Marriage of ideas - nuclear waste and space elevators
New Scientist, March 4. An article about nuclear waste disposal. It gives a pretty detailed description of the new site being developed in Sweden. Still under construction, it has become one of the town's top tourist attractions. School kids take field trips there. It sounds pretty cool. And people in Sweden are not saying, "Not In My BackYard." Which is nice. Owning up to their disposal responsibilities, unlike some other countries that just keep procrastinating.
A sidebar to this article starts with, "Gone are the days when people entertained the idea of blasting nuclear waste into space. The consequences of a launch failure don't even bear thinking about." Which does make a lot of sense. Still, "space" does seem to me like it might be a much safer place for the stuff. And I'm wondering, has anyone considered using a space elevator for this? This is essentially a REEEAAAALLLYYY long structure of some sort that is traversed by a vehicle of some sort, like an elevator car on its cable. One of these structures, originally portrayed in science fiction, is already being developed in Arizona, due to the wondrous discovery and development of carbon nanotubes.
Assuming there's some sort of safety parachute concept, using a space elevator should be no less safe than trucking these fuel rods across the country to Yucca Mountain. Once in space, a very low-energy, low speed thruster-type system can drive these fuel rods off somewhere, where they are safely away from us. Maybe even the moon. In any case, it'd probably be pretty safe there from terrorists, and unable to enter the water supply or get ruptured during an earthquake.
Anyone that knows someone in NASA or the US (or any other country's) Department of Energy, feel free to pass this idea along. Or maybe that private company in Arizona would like to get some government funds for further research and development.
8:47:35 PM 
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