“This is not a place of honor, don’t dig here, this is not good material,”
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methane is a nasty greenhouse gas.
It would be a lot more energy-efficient to dump the waste on Venus. If SpaceX’s plans work out, it should be possible to setup a Earth-Venus waste-disposal cycler that could be very attractive when compared with long-term storage on Earth.
Indiana Jones and the Nuclear Repository of Doooom!
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True. But the proposal isn’t to release it. The proposal is to burn it.
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Yes, the analysis shows this won’t help. Modern agriculture is fossil fuel intensive, so growing crops for energy makes no sense whatsever. Plus the fact that there’s very little scope to expand the amount of land currently farmed without tearing up crucial carbon sinks such as forests. So if we convert farmland from growing food to growing energy crops, many people will starve. Biofuels are not a climate solution by any stretch of the imagination.
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I’m not an astrophysisist, but wouldn’t you have to put on the brakes to stop at Venus?
Seems to have forgotten about 3 mile Island at the beginning or do I have to go looking for the European version?
A reactor in Japan is pumping plutonium into the ocean none stop. Around the world, whole cities have been destroyed by reactors breaking down. Be honest, We have no way to contain nuclear waste–It’s super lethal and will last longer than humans do.
The folks that are making money from nuclear power are evil.
History has clearly shown nuclear power is not safe and we can not store the waste from it. Folks that push for nuclear power should be held responsible for the horror they condone.
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A cycler trajectory between two planets allows for a free return to the initial planet, after a close flyby of the other planet. We would just have to put a small disposable rocket on the waste container that would slightly change its trajectory, after it separated from the main spacecraft, so it would hit Venus. This would allow for reuse of most of the system. The main spacecraft would come back to the Earth, where it would rendezvous with another spacecraft that would transfer a new waste container and additional propellant for course maintenance maneuvers.
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Nuclear power plants can be great fun!
https://www.wunderlandkalkar.eu/en
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meanwhile, in India.
The “filthiest” fuel is Petcoke.
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The real answer to that is “safer, better nuclear reactors that produce less (and less hazardous) waste, and can even clean up the nuclear waste that we already have”. We know how to build them in principle, it’s just that politicians don’t want us to. We’ll be buying them from China and India a few decades from now.
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Apparently like this:
This place is not a place of honor.
No highly esteemed deed is commemorated here.
Nothing valued is here.
This place is a message and part of a system of messages.
Pay attention to it!
Sending this message was important to us.
We considered ourselves to be a powerful culture.
http://www.wipp.energy.gov/picsprog/articles/wipp%20exhibit%20message%20to%2012,000%20a_d.htm
(EDIT: @JonS beat me to it)
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Reading that piece makes me ponder all the design awards, safety awards, Nobel prizes, and any other industry honors given to those involved in this enterprise.
Those trophies will have meaning for-at most- the lifetime of the recipient. Meanwhile this anti-trophy will have meaning until the end of time, or near enough as makes no difference.
This civilization won’t be remembered by its good works, it will be remembered for the permanent damage it’s done to the future.
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Yes, the CBC program covers WIPP, as well as Giant Mine (arsenic that has to be kept frozen, forever), Firefly and A Canticle for Leibowitz.
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Because, fortunately for us, space launches are and forever will be accident-free.
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It’s not as if nuclear waste storage facilities aren’t.
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Considering how challenging cuneiform & similar early writing is to us today, less than 5000 years later, imagine the challenge of a message intended to be understandable 10 or 20 times as long. Not surprising that they considered outside-the-box notions like a permanent stench, or a kind of ‘priesthood’ handed down generation-to-generation.
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