I've been spending a few days up in the Reno area, and since the President's decision to go ahead with the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository, it seems to have moved up in the local political agenda. Senator Reid is accusing Bush of "lying" and breaking his campaign promise, but of course, this is just demagoguery--Bush promised nothing except to make a decision based on "sound science." Since most politicians wouldn't know sound science if it came up and yelled in their ears, I'm not inclined to grant the Senator much credibility here--it's really a judgment call. Mr. Bush may be mistaken, but he can't be objectively accused of promise-breaking.

The Dems here are trying to leverage it as a campaign issue against Republicans, but the consensus seems to be that this won't have much traction, because the local Republicans are opposed to the decision as well. It doesn't seem to be a partisan issue here--it's viewed more as Nevada against the rest of the country. It's just the latest manifestation of the Sagebrush Rebellion, with which I am normally sympathetic.

Unfortunately, nuclear energy and nuclear waste are not issues amenable to decisions based on sound science--people tend to get too emotional about things that they don't understand.

There aren't any simple solutions to this policy problem. Nuclear energy is potentially the most environmentally benign source available in the near term (though the federal policy on it has been idiotic since the inception of the industry, making it much more hazardous and expensive than it need be, by mandating intrinsically bad plant designs).

But waste disposal is probably the most pressing problem, and it's one that's independent of plant design. And even if we were to renounce nuclear power today (with the attendant economic and environmental damage as we either destroy local economies from energy shortages, or increase production from much dirtier coal plants which produce the evil CO2, and actually put out more radiation than properly-operating nukes), we still have tens of thousands of tons of waste sitting in unsafe conditions at existing plants.

Every criticism of Yucca Mountain applies in spades to the available alternative--continuing to accumulate it at the plants in a wide range of conditions, few of them good. If Nevada wants to fight this decision, they'll have to do more than simply naysay it and declare that, after over two decades and billions of dollars, it needs more study. They have to offer a viable alternative.

And any alternative should consider the following: one generation's waste is another's commodity. Before the invention of the internal combustion engine, gasoline was a waste byproduct of cracking oil for other purposes. Thus, one of the features of the Yucca Mountain solution is that the waste will be available to us in the future when we may find it useful, and any alternative should ideally have that feature as well.

But on the bright side, another feature (well, actually, it's a bug) of the Yucca Mountain plan is that it will cost billions of dollars and take several years to implement. This effectively lowers the evaluation bar for competing concepts--they don't have to be either cheap or fast, as long as they're better.

Those of you who read my ravings regularly probably know where I'm going with this. Many eons ago, when I was an undergraduate, I took a course in aerospace systems design. The class project was to come up with a way to dispose of nuclear waste--in space. While it was (of course) a brilliant study, it has also been more recently analyzed by people who both knew what they were doing and got paid for it. It turns out to be (at least technically--politics are another matter) a non-ridiculous idea.

These are the basic options: dropping into ol' Sol, which is really really expensive, and puts it totally out of the reach of our smarter descendents; lofting it out of Sol's system completely, which is cheaper than putting it in the Sun, but still expensive, and practically if not theoretically out of reach of future recyclers; a long-term orbit, which is accessible, but long term can't be guaranteed to be long-enough term; and finally, on some planetary surface, most likely the Moon because it's the most convenient.

Lunar storage sounds like a winner to me. There's no ecology to mess up there, the existing natural radiation environment will put that particular grade of nuclear waste to shame when it comes to particle dispensing, and we can retrieve it any time we want, while making it hard (at least right now) for terrorists to get their hands on it.

So, great storage location. Now, how do we get it there? Aye, there's the rub.

The two problems, of course, are cost and safety. It turns out that both are tractable, as long as one doesn't use Shuttle, or any existing launcher as a paradigm for the achievable. The key to both reducing cost and increasing reliability is high flight rate of reusable systems--what I call space transports.

Fortunately, like space tourism, hazardous waste disposal may be a large enough market to allow such a system to be developed. A thousand tons is a thousand flights of a vehicle with a one-ton payload. And there are many thousands of tons of nuclear waste in storage. And the tonnage will only increase if it's further processed for safe handling and storage (such as vitrification, in which it is encased in glass).

Preliminary estimates indicate that it can in fact be done economically in the context of the current nuclear industry operating costs; the major issue is safety. This issue has been addressed as well, and it's something that Nevada (a state that also offers high potential as a home for rocket racing and the space tourism industry) should take seriously as a possible alternative to terrestrial storage.

If anyone in Carson City is interested, I'm available for consulting...

I actually agree with you on this one (stop the presses!), but I think you mention the potentially insurmountable problem in your 3rd 'graf.
"Unfortunately, nuclear energy and nuclear waste are not issues amenable to decisions based on sound science--people tend to get too emotional about things that they don't understand. "
People will, to put it mildly, freak out at the notion of launching nuclear waste into space. What if it explodes in mid-launch (I am sure at this point we will be subjected to thousands upon thousands of replays of Challenger), showering South Florida (or central CA coast) with radioactive waste. We could launch from somewhere else, but then the question is just more removed from our thoughts? I expect there is a trajectory that avoids or mitigates the chance of a "shower of radioactive waste", but will anyone be able to sell it to a fearful and scientifically illiterate populace? Color me skeptical.

