DeeKnow’s Grotto

Do you ever have 'brain-waves' during fits of mental activity that seem so overwhelmingly clever you start patting yourself on the back before you've even finished considering the practicalities?

Me neither, but yesterday I actually thought I might be onto something big.

I'd been reading a Gwyn Dyer column syndicated by the Waikato Times for their Saturday edition in which he talked about nuclear energy and the reality that it is the only practical immediate solution to the looming energy crisis.

Despite what the greenies would have you beleive wind-farms, solar and tidal power will never bear the brunt of our insatiable energy demands. Hydro oppourtunites have been exhausted, CO2 emmisions mean burning coal wont gain you any friends in Kyoto and natural gas is a whole other kettle of emmisions nightmares.

So we end up back at nuclear energy, which was Dwyer's thrust. The major problem with it of course is disposal of the ugly waste, and my brain-wave after reading the article was why not load the stuff into containers, shove them on the next shuttle launch and toss them off-board in the direction of the Sun letting its amazing gravitational pull do the rest.

If like me you're not a physicist, or rocket-scientist, you're probably right now having the exact same reaction I was during my epiphany. It turns out that its certainly not an original idea and about as practical as tits on a bull.

NASA did actually consider it in the 80's, they even designed enclosures that would be used that were strong enough to survive a launch disaster or accidental fiery re-entry and surface collision witout rupturing, but it turns out the problems are manyfold.

The most obvious problem is that there are already 10's of thousands of tons of waste sitting around in caves and rusting 40gal drums and thousands more produced each year, so we'd have to process the waste to seperate the REAL nasties from the regular nasties and launch only them, otherwise there's just way too much of it.

The next problem is actually getting the shit out of Earth's rotational orbit. Turns out its not as simple as pushing it in the direction of the Sun and letting gravity do the rest, it would actually take a huge amount of energy to do so, and take far less energy to put it in high-Earth orbit (too close for comfort), launch it at the Moon, or to bump the waste into a stable Solar orbit somewhere between us and Venus (NASA's favoured space disposal option)

The next easiest option is actually to push it on a course which will see it drift out of the solar system and into the dark depths of our galaxy. At first thought this sounds very un-neighbourly but nearby star systems need not worry as by the time the originally deadly parcel reaches the nearest sun it will have long since been through so many half-lives that it will be more or less a ordinary lump of well travelled but mostly harmless lead.

So here ends the astro-physics lesson and my rapidly deflating fantasy about Knight-hood and eternal celebrity status. Have a read of these palatable discussions if this topic interests you. In the mean time, its back to the drawing board for me I guess.

9:45:59 PM