Sending that much weight into orbit (and beyond, it seems) would be a disaster for the already-****ed atmosphere. Space launches dump huge amounts of gases into the upper atmosphere, fortunately we don't launch that often.

But consider the increas involved in sending up all of our nuclear waste. i say bury the stuff in the most secure way you can. Turn it to glass, pack into drums, then backfill the whiole vault with concrete. 24-hour guards, too, to ward off nutterism.

Until fusion works effeiciently, if it will

I wasn't thinking clearly. Ok. That link I have up above is in gigawatts. Million kilowatt hours. So, that comes out to about 400GW. America requires about 400GW of electrical power production, and consumes 3.8 Petawatt hours (10^15).

Texas pays for itself, even though it is the largest user (37GW) -- 1/4 of that is probably walmart. California would need 30GW plus desalination so they could stop drawing water from the Colorado. Far as I can tell, Los Angeles uses 6.6 million gallons per day, which would take maybe 100MW to generate and another 5MW to pump around the hellhole (tricounty). New York would need 16.5GW for electrical. My state would take almost 6GW.

We have something like 102 total production reactors right now, in the United States. Some of these are operating at 102% capacity because during the turn-arounds they have been able to install more efficient turbines and pumps and run the reactor a bit hotter. However, all these plants are 35 years old with life expectancies of 40-50 years. We have another 35 plants that are in various states decommissioning, and the north east power grid is currently the one strained.

That's an idea Seth, some kind of accelator....hell, it sounds very Jules Verne/HG Wells-ish but, kinda like a giant gun, launching 'bullets' of nuclear waste space-craft into space.

Didn't the US play around with the idea of using nuclear explosions to propell things into orbit back in the 1970s? Project Thunder-something I think, or Project Anvil...I can't remember off hand. Either that or some kind of accelator device...punch it out of Earth, since it'll be unmanned, it doesn't matter about G-forces.

Of course, it'll have to be fairly well secured, just incase the 'gun' misfires and it lands up falling on someone :oops:

Project Orion it was called.

I've posted my environmental objections to shooting waste into space via conventional rocket, let's not get started on a couple of hundred fission weapons...

Nuke power is the answer to global warming by the way. Even with the Waste Disposal problem, it is the cleanest energy that you can possibly imagine. No coal firing CO2 emission producing old gen power plant to pollute our atmosphere. Battelle has nearly perfected the waste disposal method of containing the waste in glass rods, so this won't even be an issue in the future.

Nukes also have tremendous power output, so much so that there is only one dam in existence that can outproduce a nuke plant - Grand Coullee dam. One simple nuke generating plant can outproduce some of the largest power generating structures ever devised.

Its a no brainer - nukes are a must for the future - especially in an era of global warming. After that, we will move to Fusion. After that, maybe some sort of anti-matter reactor.

-S

Here is Battelles patent on glass rod waste disposal:

http://www.freepatentsonline.com/4362659.html

Actually, Prof. Gerard O'Neill and his grad students put together something called a Linear Mass Driver using superconductive magnets to move a steel bucket along a rail back in the 70's. The model they built accelerated the bucket from 0-80 mph in 15 feet. It was part of an idea for building giant photovoltaic satellites in earth orbit and mining the construction materials on the moon. the LMD was workable enough on a large scale to boost the material out of the moon's gravity well to the L5 & L3 libration points between the earth & the moon. O'Neill's team figured that orbital solar power satellites would produce 5 times the electricity as a similar terrestrial array. They planned on beaming the energy to earth as microwave beams, then convert back to electricity using rectifier antennas. So even with microwave losses, the total usable electricity produced would be 3-4 times as much as terrestrial arrays.

Regarding nuclear power, I have no problem with it as long as the families of the management teams and the major stockholders of the plant owners agreed to store and safeguard the wastes on their own property until it was no longer a danger to the general populace. Of course, that would mean condemning their descendants to safeguarding the material for at least 100,000 years, but you can't make an omelet without breaking eggs.

Nuclear power is the way of the future. We have come a long way since the Three Mile Island incident and the unfortunate events of Chernobyl.

Chernobyl was as much a fault in the reactor as it was the people useing it. What I have been taught in school about the incident and what I KNOW know are totally diffrent. The only real issue with nuclear reactors is what to do with the spent nuclear fuel.