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Astrum future project task; Chernobyl X 100. Whereby a Carrington Event takes out worldwide electric grid leaving all nuclear reactors w/o long term power and cooling. A nightmare fun fact.
I was so passionate about this, in college i wrote a paper advocating it. still am I still think there is an economic answer. to a cost effective way of using space to an advantage especially dangerous elements. Does Not necessarily have to be a rocket, a modified artillery cannon?(the harp project comes to mind) a magnetic rail gun? I mean to say, if this wasn't all about money, anything is or could be possible. people are killing themselves and others over this proposition, at some point this insane mindset must be reconsidered or stopped.
Keep in mind this question presupposes that nuclear waste is so dangerous and abundant that we need it off-world. It's not. All nuclear waste in the US. ALL OF IT could fit in the square footage of two Walmarts.
I’m watching this now and was just thinking of your video on this topic, wondering why we would want to waste so much money to do what we already do safely here on Earth. Thanks for your informative content, @kylehill
One thing which I think might contribute, but I seldom see mentioned in discussions around nuclear technology is just how ubiquitous and common nuclear processes are in nature. Most discussions (way too civil description) around the topic come from the line of "look how safe and useful and efficient this technology is" and very seldom from line of "look at how this occurs in nature and has always been part of our everyday existence". For the average person, one is a lot harder to trust than the other. Here are some interesting points which I would love to see mentioned in one of your videos: 1) The earth's mantle is hot. Why? Mostly due to naturally occurring nuclear decay. Geothermal is one of the absolute 'greenest' energy sources but yet it's still nuclear energy. 2) Cosmic background radiation. There's a brilliant video from Tech Ingredients wherein they show a visual demonstration of the radiation that's been ever present since the start of the universe. 3) Fusion as a nuclear process. When most people hear "nuclear" they think "bad", often overlooking that our sun (just like other stars) is a nuclear process. Any and all reactions undergone within the nucleus of an atom is a nuclear process and this is happening everywhere, all the time, even within our own bodies. The terminology should be normalised as it is a normal process. (within bounds obviously) I truly believe the hiccup people face with accepting nuclear energy isn't the technology or how safe it is, it's an understanding of the nature of nuclear processes. If someone can accept that nuclear (fission, fusion, radiation etc) is a normal part of our everyday life, that we are all swimming in the full spectrum of various forms of radiation then accepting the use of the technology will just come (scuze the pun) naturally.
Rather surprised to see something logical and unlaced from poli sci meandering, which seems reasonable, out of you. Still not a fan, but kudos for that.
@@JakeStz It is one thing to sell some overpriced useless stuff or overpriced crappy meals, but selling mental health data of patients is just a step to far.
"No" and "don't do it", nuclear waste is too valuable a resource, once it becomes viable to parcel aside the 5% that's useless. The remaining 95% can be repurposed for numerous uses.
@@stevewiles7132 Can be put back into nuclear power plants to keep providing power without needing to mine more of it. The USA has banned anyone that uses US designed or any plant that uses even $1 of US money to build, from reprocessing spent fuel. If it wasn't for this ban, there would be almost no nuclear waste to store.
@@stevewiles7132 They already make Nuclear Batteries with a near limitless energy supply for a watch you wear on your wrist. And 0... yes 0 radiation to you.
@@nghermit4922that's a funny pun, I suppose, but the reality is that bad therapy can actually be damaging. They don't even properly vet their therapists. So it's more like, no help is better.
@@ellia.vagabondbad therapy can be bad and you can find bad therapists anywhere. i know of two people who used betterhelp and loved their therapists. just because you dont like the company doesn’t mean the people who work for it are bad
Can't Nuclear waste be recycled into making more nuclear fuel? Also, what's the problem with returning it to the depths of Earth were it was to begin with?
While watching this video my headphones broke and started playing you saying ''Rrrrrr'' in an endless cycle. Cant turn them off, cant turn down the volume, just waiting til it runs out of batteries. Its sad that i need new headphones but the way it broke is funny LOL
You mentioned recycling, why can't the spent fuel rods be re-enriched and used again ? or even used for a lower output generator, they are still radioactive and full of unused energy.
They can. The technology used for it is also useful for weapons tech though. The French have led development since Carter banned it but America picks up the idea every once in a while. Of course, there’s plenty of fission fuel easily mineable and we may well get fusion going before it runs out.
Generally why I’m opposed to nuclear power period. If a coal fired power station goes wrong and explodes, it makes a mess but you rebuild immediately and carry on. When a nuclear reaction goes wrong, it goes horribly wrong making the region a no go zone for tens of thousands of years
The nuclear waste storage issue was solved years ago. Politics will tell you otherwise, they ignore the science, facts, and the actual experts in this field. There is plenty of space on earth to safely store nuclear waste for a very very long time. United states alone could actually safely store all nuclear waste on earth that are far from volcanoes, earthquakes, and moving water. People don't really understand how safe and clean nuclear power really is. You could stand right next to a storage unit and nothing will happen to you, because storage is just that efficient these days. It's just sad that politics and the media has made everyone so afraid, everyone only ever thinks of the worst possible situations about nuclear power. So many things have to go wrong in order for a power plant to have a meltdown, but the politics will never let it go, which keeps people ignorant and scared of it. You have better chances of being struck by lightning or being in a plane crash than a nuclear power plant having a meltdown. The chances of a meltdown are 1 in 1,000,000,000 per year of operation.
That why we already had several close calls? Those extremly long chanches you cite seem to crop up every few decades in reality. . Doesnt matter anyway. Because even if we take all you say about risks as a given - the price of fission energy is ridiculously high. Utterly noncompetitive, really. Only ever done by economic players if they get promises in taxpayer money. No single fission plant was ever built without earnings guarantees by governements. Its just - at current tech - not a viable way to make mass-use electricity. Too expensive, too dependent, too inflexible, loooong build times, massive initial investment burdens. That tech can only flourish in preservations free of economic pressures like the military or related state-guided industries. That might change with new tech like SMRs or LSRs, but for now those suffer the same basic problem. Its just too darn costly to make. Compared to literally every other mass-technology for eletricity production we use.
