Another “great idea” whose origin can probably be traced back to a bong hit.
The middle of the desert would seem to me a safe place to put it. What am I missing?
No. Volcanoes are no good. Too volatile, unpredictable.
Using concrete and steel casks, the contained radioactive waste should be lowered into a deep-sea trench along a subduction zone, preferably the Aleutian Trench, which I believe is in U.S. territorial waters. There the radioactive waste can be RECYCLED under the North American Plate.
This satisfies the three criteria for safely disposing of radioactive waste: time, distance, and shielding. It won’t reappear for millions of years and in the meantime will be underneath miles of the earth’s crust. Difficult to get much better than that.
Al Gore: Earth's Interior 'Extremely Hot, Several Million Degrees'
It's actually several THOUSAND as any high school kid knows, or should know!
Poopular Science eh.
I have never heard of proposals to destroy any atomic nucleus thermally. If underground magma got hot enough to generate the plasma energies required to literally collide nuclei, life wouldn’t be able to exist on the planet. Unless you’re Al Gore in which case you can fake the millyuns of degrees involved.
Store it safely until such time in the future we can dump it on Jupiter.
Trust me, Jupiter won’t mind. It could swallow our whole earth and not care one bit.
Where to put nuclear waste: Try Al Gore’s big global warming butt.
I’m feeling nasty tonight. I couldn’t even lift my 4 foot long, 50+ lb. icicle that is lying in my yard, next to the other 2-1/2 ft. part of it which weighs about 40 lbs. It was about 8 ft long or more from my roof to the ground.
I like the old idea of putting spent nuclear rods and containers into a linked space-train vehicle and send it into the sun. Now, that would be real global warming.
Better would be at subduction zones in deep oceans, between plates.
Why don’t we just reprocess the fuel into new fuel?
Oh, yeah. Politics.
Build some large booster rockets, load up radioactive waste, fire out of Earth orbit in the general direction of the sun. The sun’s the biggest gravity sink within several light-years - the waste will get there sooner or later, and will fall into a thermonuclear explosion far larger than the entire Earth. Perfectly safe disposal and probably more economical than building and securing some huge underground repository.
I actually had this thought years ago but I never thought it was viable. One big explosion and a 25,000 year half life would spread it all over the world. So then I thought, how about an undersea volcanoe. But about that time I saw a couple of movies, like those things that got all radioactive and moved inland down in California, and Gorgo, and It Came From Beneath the Sea, and Them, and the one with the giant crab.
So I dismissed the idea, and ate a few bags of Cheetos instead.
parsy, who remembers that for some strange reason
There really is only one logical solution.
Take a cattle prod to the space vehicle design teams and build an economical means of lifting tons of radioactive material into space and into the sun.
Be it anti-grav, beam it up Scotty, space elevator or giant guns there needs to be a way to get this stuff off planet.
Could we send it into outer space towards the sun and let it encompass it? Would the sun ultimately consume it? Would this be too costly or are there other constraints? Or could we simply send it out into the oblivion of outer space?
Next goal: strip wet from water.
Ya know, the whole nuclear waste thing becomes a LOT easier if ya just get over the "weapon" hysteria and just use the stuff in appropriate reactors for making energy.
Encase it in glass, steel etc. and sink it in the deepest part of ocean or blast it into space to eventualy go into the sun, make a good job for private space concerns.
That “nuclear waste” is actually a natural resource that a rational civilization would use.