingys, and they think we are at war with them.

    Throw in some gory reports of the damage. A love story or two. Maybe a Judus, either gaseous or human.

    know any writers?

    #3343
    Brian H
    Participant

    JimmyT wrote:

    Why take it beyond the moon? Just pick a particular crater, and crash your n-waste loads into it. With no atmosphere, any “splash” will fall back down quickly. That crater could be used by any any and all nations. It would never be a problem until the moon is terraformed and given a dome or atmosphere, by which time the tech to manage a few tons of isotopes would be readily available. 😉

    Or if you really want it gone with no return, drop it into Jupiter. It’ll never notice.

    Ya’ know, Brian. I bet you could work that Jupiter thing into a decent science fiction story:

    Spacetugs (powered by focus fusion devices, of course) around the mining colonies in the asteroid belts start disappearing near Jupiter. This happens soon after we start disposing of our nuclear waste there. Turns out Jupiter is inhabitated by gasesous thingys, and they think we are at war with them.

    Throw in some gory reports of the damage. A love story or two. Maybe a Judus, either gaseous or human.

    know any writers?
    Yeah, Jerry Pournelle and Larry Niven are buddies of mine! Not.

    I suspect the thingies might be grateful for the freebie contributions of heavy elements, which are likely in short supply in that atmosphere …

    BTW, is inhabitating any different from inhabiting? 🙄

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