Posted on 10/09/2017 5:38:11 AM PDT by RoosterRedux
What do you do with the spent material? Can it be recycled? (i.e., replenished through a 'breeder' or something like that) If not, you've still got a serious problem of waste material disposal. We really don't have any 'safe' way to store material that maintains radioactive toxicity for tens of thousands of years.
Personally, I think the only real solution is to launch the stuff into space and park it in a stable orbit around the sun. (not in orbit around the earth) At some point, if mankind survives as a species and the muslims don't drag us back to the seventh century, I'm sure we'd be able to do something with this stuff. If not, fire it into the sun, and let it be our solar garbage disposal.
Yes. That's why it is still in operation decades after being launched. At this point, it's power output is really low, but enough to keep a very select number of instruments online.
It takes more energy to put something into the Sun (meaning force it to slow down, so that it falls into the Sun), than it would take to make an object leave the Solar System, as the gravity of gas giants Jupiter and/or Saturn could be used to accelerate it.
Plutonium leftovers can be used for further nuclear fission. That is how France uses their nuclear waste.
nuke power bump
One disposes of it safely in a place designed for the purpose. The power companies with nuke plants have been paying into a fund to pay for disposal for decades. The safe disposal site has already been built at Yucca Mountain, but is prevented from being put into use by the senior senator from Nevada. He has personally stalled work by blocking legislation.
There are NO "technical issues" involved in safe disposal...just leftist politics.
While I haven't actually seen the orbital mechanics of this, I don't see how it can be true in any meaningful way. The big issue is getting things out of the Earth's gravity well. If you achieve escape velocity and your craft's vector is pointed toward the sun instead of away from it, the work of the sun's own gravity will drag it down absent any additional boost. Depending upon the original vector, the trip will either long (i.e., it might take several orbits to spiral in) or short (if you craft the initial vector appropriately) if the craft does not have enough momentum to escape the sun.
Again, the big problem is getting however many tons of material you're talking about out of our gravity well. Then you also have the enviroweenies who will protest any launch that has nuclear material on board, as they did with the Casinni mission, and that craft had a payload that had been designed to successfully survive a failed launch.
Plutonium leftovers can be used for further nuclear fission. That is how France uses their nuclear waste.
Ya. Useful for plutonium reactor components, but that's a small portion of what is left from a standard fission reactor. I'm not even sure what kind of radioactives are planned for these small units, but I seriously doubt it is something as potentially useful as plutonium.
Personally, I'd love to see something like these small neighborhood reactors, as it would make our power grid a lot more robust, and resilient, but until we figure out how to actually deal with stuff that will remain dangerous for longer than we've even had an existing civilization on this planet, I think we need to be cautious about it and think the entire life-cycle through, rather than just the short-term benefit to be gained.
Actually, we have several.
yup!
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