Depositing our waste into outer space

[Loren Pechtel]

One possibility is that to have a cannon fire the waste into space. Instead of explosives powering the cannon use magnets to do so. The cost of the electricity would be very small, though the cost of the cannon would be high. Plus you would need to go though the atmosphere without burning up, or slowing down much which might be a problem.

1) Even the electricity to fire it would be enough to convert the material to plasma, destroying all organic type threats it might pose.

2) Getting it through the atmosphere is a non-trivial problem. You need a *BIG* gun to accomplish this, the atmosphere will pretty much stop any projectile with a cross sectional density below 14.7 pounds per square inch assuming your gun is at sea level. (Yes, I said cross sectional density, not pressure. It's not a coincidence that this matches Earth's atmospheric pressure, though.) The only way you'll accomplish this is with a long, thin projectile and it will have to be far bigger than the biggest shell ever fired.

3) If you want to hit the sun the velocity after leaving the atmosphere must be 41 km/sec. You'll need substantially more than that upon leaving the barrel. Suppose it tumbles a little bit? It's going to be shredded. The Challenger got torn apart by twisting a bit at a *FAR* lower velocity.

 

[PyramidHead]

Well, I guess I know what to say to my family members when somebody suggests this at the dinner table.

 

[Jarhyn]

... So, I'm all for 'burn the world if it means living forever', making well timed sacrifices m when necessary to realize transhumanist goals, but it strikes me as patently idiotic to throw away resources rather than using highly available spare energy to produce a cycle and make it not be waste. We only have so much useful 'stuff', and making the raw materials utterly unrecoverable, not to mention wasting a lot of that free energy in the process, seems pretty terrible.

 

[ElectEngr]

I've always liked the idea of shooting radioactive waist into the Sun.

I know that's not PC around here but I'm not willing to give up everything and go back to pre Industrail Revolution.

Later,
ElectEngr

 

[bilby]

I've always liked the idea of shooting radioactive waist into the Sun.

I know that's not PC around here but I'm not willing to give up everything and go back to pre Industrail Revolution.

Later,
ElectEngr

I had some ^99mTc injected into me yesterday for a medical scan, and for a few hours, I had a radioactive waist; and indeed, radioactive hips, spine, arms, legs...

Radioactive waste, on the other hand, is either active enough to be too useful to throw away; or not active enough to worry about giving it special treatment.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

I've always liked the idea of shooting radioactive waist into the Sun.

I know that's not PC around here but I'm not willing to give up everything and go back to pre Industrail Revolution.

Later,
ElectEngr

I had some ^99mTc injected into me yesterday for a medical scan, and for a few hours, I had a radioactive waist; and indeed, radioactive hips, spine, arms, legs...

Radioactive waste, on the other hand, is either active enough to be too useful to throw away; or not active enough to worry about giving it special treatment.

Few hours? IIRC it was ~40 hours after her heart scan that my wife tripped two nuke scanners in Shanghai. (And she managed to pass through two US airports without tripping any scanners--lucky, as the card from the lab was in the pocket of the jacket she decided not to wear. Chinese security was if anything too lax about it (I would have swept her with a geiger counter to see that it was from her whole body rather than something she was carrying, they only talked to her for a little bit) but I can imagine what it would have done to our flight if US security had seen her.)

 

[bilby]

I had some ^99mTc injected into me yesterday for a medical scan, and for a few hours, I had a radioactive waist; and indeed, radioactive hips, spine, arms, legs...

Radioactive waste, on the other hand, is either active enough to be too useful to throw away; or not active enough to worry about giving it special treatment.

Few hours? IIRC it was ~40 hours after her heart scan that my wife tripped two nuke scanners in Shanghai. (And she managed to pass through two US airports without tripping any scanners--lucky, as the card from the lab was in the pocket of the jacket she decided not to wear. Chinese security was if anything too lax about it (I would have swept her with a geiger counter to see that it was from her whole body rather than something she was carrying, they only talked to her for a little bit) but I can imagine what it would have done to our flight if US security had seen her.)