Yes. That's why the largest alien craft have to maintain a very distant orbit around the Earth-Moon system. Even sending down a pod needs multiple orbit braking.
Sorry, this video seems a bit intellectually dishonest. Also, supporting sponsorship from Betterhelp is also a really bad look. Launching waste into the sun is simply cost prohibitive. The rest is a matter of math and astrophysics.
Reminds me of that Invader Zim episode "Planet Jackers" where an alien race that steals plants and takes them to their solar system to throw into their dying star to "fuel" it like a campfire, and even at the age I was when it came out, I knew stars fused hydrogen as fuel and throwing something like a planet with all the heavy elements that stars create as they die would just make their star die quicker.
Also the fact that giving a star more fuel to burn makes it die quicker as well. That's why red dwarf stars can live for so long, because they hardly have any fuel to burn. If you want your star to live longer, you have to remove fuel, though possibly at the cost of freezing your planets.
Firing it into interstellar space isn't solving a problem, it;s just moving it elsewhere. The simple answer to "Can Shooting Our Nuclear Waste into the Sun Solve All Our Disposal Problems?" is Yes it can. The cost may prohibitive but it's not beyond our current tech level to achieve. Even with all the potential failure points it is possible and would solve the Nuclear waste issue. A better question is to ask, "Why don't we fire waste into the Sun"
How about building a skyhook elevator and sending the trash up that way? Arthur Clarke once said it would be built a few years after people stopped laughing at the idea.
That was a lot of presentation about the costs, but the lack of mention about how the sun would cosmically vaporize the payload back outward before it even made it past the heaviest part of the sun's corona is a weird flub. It was a previous video right here on this channel that talked about the sheer force of the sun's radiance being a small, but potent factor into why things might never 'touch down' onto the surface (such as it is) and it wasn't just the unstable surface, or solar winds, but the corona itself that was the cause--which you've noted is hotter than the sun's surface.
We're talking about a few hundred thousand tonnes of spent fuel, plus other stuff that may be fewer Bq, but much more mass. Actually, it's not so hopeless as all that. There's actually a very practical way place spent fuel: **deep boreholes**. Keep it around in spent fuel pools and then dry casks, for maybe a hundred years, much as we're doing now. Then, drill holes deep into the ground, in remote locations. Have it stored in some kind of barrels, and when you lower each barrel, pour in some concrete or other inert material atop it. Barrel, concrete, barrel, until you're done with that hole. Then on to the next hole. There's room for a LOT of such holes. It's possible that, despite taking some reasonable precautions, some seismic event or something could cause some of this spent fuel residue to leak into an underground formation. But consider the perspective: After a few hundred years at most, it's all going to be basically Pu-239, a bit of technetium, and trace amounts of a few other things, some of which will even be stable isotopes. Those things are not very radioactive, which is exactly why they'd still be there. Even with direct exposure, it's hard to imagine anyone having any near-term effects. It's about cancer and mutations, but you need to compare it to the existing background exposures. Some portion of the plutonium would have to leach out of the containers, and it would be dispersed into the surrounding area. Out of that, some very tiny portion could get into drinking water or agricultural fields. And of that, some portion would get into someone's body. That would only happen after a huge x huge x huge amount of dispersal. No one should lose a nanosecond of sleep over this. There's just one catch: Once you do that deep borehole disposal, you're going to have a really hard time if you want to get it back. I know there are many advocates of next-gen reactors that, they imagine, will burn up all that waste. I think they're concocting a fantasy. If a whole new fleet of such reactors is built, by that time there will probably be over a million tonnes of waste from the old reactors. When you work out how many reactors you would need to burn up all that waste, and how long they would run, that gets into some totally implausible scenarios, with the entire global economy, presumably greatly expanded, running on next-gen reactors, for hundreds, maybe even thousands of years. Nothing like that is EVER going to happen. In fact, I think it's actually more probable that by such a time, fusion reactors could be used to burn up that waste by putting it into blankets and blasting it with the neutron flux from all that power generation. But all that kind of stuff is just so Out There that it's probably pointless to go on any more about it.
Imagine shooting a rocket & planning on using 9 gravity assists at 3 different planets to slow down & hit your target. I have a hard time hitting a can with a BB gun from 20yds lol
@@genericalfishtycoon3853 it’s a joke, I’m good. Just making a point that it’s pretty cool that you can shoot a rocket, using 9 different gravity assists & 7 years later, hit your target
What about magnetic braking in the suns magnetosphere over a very long period of time? I mean it's not like the garbage is in a hurry to arrive there right?
@@scurvofpcp Nah that's just plain wrong thinking, once we reach the technology AND space infrastructure of TERRAFORMING a whole planet (which will take thousand of years anyway), there is no way that we don't have technology then to decontaminate it from some minor radiation too. Which it won't be anyway even if we shoot all our nuclear waste at it. In terms of nuclear waste we are talking a few thousand tons maybe up to 100.000 tons over the next CENTURY and not billions (though even billions would be negligible compared to mass of venus atmosphere, which is 4.8×10^20 kg).
@@fallendown8828 The atmospheric pressure at the surface of Venus is around 92 bar, or 1,350 pounds per square inch (psi), which is 93 times thicker than Earth's atmosphere
Someday, it won't be so hard, risky, or expensive. But by then we might also have the technology to safely recycle the stuff into a usable material (or energy).
Perhaps Venus is a more suitable target? The BepiColombo mission initially considered a gravity assist maneuver, but a Hohmann transfer orbit may be more fitting. This would entail the spacecraft passing by Venus to leverage its gravity for acceleration and course correction, followed by a Mercury flyby for additional trajectory fine-tuning. While managing propulsion and solar pressure, the spacecraft would disintegrate under the intense heat and pressure, which does not address the issue of solar wind potentially propelling radionuclides back towards Earth. Since Venus's surface is already inhospitable, directing the waste into a Venusian volcano could potentially alleviate some of Earth's problems for an extended period.
