shame on an IGA posted:

so my napkin math works out to needing around 3 million g of acceleration on a 10m catapult arm to hit the delta-v requirement, negating air resistance

Karia posted:

So the problem here is that you're trying to do this all in one shot. The better way is to do it as a series of catapults. The first big catapult throws a slightly smaller catapult. At the top of its trajectory, that one throws another, even smaller catapult, and so on, until you've got one tiny little palm sized catapult which shoots a couple grams of plutonium straight at the sun.

Karia posted:

So the problem here is that you're trying to do this all in one shot. The better way is to do it as a series of catapults. The first big catapult throws a slightly smaller catapult. At the top of its trajectory, that one throws another, even smaller catapult, and so on, until you've got one tiny little palm sized catapult which shoots a couple grams of plutonium straight at the sun.

Pigsfeet on Rye posted:

Its catapults, all the way up.

Kitfox88 posted:

Someone's probably already prototyped this system in KSP, even.

Karia posted:

So the problem here is that you're trying to do this all in one shot. The better way is to do it as a series of catapults. The first big catapult throws a slightly smaller catapult. At the top of its trajectory, that one throws another, even smaller catapult, and so on, until you've got one tiny little palm sized catapult which shoots a couple grams of plutonium straight at the sun.

Humphreys posted:

jetz0r posted:

You all have no sense of scale. There's no way to launch all the nuclear waste into space without devoting the entire world economy to rocket production, and sending a never ending stream of heavy launch vehicles into the sky. Chemical rockets are just awful for putting a lot of mass into space, you need something better, something that can lift huge amount of concrete blocks and water. You need nuclear pulse propulsion.

I mean, sure, it's a massive undertaking to build a 100,000 ton holding vessel on top of the largest shock absorbers ever built, on top of a launch pad made of high explosives. We'll also need a pile of tiny nukes, but the US could use some more manufacturing jobs. I guess we'll also need to throw that manufacturing plant into the ship once the bombs are completed. But then we'll finally be able to send all our high level nuclear waste to Jupiter on a string of a few hundred nuclear explosions.

Obligatory KSP video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vwrLR2kv5KA

BMan posted:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nX23IRKNaLE

Batterypowered7 posted:

Can we just railgun some containers at the sun? Maybe power it with some nuclear power plants?

Turrurrurrurrrrrrr posted:

Will Yucca Mountains in Nevada be ready

Nessus posted:

Make it a two step process. After the single run through the reactor on Earth, we load it into a space elevator which we use to move it into near-earth orbit. From there we move it to the Moon. Obviously, it's still a proliferation risk on the Moon, if perhaps somewhat less of one, so we can accumulate it before we load it into an enormous mass driver capable of accelerating a 500-ton payload to sufficient velocity to reach the Sun or Jupiter in a matter of hours.

Obviously you'd want to make the mass driver maneuverable so that you can fire it at the Sun or Jupiter at any point in their orbital period. Please contact Hugo Drax for a price quote on this project.

Karia posted:

Oh, yes. That's extremely easy from an energy standpoint. Escape velocity for Earth is roughly 11km/s, which means that you need 62 mega Joules of energy per kilogram of material you want to yeet into orbit. So if you can get 62.1 MJ of energy from a kilogram of uranium, you're coming out ahead.

Back-of-the-envelope math suggests that you'll get on the order of 100 gigaJoules by fissioning 20% of the U235 that's in the sort of uranium you can dig out of the ground (~0.7% U235.) So well over 99.9% of the energy in the uranium can be used for other stuff and you'll still have more than enough to throw the leftover waste into the sun.

I suspect there might be other difficulties you'll encounter along the way, though...

Old Balls McGee posted:

kdaN

Mustached Demon posted:

Why don't we turn the moon into a giant reactor and run a cable or two?

Platystemon posted:

I know Luneshot knows this, but rockets can take advantage of this discrepancy to get to the Sun the slow and cheap way.

Getting an elliptical orbit stretching to Neptune’s only takes three and quarter kilometres per second from Low Earth Orbit, and once there you’re only moving like two kilometres per second, so you can negate that and fall straight into the Sun.

Luneshot posted:

Once you've left Earth, you still have to remove all of Earth's 30 km/s orbital velocity in order to actually drop the waste into the Sun.

It's much easier to just leave the solar system entirely, because solar escape velocity at 1 AU is like 42 km/s, and you already have ~30km/s of that by virtue of starting at Earth.

Antigravitas posted:

Nuclear nightmares are great. It's almost 2021 and nobody knows what to do with the waste.

In Germany they had the glorious idea to test storage solutions by dumping waste in an old salt mine. A salt mine they knew (but denied) had brine inflow and would start deforming immediately. It was supposed to be storage for low to medium waste, but there's a ton of undocumented waste in there, in disorderly dumps. They used drums which immediately started corroding (brine…) and leaking. The entire site has to be excavated (at taxpayer's expense, naturally).

The English Wikipedia article for Asse II doesn't mention (or has been scrubbed of) most of the really damning things, like the 28kg of Plutonium they much later "remembered" they had dumped there, or that they had a "revenue" of 900k by letting the private sector dump their waste there, with cleanup costs estimated to be at least 2 billion, or that the last year of operation when everyone knew it was unsafe accounts for a quarter of all the dumped waste, hastily thrown in and buried and documentation destroyed.

minato posted:

There's a motorcycle crash in THX 1138 that just... a stuntman going full tilt into some debris. Timestamped: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J5nmxHjPuvY&t=150s

Sirotan posted:

Pretty sure it's just a dummy and they've got the motorcycle on a track?

Nessus posted:

Make it a two step process. After the single run through the reactor on Earth, we load it into a space elevator which we use to move it into near-earth orbit. From there we move it to the Moon. Obviously, it's still a proliferation risk on the Moon, if perhaps somewhat less of one, so we can accumulate it before we load it into an enormous mass driver capable of accelerating a 500-ton payload to sufficient velocity to reach the Sun or Jupiter in a matter of hours.

Obviously you'd want to make the mass driver maneuverable so that you can fire it at the Sun or Jupiter at any point in their orbital period. Please contact Hugo Drax for a price quote on this project.

BMan posted:

Whatever we do with spent nuclear fuel should be reversible in case we ever decide that, actually, throwing away perfectly good fertile material was a bad idea

BMan posted:

Whatever we do with spent nuclear fuel should be reversible in case we ever decide that, actually, throwing away perfectly good fertile material was a bad idea

BMan posted:

Whatever we do with spent nuclear fuel should be reversible in case we ever decide that, actually, throwing away perfectly good fertile material was a bad idea

LifeSunDeath posted:

More like George Lucas killed a man just to see how it felt.

Wasabi the J posted:

IDK why we're sending it to heavenly bodies when the vast emptiness of space is a much broader target.

Efb gently caress

CommieGIR posted:

We actually know what to do with nuclear waste, and we have ways to handle it. We can reprocess spent fuel, we have ways of burning up longer lived isotopes.

Nuclear isn't dirty because it has to be, its dirty because being dirty is cheap. We'd rather use fossil fuels to accelerate our extinction than solve actual problems.

But its unprofitable and expensive, so thats why its not happening

And no, shooting it too the sun is both expensive in thrust and method.