^99mTc is a metastable Gamma emitter with a half life of about six hours; it emits a 140kEv Gamma and drops to the ground state ⁹⁹Tc, which is a low activity Beta emitter with a half life of 220,000 years; it undergoes very little Beta decay before being excreted in the urine.

Perhaps your wife had a ²⁰¹Tl tracer, which is often used for cardiac flow tracing; this isotope of Thallium has a half-life of about 73 hours, and decays by electron capture, emitting a 70-90kEv Gamma; as a result, X-Ray detectability persists for much longer than ^99mTc. (The decay product, ²⁰¹Hg, is a stable isotope).

140kEv is a 'hard X-Ray' energy photon, and matches the energy of conventional medical X-Rays very well; Gamma photons below about 100kEv are a bit 'soft' as X-Rays go, so longer exposures or more sensitive films or Gamma-cameras are needed.

Technically, radiologists refer to photons generated in atomic nuclei as Gamma rays, and those produced by accelerated extra-nuclear electrons as X-Rays; but of course there is no difference between photons of equal energies, once emitted; there is a lot of overlap between the spectra of low energy Gamma rays and X-Rays.

Given how easy Alpha and Beta radiation is to shield, airport scanners look for Gamma/X-Ray photons, which are pretty much impossible for a smuggler to shield against - carrying a few feet of lead shielding through an airport might well look suspicious, and few terrorist organisations could afford the excess baggage charges.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Few hours? IIRC it was ~40 hours after her heart scan that my wife tripped two nuke scanners in Shanghai. (And she managed to pass through two US airports without tripping any scanners--lucky, as the card from the lab was in the pocket of the jacket she decided not to wear. Chinese security was if anything too lax about it (I would have swept her with a geiger counter to see that it was from her whole body rather than something she was carrying, they only talked to her for a little bit) but I can imagine what it would have done to our flight if US security had seen her.)

^99mTc is a metastable Gamma emitter with a half life of about six hours; it emits a 140kEv Gamma and drops to the ground state ⁹⁹Tc, which is a low activity Beta emitter with a half life of 220,000 years; it undergoes very little Beta decay before being excreted in the urine.

Perhaps your wife had a ²⁰¹Tl tracer, which is often used for cardiac flow tracing; this isotope of Thallium has a half-life of about 73 hours, and decays by electron capture, emitting a 70-90kEv Gamma; as a result, X-Ray detectability persists for much longer than ^99mTc. (The decay product, ²⁰¹Hg, is a stable isotope).

It was ^99MTc -- it was several half-lives later that the PVG airport scanners found her. The first time they talked to her, quickly found out she had had a heart scan and that was that. No checking at all. The second time nobody responded to the hooting device, we waited a bit and then went on.

Given how easy Alpha and Beta radiation is to shield, airport scanners look for Gamma/X-Ray photons, which are pretty much impossible for a smuggler to shield against - carrying a few feet of lead shielding through an airport might well look suspicious, and few terrorist organisations could afford the excess baggage charges.

Of course. There's no point in looking for alpha or beta, they're too easy to screen.

 

[bilby]

^99mTc is a metastable Gamma emitter with a half life of about six hours; it emits a 140kEv Gamma and drops to the ground state ⁹⁹Tc, which is a low activity Beta emitter with a half life of 220,000 years; it undergoes very little Beta decay before being excreted in the urine.

Perhaps your wife had a ²⁰¹Tl tracer, which is often used for cardiac flow tracing; this isotope of Thallium has a half-life of about 73 hours, and decays by electron capture, emitting a 70-90kEv Gamma; as a result, X-Ray detectability persists for much longer than ^99mTc. (The decay product, ²⁰¹Hg, is a stable isotope).

It was ^99MTc -- it was several half-lives later that the PVG airport scanners found her. The first time they talked to her, quickly found out she had had a heart scan and that was that. No checking at all. The second time nobody responded to the hooting device, we waited a bit and then went on.

