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ArceusTheLegendary50 t1_j2fome5 wrote

Reply to comment by HeebieMcJeeberson in What if we kept pursuing nuclear spacecraft propulsion? by rosTopicEchoChamber

>What a great way to gradually get rid of nuclear waste.

Kurzgesagt made a video on this and explains precisely why this is a terrible idea. The basic gist of it is that "what goes around comes around" is very literally the problem: aiming at the sun isn't actually very easy and there's still a good chance it'll go back to Earth.

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HeebieMcJeeberson t1_j2ftpvm wrote

The Kurzgesagt video is well produced but surprisingly misleading. The drawbacks it brings up are all based on launching all of our nuclear waste into space, using present-day rockets with today's reliability levels, dedicated entirely to this one purpose, and each carrying the largest possible payload of waste. Most puzzlingly, it dismisses hitting the sun as difficult - as if it's any harder than hitting the moon, Mars, an asteroid, or any other space object we've been hitting consistently for decades. "What goes around comes around" is literally a terrible oversimplification that ignores reality.

The impracticalities the video discusses simply aren't relevant to adding a modest amount of waste to rocket exhaust as I described. But yes I agree that the strawman concept of launching nuclear waste into space on the scale described in the video would be a terrible idea.

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