What's to be done about nuclear waste?

By Todd Stadler · Wednesday, April 30, 2008 1:42am

In an apparently serious discussion of whether it would be feasible to dispose of nuclear waste by firing it into the sun using a magnetic rail gun, I found the following series of comments to be very humorous for some reason:

Egnor: You ask why it wouldn't work? First of all, you speak of "magnetic rail guns" as if they're mature, well-developed technology. Have you ever seen one? That's because they don't exist, except as tiny prototypes. We haven't got any that shoot stuff into orbit, let alone at the Sun.

Kimble: If we already have tiny prototype railguns, then perhaps we just need enough of these? We could fire millions of tiny canisters.

Vernon: Tiny cannisters would be too small. At the high speed needed to make the cannisters leave the planet, they would burn up in the atmosphere, just like most small meteors do. Only large cannisters can have enough heat-shielding to protect their contents.

Kimble: Unless they don't need to leave the atmosphere — perhaps we could generate a tiny sun. It would orbit the earth at a height of fifty metres (far enough to clear the tops of small buildings).

I realize that I haven't contributed a lick of original content in posting that, but rather have only edited someone else's content by removing the less interesting comments to improve the flow.

Still, the content's from almost a decade ago, and I'd like to think I'm doing a service by bringing back some of the Web's retro content. Because we all know how hopping this blog is, and how very many of my minions I'm capable of sending out by sheer force of my recommendation.

And so I ask: why aren't we building tiny suns to deal with our nuclear waste problem?