Given how easy Alpha and Beta radiation is to shield, airport scanners look for Gamma/X-Ray photons, which are pretty much impossible for a smuggler to shield against - carrying a few feet of lead shielding through an airport might well look suspicious, and few terrorist organisations could afford the excess baggage charges.

Of course. There's no point in looking for alpha or beta, they're too easy to screen.

It just goes to show how sensitive their detectors are then; The biological half life of most medical Tc salts is of the order of 24 hours, so after 24 hours the activity is only about 1/32 of the initial level (Half of the Tc has been excreted in the urine, and 15/16 of the remainder has decayed already).

 

[Loren Pechtel]

It was ^99MTc -- it was several half-lives later that the PVG airport scanners found her. The first time they talked to her, quickly found out she had had a heart scan and that was that. No checking at all. The second time nobody responded to the hooting device, we waited a bit and then went on.

Given how easy Alpha and Beta radiation is to shield, airport scanners look for Gamma/X-Ray photons, which are pretty much impossible for a smuggler to shield against - carrying a few feet of lead shielding through an airport might well look suspicious, and few terrorist organisations could afford the excess baggage charges.

Of course. There's no point in looking for alpha or beta, they're too easy to screen.

It just goes to show how sensitive their detectors are then; The biological half life of most medical Tc salts is of the order of 24 hours, so after 24 hours the activity is only about 1/32 of the initial level (Half of the Tc has been excreted in the urine, and 15/16 of the remainder has decayed already).

Yeah, they have to have been pretty sensitive. Some of the causes of false positives on their list were pretty low radioactivity. It didn't catch the two ounces of potassium (in the form of lite salt) I've carried through the same detectors.

The first one was at least at very close range--it was a rectangle you walked through (it looks very much like the walk-through metal detectors that use to be the primary airport security) and thus the detection range was under a foot.

The second, however, was either buried in the floor or at least 10 feet away.

 

[Tigers!]

What if the waste is restricted to just nuclear waste?

The reason reactor fuel stays dangerous for so long after you take it out of the reactor is that there's still so much energy it can't help leaking out. Thinking of it as "waste" is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Shooting it into space would turn that conceptual barrier into a literal one. So if we can't figure out how to safely and economically extract the 90+% of its available energy that we're currently abandoning in the so-called "spent" fuel, for gods' sake don't stick it anywhere our more energy-starved and less technologically primitive descendants won't be able to get it back from.

Pity we can't use that spent nuclear fuel to power a plane like the Fireflash on the Thunderbirds.

(For those unfortunate enough to be too young to remember the Thunderbirds http://thunderbirds.wikia.com/wiki/Fireflash)

 

[Loren Pechtel]

The reason reactor fuel stays dangerous for so long after you take it out of the reactor is that there's still so much energy it can't help leaking out. Thinking of it as "waste" is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Shooting it into space would turn that conceptual barrier into a literal one. So if we can't figure out how to safely and economically extract the 90+% of its available energy that we're currently abandoning in the so-called "spent" fuel, for gods' sake don't stick it anywhere our more energy-starved and less technologically primitive descendants won't be able to get it back from.

Pity we can't use that spent nuclear fuel to power a plane like the Fireflash on the Thunderbirds.

(For those unfortunate enough to be too young to remember the Thunderbirds http://thunderbirds.wikia.com/wiki/Fireflash)

What to do with the spent fuel is reprocess it. Remove the neutron-absobers that poison the reaction and put the rest back in the reactor--90% of the "waste" is actually unused fuel. For safety's sake we don't fully reprocess it--the stuff would always be lethally hot, no terrorist is going to make off with plutonium. (Not to mention that spent fuel rods from a power reactor have too much Pu-240--something you most definitely do not want in your bomb.)

 

[Derec]

Is there any downside to jettisoning our garbage into the vacuum of the cosmos, far enough away from us that it would never find its way back (or, alternatively, shooting it into the sun itself)? Is it possible, even in principle, to "pollute" space in such a way? If the cost of fuel to achieve escape velocity were offset by the savings in waste treatment and processing, would this be a viable strategy?

You mean like this?
As others have said, it would be really expensive and not really worthwhile.