Yeah, because things like snow ploughs exist.



-30C to -40C is common in only very few places.

Also:

in the background on brushes for instance is not much more snow.

edit: the video is nice

This post was edited by derDrops on Feb 8 2021 01:24pm

I have very little doubt that nuclear waste could be transported efficiently

Misleading. First, the amount of nuclear waste produced in nuclear power plants exceeds the self-weight of the raw uranium which is used in the process by a substantial factor. Second, you're not gonna put nuclear waste in a cardbox and put it on a space shuttle. It has to be transported in extremely dense and heavy containers which look like this:


According to the German wiki, these containers for nuclear waste have a weight of around 125 metric tons and can hold around 180 kg of nuclear waste, so that's a ratio of 1:700 right there for a start. If you dont want to contaminate the launching ramp, you need a container of roughly this weight class. Launching this kind of weight into orbit will cost a huge amount of energy.

I mean, come on, think about it critically: some of the brightest scientists in the world have been racking their brains for decades to find a permanent solution for nuclear waste - do you seriously believe that none of them ever thought about the idea of just launching it into space?

According to google 1 kg of uranium makes 24 million kWh of power at a nuclear plant.

Converted to joules that's 8.64 x 10 J, or 8.64 x10^7 MJ

Sending something to space takes 109 MJ/KG, so we want 700KG so 76300 MJ. So we've got a wasted energy content of 0.08% of the total energy.

Even if my numbers are off, I've got a factor of over 1000 to make up for it.

It's not really the energy content that's the problem, as much as it's just the practical aspects of sending things to space.

While you make an excellent point, it's not a particularly useful one, given nuclear power plants don't power shuttles.

The challenge has very little to do with the energy efficiency of nuclear power, and a lot more to do with how to get to the moon utilizing something more efficient than rocket fuel.

Nuclear power plants certainly do power rockets. It's basically just electrolysis to create oxygen and hydrogen, which is then cooled to liquid and used as rocket fuel.

We don't necessarily have to send it to the moon. We could also just vault it out into space on a small rocket designed just for that payload. It would waste some material, but the material would exit the entire solar system after a few years / decades and would never be seen again.

"We have a serious trash problem on our planet, with many wastes being toxic to life. Any solutions?"

"Let's randomly launch it into space!"

"What if it lands on some other planet and poisons them?"

"So what? We don't live there..."

Edit: To not go full troll, my interests are less in the storage of waste, which as far as I know is currently stored in reinforced bunkers (think hollowed out mountain), but instead on future power. If He3 is as good as they say, and if we want rare metals and silicates to last (yes, these are limited and expensive resources), then the moon is easily humanity's most valuable asset. People talk about Mars, but Mars is mostly worthless, from a resource perspective. The moon is a wealth of resource, and would provide everything we need for both energy and technology pretty much forever.

This post was edited by InsaneBobb on Feb 8 2021 03:33pm

^^

1/2 * 1kg * 8000m/s² (V needed to stay in Low earth orbit) = 32.000.000 J

That's almost half of it, without taking losses into account to get there.

And then comes the trip to the moon


This post was edited by Knoppie on Feb 8 2021 03:56pm

modern reactors will solve the "waste" problem in the next years

what uneducated people call nuclear waste is in reality another massive energy potential that exceeds the classic reactors multiple times