Those are some odd orbital mechanics. Per my understanding when you want to increase your orbit you increase speed. When you want to decrease orbit you decrease speed. So first one would increase speed to get away from Earth's sphere of influence... then once you were orbiting the sun and far enough away from earth to not get caught back up in it's gravity well. We the could slow down to get closer to the sun. Now trying to fly directly at something is problematic; because depending where you are in your orbit part of the acceleration vector could be adding to your orbital speed.
No. It's too dangerous. If an accident happens, it will end the project and it's too expensive. Burying it deep in the earth is the best solution right now. In the future, the waste can be repurposed to something less toxic.
It is way better to build a boiler for electricity and heat by adding a scrubber to the chimney and burning all the plastic you use. Real renewable energy.
I wonder if you could put the load into an elliptical orbit then just use a small amount of fuel to aim it towards the sun when it reaches the outermost part of the orbit
6 billion years ago there were natural reactors that formed at Oklo, and the decay products, with zero containment, are still there in the original site, and are being mined for the Uranium. About the worst area you can think of for a waste depository, sandstone, with water flowing through it, and still thousands of tons of those decay products are still there.
@@RjBenjamin353 A uranium deposit underwent a certain percentage of natural fission, due to the periodical ingress of groundwater into the deposit. This acted as a moderator and the heat produced helped boil off the water, untill more got in at a later date. It was in a place called Oklo.
I've always asked myself a similalr question.. But not about aiming for the Sun, but aiming for outer space. What would be the downsides of this approach, if any? This seems way more easier to be done tak firing it into the sun.
4:12 of the video: 176 Km/s is 393,699.6 MPH. 176Km/s = 109.361 miles per second. That X 60 seconds is 6,561.66 miles per minute. That X 60 minutes is 393,699.6 MPH. At that speed, a ship could cover the distance between the Earth and Sun in about 10 days. Did I miss something?
Bill Gates proposed (about 10 or more years back,) that with new reactors it is possible to fuel them with nuclear waste and there was 700 years' worth of free energy. Wonder what happened to this idea?
Green parties, public ignorance, and money (technically people’s unwillingness to spend such on the greater good). Long term expensive investments potentially generating profit in ten or more years are seldom considered attractive if a short term option with much lower but instant profitability exists.
It is already (and has been for a long time now) possible to reprocess our nuclear waste and use it again in a nuclear reactor. The US simply has a regulation against doing this. Get rid of that regulation, and we can get rid of our nuclear waste by using it.
The technology is north of your border. Called CANDU reactor. It can run on natural uranium or spent uranium from light water reactors. Recycling has never been more honourable.
Granted, putting nuclear waste into the sun is ludicrously dangerous and expensive - but what I wonder is what would happen to the sun? If we added, let's say, 10 tons of spent uranium or plutonium into the sun each year, what would happen to it chemically?
"Shoot our nuclear waste into the sun"... then one guy stops, looks at the presumed head of the idea, a personage possibly named Melon Suzk and says "boss, if we're risking nuclear fallout, taking it off the planet... then why are we bothering to send it to the sun when we could just point it to the tail end of our solar system and let it go?". Whenever i hear people say "throw it into the sun", i assume they have a degree in scratching their left ear with their right hand.
Since the 1960’s we have had the technology to reduce all the nuclear waste to where it would only be dangerous for about 100 years. It’s just expensive. We also have the capability to drill deep underground and store the waste under current nuclear facilities where it would be extremely difficult if not impossible to retrieve or cause harm before it becomes inert. The only thing preventing us from safely eliminating or storing nuclear waste is politics.
How can we launch ships and rockets to other planets that are much smaller but not into the giant sun. I'm still confused why we can't just slingshot the waste right into the sun.
I want a Humans Are Space Orcs story where first contact happens because the program to rocket nuclear waste into extrasolar space creates an interstellar nuisance that leads to Earth's discovery by galactic society.
This reminds me of when I was younger. We were in my dad's car in the summer with the windows down. My brother and I were in the back seat. My brother had to hock a loogie, so he did the normal thing of spitting it out the window. Instead of hocking out the window, he aimed forward for whatever reason. The loogie went all over his face and we laughed as he struggled to find something to wipe it off. This is also a danger of blasting anything into the sun that we don't want on earth. Just like my bro's loogie, the sun could send it back unexpectedly or have some other reaction that's hazardous to life on earth. If this experiment were to be carried out, maybe it should be done with something like plastic first. It's light weight and would easily burn up if the rocket went Challenger mode unexpectedly. It would be easier to accel/decel and serve as a less harmful test run. It makes more sense to fire it somewhere like Venus which is much closer and wouldn't need to burn up a rocket in the process. Things like plastics would be instantly crushed. I'm not sure I'd want nuclear waste to be crushed until we know what the outcome would be. Maybe, if crushing nuclear waste is a positive thing, Jupiter would be better since it's larger and would have further results.
it makes no sense to shoot it in space to begin with. There is simply too much (nuclear) waste. The act of shooting the waste in space would have far worse effects than the actual waste itself and in doing so create even more waste.
@@fredhawken1112 Well yeah. Shooting it in space is a terrible idea but it's fun to think about bc thinking means there are no physical consequences. The best part is that we don't have to think about it at all. The wonderful minds at Futurama did this for us a long time ago. It's a pretty good episode and it shows that unless we have a doomsday device and a rocket that defies physic, and spacetime, we don't stand a chance and it's a dumb idea.
If we missed the sun with the garbage rocket, would we get it on the other side of our orbit? Like a roller-coaster rider who yacks at the top of the loop and then catches it at the bottom? 😃
I don't get it, why we need to full stop the orbital speed and do free fall I thought if the orbital speed not fast enough the object would fall Like I imagine perfect circle orbit, if we decelerate in certain point of the orbit, the opposite point (idk the correct term English not my native tongue) of the orbit will get closer or lower to the object we orbiting, making the orbit eclipse with the point where we decelerate the highest or farthest altitude, and the opposite point become the lowest altitude So doesn't it just need to slow down enough so that the lowest point touch the ground Well I don't know I'm no rocket scientist
You could just fling it into one of the gas giants or if going to space gets much more reliable you could have a dedicated spot on the moon where you dump hazardous waste. A couple of years of Space-X rockets could get rid of the nuclear waste here. We obviously have better options in deep earth depositories but if it became cheap and safe enough then the moon seems like a good place.