That's why I said that it's technically, but not necessarily politically feasible. Of course, no other solution seems to be either, other than continuing to do nothing.

A possible interim measure/demonstration project would consist of moving the 33 Soviet-era nuclear reactors in low Earth orbit to the lunar surface. This would test all components of a lunar nuclear-waste disposal system except for the Earth launch itself (and would partially test even that).

These satellites, called RORSATs, are loaded with 31 kg of weapons-grade uranium apiece and will someday become tempting targets for theft. The lunar surface is a far safer locale, as diverting the nuclear material would then require at least 2.4 km/sec of delta-V, vs only tens of meters per second to deorbit the satellites from LEO.

See

http://www.globenet.free-online.co.uk/ianus/npsm2.htm#2_2_1

A possible interim measure/demonstration project would consist of moving the 33 Soviet-era nuclear reactors in low Earth orbit to the lunar surface. This would test all components of a lunar nuclear-waste disposal system except for the Earth launch itself (and would partially test even that).

These satellites, called RORSATs, are loaded with 31 kg of weapons-grade uranium apiece and will someday become tempting targets for theft. The lunar surface is a far safer locale, as diverting the nuclear material would then require at least 2.4 km/sec of delta-V, vs only tens of meters per second to deorbit the satellites from LEO.

See

http://www.globenet.free-online.co.uk/ianus/npsm2.htm#2_2_1

I recall thinking this in high school. Why not wait for fusion reacters and burn the waste?

Why not push a bit more money into ADS or ATW systems. (Accelerator driven systems / Accellerator Transmutation of Waste)

There is a huge amount of energy left in the waste (especially in the US where there is no reprocessing I think)

If you can get a workable system going you can generate power from the waste. So for instance on the one hand, you could be paid billions of dollars by the govt to make the "waste" go away (in terms of reduced radioactivity) and on the other you could sell the electricity for profit.

This seems like a commercial winner *if* the development costs can be amortised

Wow! I didn't know there were nukes in orbit as we speak. Russian made, you say? Well, then I guess we don't have to worry about it, because all Soviet engineering was built to last, right? er....well, maybe we should start thinking more seriously about it, just in case anything should happen, eh??

Not all of them are still in orbit. They dropped a couple of them, at least one on western Canada back in 1978...

Correct. Cosmos 954 landed in northern Canada; Cosmos 1402 landed in the Indian Ocean. See http://www.space.com/news/spacehistory/dangerous_reentries_000602.html; also see http://apollo.cnuce.cnr.it/~rossi/publications/iaf97/node2.html for another side effect.

I comment further at http://avoyagetoarcturus.blogspot.com/2002_02_01_avoyagetoarcturus_archive.html#10201503. Enjoy!

Since we are talking about no live cargo, and something that could be automated, what about some sort of giant electromagnetic accelerator or rail gun. I seem to recall that man killing accellerations were theoretically possible. Maybe Jay feels like doing the ciphering. How long would it have to be to get to orbital velocity? I don't know what the state of the art for superconduting magnets is, so this may be as fanciful as a skyhook.

A mass-driver (rail-gun shooting pellets or scoops of material for propulsion) would be more trouble than it's worth, but solar-electric propulsion, in which solar panels provide the electricity for an ion engine, could address safety concerns associated with chemical rockets (ie that at least 1% of them blow up). The tradeoff is speed, as thrust from ion rockets is quite low. Total delta-vee to enter lunar transfer orbit from low Earth orbit is about 3.3 km/sec; compare DS-1 (http://nmp.jpl.nasa.gov/ds1/tech/ionpropfaq.html), which had 4.5 km/sec available, sufficient -- had it been its purpose to do so, which it was not -- to take that spacecraft from low Earth orbit to low lunar orbit. The specific impulse of the (now proven) technology used by DS-1 was around 2,500 sec, compared to ~450 sec for the best chemical rockets (plug the numbers given at http://nmp.jpl.nasa.gov/ds1/tech/spacecraft.html into an appropriate version of the equation at http://www.asi.org/adb/06/07/04/11/rocket-eqn-primer.html to figure this).

The disadvantage of ion rockets is that they can't launch you from Earth! Also, once in low lunar orbit, one must land within a few weeks, as lunar "mascons" cause surprisingly quick orbital decay, and ion rockets can't give you a soft landing on the Moon either.

Nonetheless, use of solar-electric propulsion for the transfer from low Earth orbit to low lunar orbit is probably the best option. And it helps get people used to the idea of lunar disposal of nuclear waste.

Jay
http://avoyagetoarcturus.blogspot.com/

Well, it's certainly one payload that won't mind the radiation dose as it travels slowly through the Van Allen belts...