Opening the Next Frontier
by Anthony Tate

Part 13: But doesn't this thing make nuclear waste?


Ahhh... this is possibly the best part of the whole system. Yes, it does make nuclear waste, but unlike all Earth-based nuclear power, the disposal of this nuclear waste is built into the system. Indeed, with just a little work, this sort of a nuclear booster could get rid of more waste than it makes.

How does it do this? It shoots it into the Sun!

I can see you all out there rolling your eyes. For how many years have we been wishfully saying, 'why don't we just load it on a rocket and shoot it into the Sun.' Well guess what, when you build a nuclear powered rocket, it is positively easy to use that same rocket to do exactly that.

Here's how: Almost every rocket, as it gets into orbit, shuts off its motors for about 45 minutes, then fires them again one last time, halfway around the Earth. The reason for this is a little complicated, but can be summed up simply. Since the Earth is round, your orbit around the Earth had better be round too. And it's a lot easier to make round orbits if you do that small 'circularization' burn halfway through your first orbit. We will use this standard feature of rocket travel to get rid of our nuclear waste.

In a traditional chemical rocket, the circularization burn is used to add a tiny bit more speed to the spaceship, making the orbit nicely round. In this nuclear system, we have so much power to burn that we deliberately 'overshoot' on the way up, so the circularization burn is a lot larger than normal.

Now, if you will remember, up above I mentioned that the exhaust of this nuclear spaceship shoots out at a whopping fast 30 kilometers per second. If you add this 30 kilometers per second to the 8.5 kilometers per second the whole rocket is moving while in orbit, and you point your rocket in just the right direction, you can literally shoot the exhaust right away from the planet so fast that it never comes back. You can then aim it to drop into the Sun without too much trouble.

Now, the radioactive spent fuel of this rocket is gaseous, remember? So, if we only use one of the seven big rocket engines to perform the circularization burn, it is a trivial chore to pump the gaseous waste from the other six rocket engines into the rocket chamber, heat it super hot, and shoot it into space forever.

If we take a few hundred pounds of the worst waste from the ground up with us on each trip, stored in the fuel vaults for safety, of course, this system can easily get rid of more waste than it generates.

What's not to love?

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Contents:

1: The Frontier Spirit

2: What went wrong.

3: Where do we go next?

4: So, why aren't we going?

5: Dealing with the Devil

6: A brief technical interlude

7: So how good is Nuclear, anyway?

8: Heat, temperature, and cooling.

9: But isn't this dangerous?

10: Prometheus would be proud of us.

11: Ok, that all sounds nice, but this is just fantasy, right?

12: But isn't this just too big?

13: But doesn't this thing make nuclear waste?

14: Conclusions