Is there even a nuclear waste disposal problem? Cause that waste takes no space compared to what we get from it. People keep bringing up that 'problem' and that's the only problem regarding nuclear waste - it causes huge backlash toward using nuclear based on non-issue and indirectly causes much more pollution by moving away from nuclear to replace it with inferior sources of energy.
I don't understand. Why would a cargo always end up in orbit around the sun. We can make sure the exit of the earth orbit will be in collision line with the sun right? Why would a free fall be necessary?
Imagine trying to put a golf ball into a hole at the bottom of a steep bowl. No matter how you hit it, it rolls downhill, speeds up, and skips over the hole. Eventually friction slows it down, of course, but there's no such friction in space, so you have to use rockets or gravity assists.
Very strange idea, launch nuclear waste into the sun. That "waste" can be very valuable in the future, when we know how we can use it. And why would we dig up stuff, use it, and throw it into the sun any ways? What belongs to Earth should remain on Earth
1. Dont shoot nuclear waste into sun, its stupid 2. Shoot it to jupiter instead if you dont want it here 3. If you still want it end up in the sun then help yourself with solar sails
Why don't we acknowledge our responsibility and solve the problem of the pollution we caused, instead of shifting the burden onto the next generations?
It's not about what can go wrong it's about money. The first attempt should be without nuclear waist until we understand how to shoot rockets to the sun. Which again money.
instead if using millions of litres of fuel to decelerate and fall into the sun couldnt you just throw a large mass the same weight as your ship in the opposite direction your flying?
One flaw with the concepts in this video, you're still presuming chemical based rocketry to get stuff into orbit and beyond. And it has only really been about half a century that we do chemical rockets. So the idea doesn't really work right now with current technology due to costs and risks involved. Which is not to say it won't ever work.
Anything is possible, but it is the probability that should be of concern... Also, time travel would be just as complex. Even if you could, you wouldn't want to... Well, IF you were able to account for everything in motion, and your destination was going to be when you end the "trip"... it wouldn't be exactly as you thought, unless you could also account for the few billion or more years gap between start & finish. Still, more a galactic gamble than a migration.
This most recent video was made possible thanks to everyone who has signed up on Patreon. To have your questions considered for the next Astrum Answers video sign-up and ask your questions here: bit.ly/4anEb5u
Nice video
Astrum future project task; Chernobyl X 100. Whereby a Carrington Event takes out worldwide electric grid leaving all nuclear reactors w/o long term power and cooling. A nightmare fun fact.
Taking the Futurama route of launching all our trash into space lol.
I was so passionate about this, in college i wrote a paper advocating it. still am I still think there is an economic answer. to a cost effective way of using space to an advantage especially dangerous elements. Does Not necessarily have to be a rocket, a modified artillery cannon?(the harp project comes to mind) a magnetic rail gun? I mean to say, if this wasn't all about money, anything is or could be possible. people are killing themselves and others over this proposition, at some point this insane mindset must be reconsidered or stopped.
The self help app looked stupid and appears to spread dangerous nonsense.
Keep in mind this question presupposes that nuclear waste is so dangerous and abundant that we need it off-world. It's not. All nuclear waste in the US. ALL OF IT could fit in the square footage of two Walmarts.
I’m watching this now and was just thinking of your video on this topic, wondering why we would want to waste so much money to do what we already do safely here on Earth. Thanks for your informative content, @kylehill
One thing which I think might contribute, but I seldom see mentioned in discussions around nuclear technology is just how ubiquitous and common nuclear processes are in nature.
Most discussions (way too civil description) around the topic come from the line of "look how safe and useful and efficient this technology is" and very seldom from line of "look at how this occurs in nature and has always been part of our everyday existence".
For the average person, one is a lot harder to trust than the other.
Here are some interesting points which I would love to see mentioned in one of your videos:
1) The earth's mantle is hot. Why? Mostly due to naturally occurring nuclear decay. Geothermal is one of the absolute 'greenest' energy sources but yet it's still nuclear energy.
2) Cosmic background radiation. There's a brilliant video from Tech Ingredients wherein they show a visual demonstration of the radiation that's been ever present since the start of the universe.
3) Fusion as a nuclear process. When most people hear "nuclear" they think "bad", often overlooking that our sun (just like other stars) is a nuclear process. Any and all reactions undergone within the nucleus of an atom is a nuclear process and this is happening everywhere, all the time, even within our own bodies. The terminology should be normalised as it is a normal process. (within bounds obviously)
I truly believe the hiccup people face with accepting nuclear energy isn't the technology or how safe it is, it's an understanding of the nature of nuclear processes.
If someone can accept that nuclear (fission, fusion, radiation etc) is a normal part of our everyday life, that we are all swimming in the full spectrum of various forms of radiation then accepting the use of the technology will just come (scuze the pun) naturally.
Rather surprised to see something logical and unlaced from poli sci meandering, which seems reasonable, out of you. Still not a fan, but kudos for that.
I'm glad you reacted to this nonsense of a video concept. Love your work Kyle Hill
I'm gonna eat it all
Can we launch BetterHelp into the sun instead?
No, same problems of launching nuclear waste apply. :P
Lol
I second this notion to eject better help, brain good here
Yea
Your sponsor "better help" is a scam!
There are numerous videos on youtube about this topic...
Who cares?
@@JakeStz many of us do
@@JakeStz It is one thing to sell some overpriced useless stuff or overpriced crappy meals, but selling mental health data of patients is just a step to far.
@@JakeStz not you so why even say anything
Maybe the us needs some minimal data protection rules?
