[geeks] Global warming, was Mr Bill?

[der Mouse]

>>> [...] high-level radioactive waste [...]
>> For what value of "safe"?
> If all else fails, we could always pitch'em at the Moon.  Be a bit
> expensive though.

I think the Sun would probably be better.  We're a lot more likely to
want to put humans on the Moon than we are on the Sun.  (And if we ever
do want to put humans on/in the Sun, the technology necessary to do it
at all will probably be advanced enough that radioactivity would be at
most a minor nuisaance, especially given how tiny the contribution we
could make would be; the Sun is _big_.)

Getting them out of the Earth/Moon gravity well would be more
energically expensive than just putting them on the Moon, but I would
expect it would be cheap and easy to do the gravity slingshot thing
with the Moon, sapping a miniscule amount of its orbital energy to
boost the spent fuel to terrestrial escape speed.  The need to hit the
Sun might well mean we couldn't take more than one shot a month or so,
but that's not a big deal.

But, honestly, I think it would be better to just stockpile them
against the day when it becomes economic to extract the energy
contained in them.  We're pretty close already.

/~\ The ASCII				der Mouse
\ / Ribbon Campaign
 X  Against HTML		mouse at rodents-montreal.org
/ \ Email!	     7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39  4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B