here in the courts exact Labs we test very important ideas to see what massive fail thanks
thank you um we'll probably just keep that bit in anyway somehow happens when you blow things
up or play with black holes many of you suggested that we look into an idea that sounds reasonable
shooting nuclear waste into space it's one of those Concepts that seems like an easy we just
messed this up this will be on YouTube now so as we were just saying with a very Australian
accent this is not a good idea a lot of us Aussies think you know not Aussies just people in general
Why Don't We Just Launch it into the Sun or just out into space and just forget about it
where you're gonna find out it's not it's not that easy there's some fundamental problems
effects for one of the main problems with the nuclear energy but it turns out this
idea is not just bad but horribly bad and it gets worse the longer you think about it why is that
let's let's just launch it into space mate straight into the sun just be done with it and
that's that what is nuclear waste nuclear waste is a fuzzy term and comes in categories which vary
from country to country but in general there are three broad levels 90 is low level nuclear waste
tools gloves or trash used at a nuclear facility that could be weakly contaminated with some
short-lived radioactivity this stuff's pretty safe stuff is generally safe for normal disposal seven
percent is intermediate level nuclear waste mostly materials that have been in close proximity to a
reactor core long enough to become dangerously radioactive D is in the house welcome active
with proper handling it's either safely buried or melted down and mixed into glass or concrete and
stored deep underground this was the intermediate yes so 97 of nuclear waste is similar to toxic
byproducts from other Industries not great not terrible we can handle it it's not that bad the
remaining three percent is where our problems begin yes high-level nuclear waste is very
concentrated spent fuel taken out of a reactor core formally yeah as well as the rods themselves
uranium it's now made of various dangerous and often highly radioactive elements as a bonus
it's also incredibly hot and not easy to handle at all I love the animations these guys do they
just entertain me so much this is what we want to shoot into space All In All Around 400 we're
going to explain how bat animation is somewhat not accurate as to why this is a big problem but
I you know I get it they're just trying to make it fun 40 active nuclear reaction another interesting
thing is like um you know how he said uh he's talking about the nuclear waste when it's spent
well it's pretty interesting that we only uh the some of the stuff you know has still we could keep
using it but we have all these treaties and rules about how much you can spend some of this material
and it's amazing like we only spend in some cases like five percent of what's really bad so this is
like 95 we could but you know people are just scared of this stuff I think these things will
slowly change when people realize nuclear fission and nuclear actors are much safer than we realize
but anyway we can talk about this in a minute create about 11 000 tons of high-level nuclear
waste each year since 1954 we've accumulated 400 000 tons of dangerous radioactive waste most
countries are dealing with it by not dealing with it and kicking the can towards the future great so
let's launch it into space according to scientists space is big and nobody lives there so it seems
perfect for eating away this mess there are a few tiny tiny problems though problem one faint cheap
there's so many problems and I want to address all of them I want to see if he brings him up first
um so even though space flight is getting more affordable it's still extremely expensive just
to get something into low earth orbit costs on average about four thousand dollars per kilogram
putting that into perspective it costs about one thousand six hundred dollars
to mine separate and fabricate one kilogram of nuclear fuel so launching waste into space has
suddenly made nuclear fuel for reactors way more expensive and greatly increased the cost of the
electricity they produce to launch one reason kind of missing a fundamental issue here so
let's see if he addresses a worth of nuclear waste would cost at least 100 million dollars per year
to deal with all the 440 operational nuclear power plants high-level nuclear waste would cost some 44
billion dollars per year for space launch before packaging transport and security costs are added
okay let's pretend we don't care currently we couldn't shoot all the nuclear waste into
space even if we wanted to there just aren't enough Rockets in 2021 we saw a record 135
launches into space if we repurposed each okay so I'm not sure he's going to mention it just
from skipping it looking at these um so there is the other problem where that you know this stuff
you know one of the lighter elements this stuff can turn into after you use it is uh you know that
that stuff called lead right it's not exactly light so it's not exactly you probably know
that you know when you shoot things into try to at least into orbit it's not easy clearly
um you know you can't it's probably harder to launch heavier things right so just think
about that you know you're just going to add all this lead to a rocket ship
that's not going to be easy that's going to be very very hard
um and it's going to cost a lot of money so but there's so many other issues we're going to get
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Shores algorithm on a decently sized quantum computer and that's coming so those rockets
and filled them all with nuclear waste the total amount that could be lifted into a low earth orbit
which is the closest orbit above the atmosphere is nearly 800 tons we'd need at least 14 times more
Rockets to handle just today's nuclear waste let alone get rid of the hundreds of thousands of tons
in temporary storage so he's kind of starting at issues that are kind of non-issues when you
compare them to the actual big issues which make this just sort of not even worth thinking about it
in this way at least but we would need to create entire new Space Industries to keep up with the
demand for giant toxic space trash trucks and it gets worse much worse problem two space is hard
we only made the calculation for low earth orbit where we send most of our rockets and satellites
littering the space around so yeah you can start to see the Earth with thousands of casts have
spent nuclear fuel would be a nightmare for space junk management and satellite collision avoidance
we're still at this altitude this there are treaties against this sort of thing atmosphere
causing a tiny bit of drag so we might have nuclear waste raining down from space within just