"No" and "don't do it", nuclear waste is too valuable a resource, once it becomes viable to parcel aside the 5% that's useless. The remaining 95% can be repurposed for numerous uses.
Yeah, can be recycled into glow in the dark furniture........
@@stevewiles7132 Can be put back into nuclear power plants to keep providing power without needing to mine more of it.
The USA has banned anyone that uses US designed or any plant that uses even $1 of US money to build, from reprocessing spent fuel.
If it wasn't for this ban, there would be almost no nuclear waste to store.
@@BabyMakR and even now, we handle the larger amounts pretty well. It just adds costs to nuclear which is not good.
@@stevewiles7132 They already make Nuclear Batteries with a near limitless energy supply for a watch you wear on your wrist.
And 0... yes 0 radiation to you.
Noooo, Astrum! Why taking the BetterHelp sponsorship? Please, have some integrity. I am really disappointed to see you go down that path.
Came here to say this. They are a money grab. Super expensive and not helpful at all
I’ve heard it called better than no help.
@@nghermit4922 Though it's not rare for it to be Worse than no Help
@@nghermit4922that's a funny pun, I suppose, but the reality is that bad therapy can actually be damaging. They don't even properly vet their therapists. So it's more like, no help is better.
@@ellia.vagabondbad therapy can be bad and you can find bad therapists anywhere. i know of two people who used betterhelp and loved their therapists. just because you dont like the company doesn’t mean the people who work for it are bad
Great video as always, but It really sucks you took a betterhelp sponsor. They're no good
Another TH-camr lost to the scum sponsor.
why throw valuable fuel into the sun?
valuable AND recycleable fuel
Because we can, right? R-right?????
I love your videos but please don’t ever do take a better help sponsorship again. Had to dislike the video due to that
Can't Nuclear waste be recycled into making more nuclear fuel? Also, what's the problem with returning it to the depths of Earth were it was to begin with?
While watching this video my headphones broke and started playing you saying ''Rrrrrr'' in an endless cycle. Cant turn them off, cant turn down the volume, just waiting til it runs out of batteries. Its sad that i need new headphones but the way it broke is funny LOL
You mentioned recycling, why can't the spent fuel rods be re-enriched and used again ? or even used for a lower output generator, they are still radioactive and full of unused energy.
I hear it can be re used many times, but I'm no nuclear geek, I just wish we had more of it.
they are
Carter banned reprocessing in the U.S.
They can. The technology used for it is also useful for weapons tech though. The French have led development since Carter banned it but America picks up the idea every once in a while. Of course, there’s plenty of fission fuel easily mineable and we may well get fusion going before it runs out.
Generally why I’m opposed to nuclear power period. If a coal fired power station goes wrong and explodes, it makes a mess but you rebuild immediately and carry on. When a nuclear reaction goes wrong, it goes horribly wrong making the region a no go zone for tens of thousands of years
The nuclear waste storage issue was solved years ago. Politics will tell you otherwise, they ignore the science, facts, and the actual experts in this field.
There is plenty of space on earth to safely store nuclear waste for a very very long time. United states alone could actually safely store all nuclear waste on earth that are far from volcanoes, earthquakes, and moving water. People don't really understand how safe and clean nuclear power really is. You could stand right next to a storage unit and nothing will happen to you, because storage is just that efficient these days.
It's just sad that politics and the media has made everyone so afraid, everyone only ever thinks of the worst possible situations about nuclear power. So many things have to go wrong in order for a power plant to have a meltdown, but the politics will never let it go, which keeps people ignorant and scared of it.
You have better chances of being struck by lightning or being in a plane crash than a nuclear power plant having a meltdown. The chances of a meltdown are 1 in 1,000,000,000 per year of operation.
That why we already had several close calls?
Those extremly long chanches you cite seem to crop up every few decades in reality.
.
Doesnt matter anyway.
Because even if we take all you say about risks as a given - the price of fission energy is ridiculously high. Utterly noncompetitive, really.
Only ever done by economic players if they get promises in taxpayer money.
No single fission plant was ever built without earnings guarantees by governements.
Its just - at current tech - not a viable way to make mass-use electricity.
Too expensive, too dependent, too inflexible, loooong build times, massive initial investment burdens.
That tech can only flourish in preservations free of economic pressures like the military or related state-guided industries.
That might change with new tech like SMRs or LSRs, but for now those suffer the same basic problem. Its just too darn costly to make.
Compared to literally every other mass-technology for eletricity production we use.
5:47 The planet gains energy?
The very miniscule energy of the rocket pushing off the planet, yes.
Yes. That's why the largest alien craft have to maintain a very distant orbit around the Earth-Moon system. Even sending down a pod needs multiple orbit braking.
Sorry, this video seems a bit intellectually dishonest. Also, supporting sponsorship from Betterhelp is also a really bad look. Launching waste into the sun is simply cost prohibitive. The rest is a matter of math and astrophysics.
Reminds me of that Invader Zim episode "Planet Jackers" where an alien race that steals plants and takes them to their solar system to throw into their dying star to "fuel" it like a campfire, and even at the age I was when it came out, I knew stars fused hydrogen as fuel and throwing something like a planet with all the heavy elements that stars create as they die would just make their star die quicker.
Also the fact that giving a star more fuel to burn makes it die quicker as well. That's why red dwarf stars can live for so long, because they hardly have any fuel to burn. If you want your star to live longer, you have to remove fuel, though possibly at the cost of freezing your planets.
Firing it into interstellar space isn't solving a problem, it;s just moving it elsewhere.
The simple answer to "Can Shooting Our Nuclear Waste into the Sun Solve All Our Disposal Problems?" is Yes it can.
The cost may prohibitive but it's not beyond our current tech level to achieve. Even with all the potential failure points it is possible and would solve the Nuclear waste issue.
A better question is to ask, "Why don't we fire waste into the Sun"
How about building a skyhook elevator and sending the trash up that way? Arthur Clarke once said it would be built a few years after people stopped laughing at the idea.
better health sponsor ins 2024? lol
Which disposal problems? Nuclear waste is almost a non-issue.
