/sci/ - Science & Math

>mfw when challenger

too many launches blow up to make this safe

>>2401819
You mean a much lower percentage of vehicle accidents than any other vehicle in operation?

>>2401813
Problems:
1- Expensive as fuck
2- Risky - if the rocket blows then all of that shit is scattered everywhere.
3- Unnecessary. Contrary to popular myth, that shit isn't as bad as they make it out to be. Either it has a short half life and it's dangerous for a short period of time, or it has a long half life and it's not really all that dangerous.

Ex: uranium ore doesn't kill you from radiation poisoning. It kills you because it's a heavy metal like mercury, through heavy metal poisoning.

Here's the thing, OP:

We don't actually want to put the nuclear waste beyond reach. I know that Captain Planet taught you that this stuff is pure evil, but that's not the case. And once you put it into the sun, you're NEVER getting it back.

>put all of our nuclear waste, much of which is extremely useful, on a series of giant rockets

>an accident causes a rocket to explode during launch

>metric tons of vaporized radioactive material spread into the upper atmosphere

Anyways, energy requirements for launching shit into the sun are extremely large, and the vast vast majority of nuclear waste can simply be re-used. What can't, only lasts a few hundred years at worst and in such small quantities that storage really isn't an issue.

>>2401831
That's a straw man argument. A single accident like Challenger with a nuclear waste payload would be disastrous. In more ways than one.

>>2401839
This. Solar disposal makes recycling impossible.

>>2401832
Woah, someone who fucking knows what they're talking about? Let me suck your dick.

>>2401839
Carl Sagan would argue... otherwise, my star-stuff friend

Way to expensive. No space program can currently put anything into low orbit for $1,000 per lb. You want to send it to the sun, which would likely increase the costs by a factor of three or more.

Currently, about 300 million tonnes of nuclear waste are produced each year.

I'll leave you with that.

>>2401831
The space shuttle has a record of 2 failures out of 135 launches.

That, even if you stretch it, is not even remotely close to a "safe" vehicle. Let alone one of the safest in operation.

Rockets are incredibly dangerous.

Nuclear waste is not waste. Its perfectly good fuel for a breeder reactor.

>>2401879
>300 million tonnes of nuclear waste per year
Really? That seems extraordinarily high. Citations please.

>>2401855
Once the rocket is out in orbit with a trajectory towards the sun, no power is required anymore. It will just float towards the sun in that direction.

We've never launched anything fast enough to reach the sun.

Launching something into low Earth orbit takes a speed of about 17,000 MPH. Launching something to escape Earth's gravity completely (into an orbit around the Sun) takes a speed of about 25,000 MPH. Launching something completely out of the solar system takes a speed of about 48,000 MPH.

Launching something into the Sun requires canceling out the Earth's orbital velocity, so the payload drops into the Sun instead of going into a solar orbit. This requires a speed of 66,000 MPH. We've never built any kind of rocket that can reach that speed.

>>2401929
He probably means "material deemed a radiological hazard". That means any contaminated material whatsoever.

tl;dr wow it's fucking nothing

>mfw space elevator deals with cost and safety concerns.
whether or not we want to get rid of it is the only real issue now...

>>2401955
>mfw magic deals with cost and safety concerns.

>>2401932
This sounds interesting and like it could be right, but couldn't we just launch something with such an eccentric orbit that it would, relatively quickly, decay orbit into the sun?

>>2401955
>implying a space elevator is cheap and easy to build even if we had strong enough materials to build it, which we dont.

>>2401955

>Paper-thin fullerene ribbon dozens of thousands of kilometers long.
>SUDDENLY DEBRIS MOVING AT ~5 KIPS

>>2401977
>implying i was being serious
>implying that would be the only reason we would build a space elevator

>>2401929
>In the OECD countries, some 300 million tonnes of toxic wastes are produced each year,
http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf04.html

Take all the nuclear waste into the middle of the ocean. Strap a nuclear bomb to it. Detonate nuclear bomb. The huge amount of water pressure from the ocean and water will subdue the explosion preventing any sort of damage to the surrounding yet discinegrating the waste.

>>2401983
it's paper thin? Then what the hell are the chances something is going to hit it. Pretty low I'd say.

>Find a meteorite that calculated to past earth's orbit. Meteroites and space debris fly past all the time
>Calculate its trajectory. If it is headed out of the solar system
>Shoot nuclear waste in its direction
>The meteorite will push the waste in the direction it's going
>The waste will be pushed out of the solar system by the meteorite

>>2401996

>Paper-thin fullerene ribbon
>Ribbon
>Paper-thin ribbon

I never mentioned the width. This is of course to be defined by the climber's specifications.

>>2401932
I don't like your math. at all. Dropping something into the sun would not take more energy than escaping the sun's gravitational well.

>>2402012
if it's going to be wider than a normal old ribbon, why not call it a sheet? Makes it much less ambiguous.

>>2402013
yes it would. lrn2physics

>>2402018
explain pl0x

>>2402028
Anything launched from earth is already travelling at earths orbital velocity. To escape from solar system you need to increase this speed to escape velocity. To hit the sun you need to drop your velocity to zero. Turns out earths orbital velocity is closer to escape velocity than zero. Therefore it takes more energy to hit the sun than to escape solar system.

>With all the technology we have, couldn't we build a slingshot strong enough to sling material out of Earth's orbit?

And once it gets out of orbit the biggest mass with gravitational pull will just pull it towards it and away from earth.

