If you want to go down the government rabbit hole think about thorium reactors, which would be safer and cheaper than uranium/plutonium and with much less waste. We could have had these long ago, but thorium reactors can't produce weapons-grade plutonium, which is why the research money didn't go that route.

Well yeah, it would permanently remove the waste from the Earth and reduce it to indisdinguishable subatomic particles and plasma inside the sun. Adding it a little at a time to a stream of rocket exhaust with the velocity to easily reach the sun is highly plausible.

Could this damage or affect the sun somehow? No, every week the sun spits out about 1 to 20 coronal mass ejections of roughly a billion tons each. All the nuclear waste in the world amounts to about 250,000 tons, and the rocket would send maybe 100 pounds at a time toward the sun. Very tiny farts compared to a continuous series of very large hurricanes.

This is the story of a 1987 incident in Brazil, in which a small canister of Cesium^137 that had been left in an abandoned cancer treatment facility was found by randos who sold it to a junk dealer, who noticed it glowing blue at night and opened it. A handful of cesium chloride crystals and dust ended up being distributed to people around the community, who used it to bling their bodies and possessions. When people immediately got sick the news reached national authorities, who eventually tested over 100,000 people for exposure. Almost 250 people were highly contaminated, 4 died and 20 developed serious injuries, losing fingers and other body parts. A city block of buildings was demolished and the debris was sealed up along with cars, clothing, family possessions, etc. It was the worst radiological disaster in Brazil's history.

It's a good story about the dangers of badly managing radioactive materials, and what can happen when concentrated nuclides used in thousands of hospitals around the world are opened and handled by people who don't know what they're doing. I'm guessing somebody thought this was relevant to my statement that a total rocket failure would release 2% of the contaminants from a single typical 1950s atom bomb test (more than 2000 of which were performed worldwide).

Thanks, this is yet another design I hadn't heard of. Here's a PDF describing it in detail. The "dusty plasma" engine does have the drawback of being unable to land due to spewing highly radioactive rocket exhaust. So for missions that involve landing it would have to carry a conventional lander with it, or an unmanned one could be sent more slowly to rendezvous near the destination.

Nuclear waste depositories in America

When WIPP says "disposal" they mean "storage".

Yeah the thing is that it's not a cube the size of a football field, it's in thousands of containers in numerous storage locations all over, and in every place the containers have to be checked and periodically replaced or repaired. I know some people overplay the danger but it's not a trivial problem to underplay either.

The casing around the thing is a neutron-absorbant boron material, the same as used in conventional reactors. Eventually the boron becomes radioactive and has to be changed, and this is the waste the author talked about ejecting toward the sun.

I forget, I think coolant is swirled around the bulb.

Wow that sounds like the magic bullet the nuclear industry has been waiting for. I never even heard of "Chirped Pulse Amplification" before.

Maybe 20 years ago I read about a theoretical engine called a Nuclear Lightbulb. It contains basically a large quartz bulb with a cloud of gaseous uranium hexafluoride inside, compressed by air jets blowing in to make it dense enough to fission and not let it touch the bulb. The glowing ball of fissioning plasma emits intense UV, which the quartz is 100% transparent to.

Around the outside of the quartz bulb flows a stream of hydrogen gas doped with some other material (I forget what) which highly absorbs the UV, heating the hydrogen, which expands and goes out through a rocket nozzle to produce thrust.

Power - The specific impulse of this engine would be on the order of 30,000 seconds - something like 60 or 80x that of the space shuttle main engine. The guy who wrote the article gave a design weighing 3000 tons (the weight of a Saturn V), but in the nuclear rocket 1/3 of that would be cargo. A thousand tons of cargo per launch.

Safety - The plasma cloud in the bulb is self-containing, because if it gets too hot it expands, making it no longer dense enough to be critical, so it stops fissioning. The whole thing is in a chamber lined with boron or something (whatever they use in nuclear reactors to absorb neutrons). So there's no emission of radiation or radioactive material, just very hot gas. Even if the entire rocket blew up in the atmosphere it would release 2% of the radioactive material of a typical 1950s atom bomb test.

With so much cargo capacity this rocket could take a fully equipped base to Mars in one shot, along with dozens of inhabitants and provisions, in about three months. It could have a double hull containing a foot-thick layer of water, which would shield the passengers from 95% of the radiation that would hit the ship during the trip. The outer few inches would freeze in space, providing passive self-healing in case of micrometeorites, because punctures would instantly leak water and freeze.

The author mentioned another cool feature. When a rocket is launched it always has a parabolic trajectory and then does an engine burn to circularize the orbit. This circularization burn is aimed toward space, so if it were timed right it could be used to eject a small amount of nuclear waste aimed at the sun. The rocket's exhaust velocity would be sufficient to send material out of orbit on a slow trip ending at the sun. What a great way to gradually get rid of nuclear waste.

I can no longer find the original articles I read, but here's one from 2020

I get it. Still the uniform in a modern setting reminds me of Val Kilmer's movie Top Secret.

Like little pants, that protect you from the big pants, and vice versa!

Uniform is surprisingly WWII-ish even after 40 years.

Lassie: [whimpering]
Store Manager: What's wrong, girl?

You mean for new patients or my daughter? She had the worst consequences they'd ever seen at Seattle Children's Hospital, so her case was an outlier. She was actually lucky to survive - her chances were about 50/50 at the time, but she got into a study for an experimental treatment using a small dosage of a breast cancer drug they thought would make the radiation treatments more effective. This turned out so well 17 ojut of the 18 kids in the study survived. Big improvement over 50/50. But as far as her quality of life now, she's getting the benefit of modern science, checking in with endocrinologists and taking various meds. But the damage has already been done. Fuck cancer.

She was cured, but frankly it's not a happy story.

At age 10 she was diagnosed with a medulloblastoma after an optometrist noticed an enlarged optic nerve and recommended an MRI. Two weeks later she was in surgery, followed by 2 months radiation and 6 months chemo.

In a nutshell, the combination of surgery, radiation, chemo, and the tumor itself took a huge toll on her. She was an unbelievably great student, ahead at least 2 years in everything, a super-optimistic problem solver, with tons of friends. She ended up with balance problems, which eliminated ballet and other kinds of dance. Double vision and nystagmus made reading (which she LOVED) too difficult to be enjoyable anymore. She lost her exceptional math ability - which she really tried to regain but it just wouldn't come back.

Except for math her higher functions stayed intact - keen reasoning skills, a huge vocabulary and other things - but because of moving and speaking more slowly than normal, I think people underestimate her mind. She went through middle school and high school as the gimpy kid who couldn't keep up, so almost none of the kids talked to her - like ever - which was very depressing after being pretty universally liked at school. As an adult she has tried to take a few community college classes, but with low stamina and other problems she could only take one class at a time, and even then could barely pass, so she finally abandoned education and is physically not able to sustain a job. At age 29 she is on SSI and spends most of her time in a recliner watching TV and playing on her computer.

She has a few friends and does socialize a little, although her immune system is weak so she has been extra careful to stay away from people most of the time during this Covid crap.

tl;dr: she was a standout kid in every way, with unlimited potential, and basically the cancer and/or the treatments pretty well fucked her over.

Hope this didn't ruin your day.

Glioblastoma is the really nasty one. I'm glad they're finally making some progress with it. My daughter was cured of medulloblastoma many years ago, but glioblastoma was incurable at the time. It's still the worst son of a bitch among kid brain tumors.

Indiana Jones has joined the chat.

Your dad was livin' the life!

I haz a buckit

Sounds like the kind of ragtag band of misfits and renegades that can finally get the job done.