That was a lot of presentation about the costs, but the lack of mention about how the sun would cosmically vaporize the payload back outward before it even made it past the heaviest part of the sun's corona is a weird flub. It was a previous video right here on this channel that talked about the sheer force of the sun's radiance being a small, but potent factor into why things might never 'touch down' onto the surface (such as it is) and it wasn't just the unstable surface, or solar winds, but the corona itself that was the cause--which you've noted is hotter than the sun's surface.
I often think about this and wonder about the risks of having successful launch in the first place. There has to be another way.
We're talking about a few hundred thousand tonnes of spent fuel, plus other stuff that may be fewer Bq, but much more mass. Actually, it's not so hopeless as all that. There's actually a very practical way place spent fuel: **deep boreholes**. Keep it around in spent fuel pools and then dry casks, for maybe a hundred years, much as we're doing now. Then, drill holes deep into the ground, in remote locations. Have it stored in some kind of barrels, and when you lower each barrel, pour in some concrete or other inert material atop it. Barrel, concrete, barrel, until you're done with that hole. Then on to the next hole. There's room for a LOT of such holes.
It's possible that, despite taking some reasonable precautions, some seismic event or something could cause some of this spent fuel residue to leak into an underground formation. But consider the perspective: After a few hundred years at most, it's all going to be basically Pu-239, a bit of technetium, and trace amounts of a few other things, some of which will even be stable isotopes. Those things are not very radioactive, which is exactly why they'd still be there. Even with direct exposure, it's hard to imagine anyone having any near-term effects. It's about cancer and mutations, but you need to compare it to the existing background exposures. Some portion of the plutonium would have to leach out of the containers, and it would be dispersed into the surrounding area. Out of that, some very tiny portion could get into drinking water or agricultural fields. And of that, some portion would get into someone's body. That would only happen after a huge x huge x huge amount of dispersal. No one should lose a nanosecond of sleep over this.
There's just one catch: Once you do that deep borehole disposal, you're going to have a really hard time if you want to get it back. I know there are many advocates of next-gen reactors that, they imagine, will burn up all that waste. I think they're concocting a fantasy. If a whole new fleet of such reactors is built, by that time there will probably be over a million tonnes of waste from the old reactors. When you work out how many reactors you would need to burn up all that waste, and how long they would run, that gets into some totally implausible scenarios, with the entire global economy, presumably greatly expanded, running on next-gen reactors, for hundreds, maybe even thousands of years. Nothing like that is EVER going to happen. In fact, I think it's actually more probable that by such a time, fusion reactors could be used to burn up that waste by putting it into blankets and blasting it with the neutron flux from all that power generation. But all that kind of stuff is just so Out There that it's probably pointless to go on any more about it.
I have the sudden urge to play KSP for some reason
Imagine shooting a rocket & planning on using 9 gravity assists at 3 different planets to slow down & hit your target. I have a hard time hitting a can with a BB gun from 20yds lol
Suggesting new glasses and some time on the range. Just saying.
You might want to get your blood pressure and sugar checked. You would be surprised how much blood sugar and blood pressure can impact your vision.
@@genericalfishtycoon3853 it’s a joke, I’m good. Just making a point that it’s pretty cool that you can shoot a rocket, using 9 different gravity assists & 7 years later, hit your target
Imagine trying to get to the moon by launching Starship and 9 or 10 refueling flights. Which is what they are proposing.
Exactly what the did on voyager 1 and 2. Except the opposite. Slingshoted around every planet to yeet it out of the solar system
What about magnetic braking in the suns magnetosphere over a very long period of time? I mean it's not like the garbage is in a hurry to arrive there right?
What about Venus? Its atmosphere is so powerful to destroy our trash.
Venus is in the top two for our local terraforming prospects. Let's not screw over our great grand kids.
Powerful atmosphere? What does it even mean???
@@fallendown8828 It is a huge acid power washer. Russia sent a probe to venus once and it got gobbled up by the atmosphere.
@@scurvofpcp Nah that's just plain wrong thinking, once we reach the technology AND space infrastructure of TERRAFORMING a whole planet (which will take thousand of years anyway), there is no way that we don't have technology then to decontaminate it from some minor radiation too. Which it won't be anyway even if we shoot all our nuclear waste at it. In terms of nuclear waste we are talking a few thousand tons maybe up to 100.000 tons over the next CENTURY and not billions (though even billions would be negligible compared to mass of venus atmosphere, which is 4.8×10^20 kg).
@@fallendown8828 The atmospheric pressure at the surface of Venus is around 92 bar, or 1,350 pounds per square inch (psi), which is 93 times thicker than Earth's atmosphere
Someday, it won't be so hard, risky, or expensive. But by then we might also have the technology to safely recycle the stuff into a usable material (or energy).
It would be much easier and safer to place the waste in/along a tectonic plate subduction zone.
Perhaps Venus is a more suitable target? The BepiColombo mission initially considered a gravity assist maneuver, but a Hohmann transfer orbit may be more fitting. This would entail the spacecraft passing by Venus to leverage its gravity for acceleration and course correction, followed by a Mercury flyby for additional trajectory fine-tuning. While managing propulsion and solar pressure, the spacecraft would disintegrate under the intense heat and pressure, which does not address the issue of solar wind potentially propelling radionuclides back towards Earth. Since Venus's surface is already inhospitable, directing the waste into a Venusian volcano could potentially alleviate some of Earth's problems for an extended period.
Of course it works. Superman proved it when he threw all those ICBM's into the sun.
Alex McColgan?. Are you related to Macaulay Culkin from Home Alone?. Your names sound Very Familiar.🤔?
Those are some odd orbital mechanics. Per my understanding when you want to increase your orbit you increase speed. When you want to decrease orbit you decrease speed. So first one would increase speed to get away from Earth's sphere of influence... then once you were orbiting the sun and far enough away from earth to not get caught back up in it's gravity well. We the could slow down to get closer to the sun. Now trying to fly directly at something is problematic; because depending where you are in your orbit part of the acceleration vector could be adding to your orbital speed.