>>2402046
But what about shooting it directly at the sun? I mean firing a rocket so that it heads into that sun at earths orbital velocity. Wouldn't it be stopped and slowed by the suns interior and surface? If I was anywhere in the solar system and wanted to get to the sun, then yes, having 0 velocity is the only sure fire way to do it, but we already have positions set and just need the item to touch near it, then the suns mass will slow it down.

>>2402065
read harder

>>2402078
Either I'm missing something large or you are a fucking idiot.

The only energy it takes to put something into the sun is the energy it takes to launch it out of Earth's gravity AND have it heading on a collision course with the sun. I'm not sure what the issue is with that?

If something is fired from Earth in a certain direction, it would clear Earth's gravity given enough force, and then continue to travel in said direction. So what if it just was heading straight for the sun? Or at least close enough to it that is passes through the out layer? The mass of the sun would slow it down and change it's direction as it is interacting with more matter. I don't know how to dumb this down anymore, it's seems really simple.

From a stationary point in the solar system, yes you can fall into the sun but you don't HAVE to be stationary to fall into the sun, you can have velocity.

God damn if I typed all that out because of a troll I am ultra mad.

>>2402126
lrn2vectors. Your rocket is travelling at earths orbital velocity perpendicular to the sun even before it is launched. Now if you launch it towards the sun it will not hit the sun. To hit the sun you have to first cancel the perpendicular component, i.e. earths orbital velocity.

>>2402126
The earth is moving with respect to the sun. Anything launched from the earth will be moving with respect to the reference frame of the earth. So in order to "aim at the sun" you have to add a velocity equal to that of the earth, in order to cancel out the velocity with respect to the sun. Then the object will be at rest with respect to the sun and proceed to fall in through gravity.

tl;dr learn orbital mechanics

>>2402167
>>2402173
Cancel 1% of the orbital velocity and you now have a decaying orbit, for all intents and purposes negligible compared to escaping earth.

>>2402176
orbits in space don't decay. only low earth orbits that go through very thin upper atmosphere decay.

>>2402167
OK, yes, I get that, but that what happens when it gets to the sun. What I mean is, it has the force from taking off from Earth, so it is traveling in one direction around the sun, perpendicular. But it also has the force it gained from being shot at the sun, albeit very slowly. The orbit of the rocket around the sun, going X m/s AROUND the sun and 20 m/s TOWARDS the sun, or whatever numbers you want to throw in there, will never, NO MATTER HOW ECCENTRIC, enter the sun? What I'm getting at is the eccentricity. If just has to touch near the sun or be hit by a flare and then it's fucked. Not too mention all the solar radiation it would be receiving before it even "touched" the sun. But anyway, yeah eccentricity would enable it to go into the sun with a velocity greater than zero. I get what your saying and I'm not trying to say you are wrong, I'm just trying to make sure the way I am thinking is correct.

>>2402176
>decay
>no atmosphere

>>2402196
I guess the question is whether it's substantially easier to produce an orbit that intersects the upper layer of the Sun, at least enough to degrade the orbit further.

>>2402195
sun diameter: 1.4 million km
1 AU: 150 million km

Angular momentum conservation, do the math.

Who cares if it hits the sun ? Just shoot it somewhere in space and never hear from it again

>>2401932
We've sent things to the moon; we've sent things to Mars. We also DO have a probe at the Lagrange point in between the Earth and Sun. What the fuck are you talking about son.
http://xkcd.com/681_large/

>>2401932
We could use slingshots. You think we got out of the solar system on solely rocket power?

>>2402287
Uh, dude, the Lagrance point between the Earth and the Sun still has significant orbital velocity.

Do the math yourself. How big of a deltaV would you need to launch from LEO to an orbit that intersects the sun? And don't forget the problem of getting that rocket to LEO in the first place, fuel and all.

>>2402306
We're talking about trying to hit the sun.

>>2402126
What you're missing is that to be on a "collision course" with the sun, an object has to be traveling away from the earth at about 30 km/s away from the earth, in the opposite direction of the earth's orbit around the sun. Escape velocity is about 11 km/s, so this vessel has to leave the earth at about 41 km/s. At that point, it would essentially drop straight down into the sun. Anything less, and it would not intersect the sun, but its trajectory would keep it in orbit around the sun indefinitely. This amount of energy is more than the amount of energy needed to shoot it out of the solar system altogether.

tl;dr -- it would take an obscene amount of energy to shoot something from the earth into the sun, since the earth already has such a high orbital velocity. But we could always just shoot it into its own orbit.

>>2402306
Slingshots are much more useful for escaping the solar system than trying to hit the sun. It's true you can use gravity assist to reduce orbital velocity as well as increasing it, but venus and mercury are so small that they are not very useful for gravity assists. At least not enough that you could cancel out your orbital velocity altogether.

If you were starting out at saturn, and wanted to use jupiter for that purpose, that might be plausible. Jupiter has a huge gravity well.

>>2402258
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>>2402258

We could just shove the nukes into your mother and detonate them there since she is so fat the shock would absorb the radiation and by killing her we would also eliminate world hunger.

>>2402258
That's what the dinosaurs thought when they shot their shit out to space 70 million years ago.

Wouldn't be a better use of our time to shoot up some solar panels near the sun so we can leech of pure solar energy from it like a boss?

I mean, I'm pretty dumb, but I know you can still use nuclear waste as fuel.

Also if we start throwing shit into space it'll come back to bit us in the ass later.
What if our planet gets lighter or if it flys back and does rude things?