Could we send our nuclear waste to the sun?

However, even though the Sun is certainly hot enough to melt and ionize any terrestrial matter we send into contact with it, it’s an extraordinarily difficult task to actually send anything, like our garbage, into the Sun. Imagine our planet as it was for the first 4.55 billion years of its existence.

Can we dispose of nuclear waste?

Disposal of low-level waste is straightforward and can be undertaken safely almost anywhere. Storage of used fuel is normally under water for at least five years and then often in dry storage. Deep geological disposal is widely agreed to be the best solution for final disposal of the most radioactive waste produced.

What is the best way to dispose of nuclear waste?

Can you fire a rocket into the sun?

“Any available launch vehicle—even near-future, the most powerful—it won’t be able to shoot a spacecraft to get to the sun. You must use gravity, and not just a general gravity assist—you have to use the most powerful gravity assist.”

What is the role of nuclear waste in nuclear power?

Nuclear power is the only large-scale energy-producing technology that takes full responsibility for all its waste and fully costs this into the product. The amount of waste generated by nuclear power is very small relative to other thermal electricity generation technologies. Used nuclear fuel may be treated as a resource or simply as waste.

What happens to nuclear waste if you don’t cancel out the motion?

If you don’t cancel out that motion, your nuclear waste is going to just orbit the Sun forever, like an asteroid of garbage. There’s another path you could take. Instead of trying to drop down into the Sun, you fly outwards until you’ve almost escaped the pull of the Sun. Where the angular momentum, that sideways motion, is almost zero.

Is it possible to crash nuclear waste into the Sun?

If having thousands of tonnes of nuclear waste hanging over your head makes you nervous, then you’re going to want to hear about more, permanent options. Let’s crash that stuff into the Sun. It turns out, blasting it into the Sun is much much more expensive.

How much would it cost to blast nuclear waste into the Sun?

In other words, multiple your costs by a factor of 20. $1.2 trillion to launch the high-level waste into the Sun on a trajectory that takes a long long time. The bottom line is that blasting our nuclear waste off into space, into the Sun, is just too expensive – by several orders of magnitude.