a few years experts would call this a huge problem uh clearly we have to launch our waste further
if we wanted to send it to perhaps the moon we either need way more Rockets or we need to build
much bigger ones making it even more expensive a single Saturn V the rocket used by the Apollo
program which cost around 1.5 billion adjusted for inflation per launch could get about 43.5 tonnes
from the Earth to the Moon so we'd need about 260 Saturn V rocket launches every year and of course
using the moon as target practice for nuclear waste tipped Rockets kind of makes a huge mess
so maybe don't aim for anything space is empty do we really need a Target
shooting waste in any random direction is you guessed it also a bad idea orbits are
Loops which means okay so before we get here let's let me weigh in a little bit then we'll
continue and I'll keep weighing in after watching a little bits but um so yeah as he
pointed out here you know if you were to shoot at a planet obviously not good for the planet
if we ever want to set up a colony there you could bury these things on planets I think that will be
a good option in the in the distant future not too distant but basically launching things into space
takes you know I've already told you just to get the orbit with lots of lead on your rocket ship is
going to be tough now trying to launch it into a you know somewhere and you know actually out
there is going to be really hard you're going to need as you just showed all those Saturn
V's if you were to try and do all of the stuff we're producing but um forget about that right
generally when you launch things into space into an orbit they have a nasty habit of coming back
there's a famous story of uh an astronomer discovering this asteroid uh that was kind
of heading toward Earth back in like 2000 early 2000s I think it was and uh anyway they figured
out eventually that this was actually a a booster from Apollo um 14 or 12. it was one of them
and it was coming back after 30 years it would just launched out there when it went
on a nice little journey around the Sun it was coming back for us and then so we we
pushed it out again unfortunately this thing is gonna eventually come back again because
this is what happens with orbits in about I think it's about 240 years it's going to be
another problem for us and it's going to probably crash into Earth it won't be too bad don't worry
um mostly ocean right so that's going to be that's going to happen so that's a little story as to you
know shooting stuff into space not a good idea shooting stuff into the sun might sound like a
good idea but you know to do that would require a lot of energy and it's it's way harder than it
sounds uh you can't just simply do that because they have a tendency to come back to where they
started put enough in the sky in random directions and you'll get one back eventually so we'd want to
look what we can do I guess is we'll put these um I don't think it's the video I think it's a
sound so I'll just leave the uh comments up and we'll turn the sound off pretty sure it's the song
not that we would be completely safe then Earth might run into these interplanetary caskets as
I just demonstrated sometime in the far future experiencing a much uh what experience a pretty
meteor shower pretty bit deadly but how about we shoot it into the sun ironically the sun is pretty
hard to hit yes as I just told you all the sun has very strong gravity everything just keep in
mind guys if it goes down again it comes back in like a minute I think we lost a bunch of people
but that's okay moving with respect to the Sun including the rockets that we launch meaning a
rocket would have to cancel out all the orbital motion it has around the Sun yes and fall in
easier to launch a rocket entirely out of the solar system than it is to launch it in it is
but it's also not easy of these things we need even bigger Rockets probably the biggest we've
ever built hmm nothing works it's got to be this song still gets much worse oh yeah it gets worse
we have made them relatively safe
they're always doing mean things to docs liquid oxygen
kerosene the newest designs even land themselves so that they can be reused thanks to SpaceX and
yet out of the 146 launches in 2021 there are 11 values which means they're sizable
and yeah a number of our Rockets carrying high-level radioactive waste would explode
yep not good launch pad in the worst case rapid disassembly as Elon likes to call it crashing
from Hypersonic speeds each failure would be at least equivalent to a mini Chernobyl no it would
be way worse that'll be it for the curse I'll just look the topics here and I'll chat about
them so Rockets go bird we just talked about why a that's potentially bad you also got to
remember that there are some treaties against like you know launching nuclear bombs in space
if you didn't know which is annoying because we could actually build some starships that could
um travel to you know Interstellar travel with nukes you could uh like a putt-putt
boat you could build a Starship and uh sequentially explode nuclear bombs behind it
and this would actually accelerate if you do it in in the right way this uh ship to you could get
it near the speed of light not not quite the speed of light but you get going very quickly right and
uh people did some calculations like back in the in the 70s and 80s and this thing could actually
circumnavigate the observable universe in about 56 years ship time if you if you could create one of
these things um so how crazy is that you could uh I'm trying to remember the stats that's the
because you've got to remember time dilation um so and distance contracts when you go near the speed
of light so for the ship itself for everyone else you know if you were to take that round journey
by the time you get back you know billions of years in the future and the Sun is long dead
um oh let's get rid of this so anyway that's a tangent um so nuclear bombs
I was just mentioning that would it's a shame because I can't think of it better
way to use nuclear bombs so you know everyone's always saying oh there's no reason to have a nuke
there's there's zero reason we should have nuclear bombs on our planet well actually there's lots of
reasons that they could be useful for instance an Interstellar ship it'd be that would be brilliant
um but unfortunately everyone's scared of these things and no one likes to think and
they're like well let's ban them let's get rid of all of them and people or there's a bunch of
hairless monkeys around here that can't seem to um you know take their hand away from the
the big the big button that goes boom not looking at anyone in North Korea obviously they don't
have them I mean they were testing them weren't they actually sorry so yeah that is a problem