Nuclear Power: Yay or Nay?

[Ishmael]

Originally Posted by Oberon

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

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.