I spend quite a bit of my time reading and thinking about the worlds problems. Maybe this is because thinking about my own problems gets boring after awhile. Very occasionally I am able to indentify a solution to a problem. Unfortunately I’m almost always not qualified enough to comment on the problem or the solution… But not knowing anything about a topic has never stopped me sharing my 2 cents.
Nuclear waste is a particularly vexing problem, for two primary reasons. It has a very long half life and the only thing that can destroy nuclear waste is another even bigger nuclear reaction. That means that the nuclear waste that we create today is being put in barrels and buried underground in various types of facilities. The Scandinavians put their waste in a cave they’ve dug half a kilometre inside a piece of solid rock and then concrete it up again. The Americans load their waste on trains and then just transport around the continental United States in a big loop while they wait for the facility under Yucca mountain to be completed…or not.
But I think we’ve been approaching this all wrong. We’ve been looking down in to the earth for places to hide the waste when we could be looking up into the sky for places to destroy it. And more specially at that gigantic nuclear reactor that passes over our heads everyday…some people call it the sun. Now bear with me here. What better way to get rid of nuclear waste than to drop it into another larger 4 billion year old nuclear reaction?
Yeah and I know what you’re thinking…that's a great idea but how are we going to get it to the sun? Well I’ve got that figured out too. I propose we build a very large trebuchet to just fling the spent fuel rods at the sun everyday as it passes over head. No? You don’t like that idea? Ok well once we’ve figured out how to build a space elevator we could just load them in some kind of shipping container contraption and fix some booster rockets on the back. And then launch them on a one way trip into the sun. By my back of the envelop calculation that shouldn’t be too hard. If we can land a robot on Mars and control it from earth and send a probe out past Uranus we should be able to shoot things at the gravitational centre of our solar system. The sun’s gravity should pull the shipping-container-with-booster-rockets most of the way anyway…all we have to do is point it in the right direction. Right?
Now I know that some environmentalists will be against the idea of flinging nuclear material around the solar system but I would point out that…who cares, we don’t live out in space, we live here on earth….or is that just some more of the myopic thinking that got us here in the first place?