Comment by busymom0
6 days ago
Maybe this is a dumb question but couldn't we ship the waste to another planet (of course once we have rockets capable of doing so but that's not far imo).
6 days ago
Maybe this is a dumb question but couldn't we ship the waste to another planet (of course once we have rockets capable of doing so but that's not far imo).
We could fly it into the sun, the problem is that until we have a space elevator the only way we have of getting it out of the atmosphere is via rockets and a rocket explosion with a nuclear waste payload would be very bad.
It would also be far cheaper to send that nuclear waste to Mars. It takes 55 times the energy to fly to the Sun than it does to go to Mars:
https://www.nasa.gov/solar-system/its-surprisingly-hard-to-g...
Sure but since we're talking about pie in the sky stuff requiring tech we don't yet have to begin with, putting it into the sun is a better permanent solution.
I don't think Elon is ever going to colonize Mars, but other people may someday.
In addition, even sending it to Mars would be extremely expensive.
Shower thought: Why send it to Mars when we can send it to uninhabitable Venus? Even gravity might work in our favor.
1 reply →
Potentially, but it is much, much safer to dispose of it here.
What's even better is to recycle it, because 95% of the original energy is still in the "waste". And when you do use all of it, the remainder remains radioactive for a much shorter period of time.
We can just bury it in a cement casket.
There isn't that much of it once it is solidified and it isn't that dangerous.