Umm, too expensive. Rockets are not cargo ships.
No. It's too dangerous. If an accident happens, it will end the project and it's too expensive. Burying it deep in the earth is the best solution right now. In the future, the waste can be repurposed to something less toxic.
It is way better to build a boiler for electricity and heat by adding a scrubber to the chimney and burning all the plastic you use. Real renewable energy.
I wonder if you could put the load into an elliptical orbit then just use a small amount of fuel to aim it towards the sun when it reaches the outermost part of the orbit
6 billion years ago there were natural reactors that formed at Oklo, and the decay products, with zero containment, are still there in the original site, and are being mined for the Uranium. About the worst area you can think of for a waste depository, sandstone, with water flowing through it, and still thousands of tons of those decay products are still there.
@@RjBenjamin353 The naturally occurring fission reactor in Gabon, where an uranium mine is. Look it up.
@@RjBenjamin353
A uranium deposit underwent a certain percentage of natural fission, due to the periodical ingress of groundwater into the deposit. This acted as a moderator and the heat produced helped boil off the water, untill more got in at a later date. It was in a place called Oklo.
This comment and replies are wild. I'm tossing this reply in here to keep watching.
6 billion years ago? Yeah no.
2* billion years and Oklo is probably not the only place this happened.
I've always asked myself a similalr question.. But not about aiming for the Sun, but aiming for outer space. What would be the downsides of this approach, if any? This seems way more easier to be done tak firing it into the sun.
4:12 of the video: 176 Km/s is 393,699.6 MPH. 176Km/s = 109.361 miles per second. That X 60 seconds is 6,561.66 miles per minute. That X 60 minutes is 393,699.6 MPH. At that speed, a ship could cover the distance between the Earth and Sun in about 10 days. Did I miss something?
What if you put that stuff into CASTOR containers first, then in starship and then CYA?
Bill Gates proposed (about 10 or more years back,) that with new reactors it is possible to fuel them with nuclear waste and there was 700 years' worth of free energy. Wonder what happened to this idea?
@@Nastigast cheap energy will be necessary if the techbros want their chatbots to ever be profitable.
Green parties, public ignorance, and money (technically people’s unwillingness to spend such on the greater good).
Long term expensive investments potentially generating profit in ten or more years are seldom considered attractive if a short term option with much lower but instant profitability exists.
It is already (and has been for a long time now) possible to reprocess our nuclear waste and use it again in a nuclear reactor. The US simply has a regulation against doing this. Get rid of that regulation, and we can get rid of our nuclear waste by using it.
The technology is north of your border.
Called CANDU reactor.
It can run on natural uranium or spent uranium from light water reactors.
Recycling has never been more honourable.
It was Bollocks.
We all saw how that worked out in Futurama
Granted, putting nuclear waste into the sun is ludicrously dangerous and expensive - but what I wonder is what would happen to the sun? If we added, let's say, 10 tons of spent uranium or plutonium into the sun each year, what would happen to it chemically?
Okay, let's built a space elevator and then kick the garbage into outer space :D
When the payload is in space, couldn't it burn the garbage for fuel somehow?
"Shoot our nuclear waste into the sun"... then one guy stops, looks at the presumed head of the idea, a personage possibly named Melon Suzk and says "boss, if we're risking nuclear fallout, taking it off the planet... then why are we bothering to send it to the sun when we could just point it to the tail end of our solar system and let it go?".
Whenever i hear people say "throw it into the sun", i assume they have a degree in scratching their left ear with their right hand.
True. Might as well just send in into the abyss rather than wasting the resources sending it to the sun
Since the 1960’s we have had the technology to reduce all the nuclear waste to where it would only be dangerous for about 100 years. It’s just expensive.
We also have the capability to drill deep underground and store the waste under current nuclear facilities where it would be extremely difficult if not impossible to retrieve or cause harm before it becomes inert.
The only thing preventing us from safely eliminating or storing nuclear waste is politics.
How can we launch ships and rockets to other planets that are much smaller but not into the giant sun. I'm still confused why we can't just slingshot the waste right into the sun.
I want a Humans Are Space Orcs story where first contact happens because the program to rocket nuclear waste into extrasolar space creates an interstellar nuisance that leads to Earth's discovery by galactic society.
Only a small portion of “nuclear waste” remains dangerous for a long period of time. The vast majority is considered safe after 15ish years.
Be much more efficient to dump in volcanoes or ridiculously deep holes.
Thanks so much for this video and explanation. I’ve had this question in my mind since I was a kid!
This reminds me of when I was younger. We were in my dad's car in the summer with the windows down. My brother and I were in the back seat. My brother had to hock a loogie, so he did the normal thing of spitting it out the window. Instead of hocking out the window, he aimed forward for whatever reason.
The loogie went all over his face and we laughed as he struggled to find something to wipe it off.
This is also a danger of blasting anything into the sun that we don't want on earth. Just like my bro's loogie, the sun could send it back unexpectedly or have some other reaction that's hazardous to life on earth.
If this experiment were to be carried out, maybe it should be done with something like plastic first. It's light weight and would easily burn up if the rocket went Challenger mode unexpectedly. It would be easier to accel/decel and serve as a less harmful test run.
It makes more sense to fire it somewhere like Venus which is much closer and wouldn't need to burn up a rocket in the process. Things like plastics would be instantly crushed. I'm not sure I'd want nuclear waste to be crushed until we know what the outcome would be. Maybe, if crushing nuclear waste is a positive thing, Jupiter would be better since it's larger and would have further results.
it makes no sense to shoot it in space to begin with. There is simply too much (nuclear) waste. The act of shooting the waste in space would have far worse effects than the actual waste itself and in doing so create even more waste.
@@fredhawken1112 Well yeah. Shooting it in space is a terrible idea but it's fun to think about bc thinking means there are no physical consequences.
