Does anyone know how large these would be compared to a civilian energy reactor? When these come up, there’s always a debate about the risk of a catastrophic failure spewing radioactive material in unpredictable ways. But I’ve never been clear on what the scope of the disaster would be. Is it way more radioactive material or far less (and even that spread more thinly)? How uninhabitable is how much area for how long from a nuclear disaster on the way to space?

A worse case disaster, I mean. It sounds like for a Mars trip, we wouldn’t be using these engines until far enough in space. But let’s say this tech becomes routine. Maybe the Congressman for wherever these engines get made has a meeting with the contractor’s lobbyist and decides NASA needs to buy more engines. And then 💥kaboom💥.

Worth noting that firefly have contracts with Northrop Grumman and Astra for supplying engines, plus a CLPS contract, so aren't entirely dependent on their launches for revenue

If it fails, how big of an explosion are we talkin here?

Why don’t people make investments into vertical rail? Because it’s stupid and it wouldn’t work. How would it be supported? How would it be powered efficiently, and how would many of these affect normal air travel? There are so many reasons why they’re a terrible idea and people much smarter than either of us have considered and rejected it

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There probably isn’t as much nuclear waste as you think. Here’s what Google says: The U.S. generates about 2,000 metric tons of spent fuel each year. This number may sound like a lot, but the volume of the spent fuel assemblies is actually quite small considering the amount of energy they produce. The amount is roughly equivalent to less than half the volume of an Olympic-sized swimming pool.

If your phone/device is compatible with Galileo, the signal received will automatically be used for all location-based applications, such as Google Maps or Uber. To find out if your phone is compatible with Galileo, you can visit our website https://www.usegalileo.eu/EN/. Galileo has been in operation since 2016 and is a global navigation satellite system, meaning that it covers all countries in the world.

If you would like to see which satellites of the constellation your phone is using, we recommend that you download the GPSTest app (available only for Android).

As we develop and discover new materials that are lighter and stronger a space elevator may be an option.

You can then build mammoth ships in space as the cost per Kg to get materials into space would drop from thousands of dollars to hundreds, and build ships like the Borg.

Not really any better ways given our current understanding of the universe, and chances are that any new way is also going to be a bomb.

Bombs and rockets work on the same principle; there's a lot of mechanical force created very quickly. In a bomb, it's either exploding all around, or there's something guiding it to where the bad people are. In a rocket, the 'splody bits point out the back to throw the rocket forward.

They stopped doing that because of gulf war syndrome

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That's the thing about gravity, it keeps pulling you back!

Hello u/William0fBaskerville, your submission "Hey, can someone explain to me why we are not stending nuclear waste into space having a reliable rocket that can carry a decent amounts of cargo? I'm thinking about Falcon Heavy. One start a year would mean that US doesn't need to store anymore waste underground." has been removed from r/space because:

• Such questions should be asked in the "All space questions" thread stickied at the top of the sub.

Please read the rules in the sidebar and check r/space for duplicate submissions before posting. If you have any questions about this removal please message the r/space moderators. Thank you.

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Most of my life I have thought this myself. I did not know that it was extremely heavy. The dirty bomb part I knew in my late 20's. That part became even more obvious after 9/11 and went down a rabbit hole of the USSR nucking on of their own villages/towns to have a war game. I mean seriously, if we sent all of our nuclear waste to the sun it would add a whole .000000135 seconds to the life of the sun. Now I just learned, reading the responses to this query, about delta V, whatever the hell that is, is an issue.

1. Do you know how ****ing expensive it is to launch anything into space? Anywhere from $10,000 to $100,000 per kilogram.
2. It's also inherently risky. Failure rates for space-launch rockets is a few %. By those numbers, within a few decades, you'd have a rocket laden with nuclear waste explode in mid-air. No bueno.
3. It's unnecessary. Storing nuclear waste once it has cooled down is not all that problematic.
4. The whole point of nuclear power is to generate power, ie, as an alternative to burning fossil fuel. Taking spent nuclear fuel and burning huge amounts of fuel launching it into space is defeating the point.

Cuz there isn't much of it and it's incredibly cheaper and easier and safer to just bury it in the ground on site.

Source.

" Little waste is generated. Nuclear fuel is very energy dense, so very little of it is required to produce immense amounts of electricity – especially when compared to other energy sources. As a result, a correspondingly small amount of waste is produced. On average, the waste from a reactor supplying a person’s electricity needs for a year would be about the size of a brick. Only 5 grams of this is high-level waste – about the same weight as a sheet of paper. "

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Might be seen as aggression by other countries and hard to ignore. It will basically be an ICBM armed with nucleaer Waste.

Yeah my understanding is that by the time it's removed from the plant's holding storage it is pretty well decayed. Also spent nuclear fuel and a nuclear bomb ARE NOT the same thing.

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This is 100% the answer. In addition, the waste issue (for commercial plants) is manageable from an engineering perspective, the politics are the problem.

"Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play??"

Come in to post exactly this.

Expensive, dangerous, impractical, and unnecessary. But otherwise, great idea.