The best part is that we don't have to think about it at all. The wonderful minds at Futurama did this for us a long time ago. It's a pretty good episode and it shows that unless we have a doomsday device and a rocket that defies physic, and spacetime, we don't stand a chance and it's a dumb idea.
Alex, radioactive waste is not the problem, other forms of waste cause far more problems.
I don’t think we want to land on the Sun. Hitting it would be fine and to hit the Sun we just need a path that crosses it. At any speed.
It's kind of like the sun's gravity is a defence mechanism lol.
For anyone who wants to have more imtuitive understanding of how to get from point a to b, just play KSP
Just point it into space and send it into deep space.
If we missed the sun with the garbage rocket, would we get it on the other side of our orbit? Like a roller-coaster rider who yacks at the top of the loop and then catches it at the bottom? 😃
if it missed it would complete an orbit faster than the earth, so it wouldn't immediately hit us but it could potentially in the future
No, because the fuel that would have to be burned to do that will make more pollution than it would save.
Since the universe is expanding in every which way. Can we slow down and have objects come to us?
Soooo why can't we just aim the rocket at the sun? Why would it have to free fall into it? I feel like someone is over thinking this whole thing.
What about breaking using an ion drive?
How abput sending ahead electo-magnetic stations, that slow approaching crafts freeing up fuel costs?
I don't get it, why we need to full stop the orbital speed and do free fall
I thought if the orbital speed not fast enough the object would fall
Like I imagine perfect circle orbit, if we decelerate in certain point of the orbit, the opposite point (idk the correct term English not my native tongue) of the orbit will get closer or lower to the object we orbiting, making the orbit eclipse with the point where we decelerate the highest or farthest altitude, and the opposite point become the lowest altitude
So doesn't it just need to slow down enough so that the lowest point touch the ground
Well I don't know I'm no rocket scientist
we could rail-gun or spin-launch the trash bin to Earth's orbit, and pick up the trash bin in orbit by a spacecraft and haul it to the sun.
To get closer to the sun, you need to go farther than Pluto.
Everything that leaves the planet makes it lighter. When it gets lighter (or heavier) it starts to move out of place, innit?
You could just fling it into one of the gas giants or if going to space gets much more reliable you could have a dedicated spot on the moon where you dump hazardous waste. A couple of years of Space-X rockets could get rid of the nuclear waste here. We obviously have better options in deep earth depositories but if it became cheap and safe enough then the moon seems like a good place.
The other way,deep space,Kepler belt.
Research your sponsors.
Is there even a nuclear waste disposal problem? Cause that waste takes no space compared to what we get from it. People keep bringing up that 'problem' and that's the only problem regarding nuclear waste - it causes huge backlash toward using nuclear based on non-issue and indirectly causes much more pollution by moving away from nuclear to replace it with inferior sources of energy.
I don't understand. Why would a cargo always end up in orbit around the sun. We can make sure the exit of the earth orbit will be in collision line with the sun right? Why would a free fall be necessary?
Imagine trying to put a golf ball into a hole at the bottom of a steep bowl. No matter how you hit it, it rolls downhill, speeds up, and skips over the hole. Eventually friction slows it down, of course, but there's no such friction in space, so you have to use rockets or gravity assists.
The stuff does not remain dangerously radioactive for tens of thousands of years. That's just government's fossil fuel tax revenue talking.
Very strange idea, launch nuclear waste into the sun. That "waste" can be very valuable in the future, when we know how we can use it. And why would we dig up stuff, use it, and throw it into the sun any ways? What belongs to Earth should remain on Earth
I prefer to think that planet Pollution has a dirt problem...
I've watched Futurama, all our garbage would come back in a thousand years!
Earth has an infestation problem… a human infestation
1. Dont shoot nuclear waste into sun, its stupid
2. Shoot it to jupiter instead if you dont want it here
3. If you still want it end up in the sun then help yourself with solar sails
Dang it. I thought this was the one. 😅
Why do you show the units of velocity and call it acceleration?
Why don't we acknowledge our responsibility and solve the problem of the pollution we caused, instead of shifting the burden onto the next generations?
The idea I've seen of just boring it into the core of the earth using its own heat seems like a better idea than this.
not sure that's actually possible, but I like the idea.
might need to add fresh hot fuel to get it hot enough?
@@theobserver9131 Yeah, doesn't seem very plausible. Sounded good in the 60s though!
@@theobserver9131 Found it - Google Self Sinking Capsules by Jesse Ausubel for an interesting read on the idea.
I love the hangtag 😂
Why is storing nuclear waste deep under ground a problem? Do you need to be there?
It's not about what can go wrong it's about money. The first attempt should be without nuclear waist until we understand how to shoot rockets to the sun. Which again money.
instead if using millions of litres of fuel to decelerate and fall into the sun couldnt you just throw a large mass the same weight as your ship in the opposite direction your flying?
One flaw with the concepts in this video, you're still presuming chemical based rocketry to get stuff into orbit and beyond. And it has only really been about half a century that we do chemical rockets. So the idea doesn't really work right now with current technology due to costs and risks involved. Which is not to say it won't ever work.
Ok but why not the Moon? It's much closer, but still far enough to keep the radiation at a safe distance.
I think it would be expensive,,,and we probably would like the rockets to use clean fuel..
The Sun is effectively a gigantic incinerator. If space cargo can be made cheaper, this would be a fun thing to do.
I see half the title in the thumbnail, and think "There's a can shooting nuclear waste into the sun?"
the conscious sun would not appreciate that and would send some rays our way
"the closer you are to the sun the harder it is to crash into it" unless your playing outer wilds
Anything is possible, but it is the probability that should be of concern...
Also, time travel would be just as complex.
Even if you could, you wouldn't want to...
Well, IF you were able to account for everything in motion, and your destination was going to be when you end the "trip"... it wouldn't be exactly as you thought, unless you could also account for the few billion or more years gap between start & finish. Still, more a galactic gamble than a migration.
And perfectly good being burried.
A country such as India where everyone waddles in trash by their own choice should begin taking responsibility for their own environment.