story edited: click for complete article Moon Seen As Nuclear Waste Repository Thu Aug 22, 9:11 AM ET By Leonard David Senior Space Writer, http://www.SPACE.com As the debate rages over using the Yucca Mountain as a burial ground for thousands of tons of radioactive material, a better site for unwanted nuclear waste holds its mute vigil in the skies above the Nevada desert: the Moon. After 20 years of study, last July President Bush signed a bill making Yucca Mountain the planned site to house 77,000 tons of nuclear refuse. The site is to be open for business by 2010, located in Nevada desert, 90 miles (150 kilometers) from that gambling Mecca, Las Vegas. "No site for a long term, nuclear waste repository within Earth's biome or accessible to low-tech terrorist threat is acceptable," argues Sherwin Gormly, an environmental engineer for Tetra Tech EM Incorporated in Reno, Nevada. Gormly contends that the waste issue is the single most important problem limiting nuclear power development. A revolutionary change, he said, is required to break the impasse. "We need to seriously reconsider more advanced concepts, including repository options on the Moon," Gormly said. MIRVing the Moon In the past, thoughts about a lunar nuclear waste repository have come and gone. A new twist in the Gormly plan is using off-the-shelf intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), warhead targeting technology, and a reusable suborbital launch vehicle. It's an idea whose time may have returned, he said, broaching the notion last month at a Return to the Moon workshop held in Houston, Texas, held by the Space Frontier Foundation. The concept employs a low-cost, highly reliable suborbital space plane. Flying to high altitude, the piloted plane then dispatches an ICBM upper stage assembly. Multiple Independent Reentry Vehicle (MIRV) hardware, guidance equipment, and modified reentry vehicles carrying a casks of plutonium or waste material top this stage, which ignites and speeds into space. An internal targeting system within the reentry vehicles precisely places the casks of waste headlong onto an outbound lunar trajectory. The target would be a small lunar crater with steep sides. In later years, the flight path of the casks could be aided by final guidance equipment installed on the crater rim. That will assure an even more accurate bulls-eye impact of the incoming waste-carrying containers. One by one, the casks smack into the Moon. The soft deep lunar regolith in the impact area should ensure proper waste burial. Plowing into the lunar surface at high speed, the waste would be buried under several feet of glassified regolith, Gormly said. The impact area would be highly contaminated, the environmental engineer said, so a clearly delineated repository area would be needed. "However, the problem of waste migration would be eliminated because the lunar surface has no hydrosphere." click for complete article
Yeah. Environmentalists were in an uproar over the Cassini (i think) satellite just because it had a nuclear reactor. They would freakout if we tried to strap a bunch of waste on the back of a MIRV to launch from the Cape.
There are lots of things I'd like to see permanently shipped to the moon. Nuclear waste's only one of em.
Why the moon? Venus is farther, but its doubtful it will ever be useful since it has a really bad greenhouse effect.
Yeah, and then this **** blows up in mid-launch before it gets anywhere near the moon and we all get covered in nuclear waste. Lets do it!
I guess the "real world" is just a little late: http://www.space1999.net/~moonbase99/ September 13, 1999 ... the Moon is hurled out of Earth orbit by a massive explosion in Nuclear Waste Disposal Area 2, where nuclear waste from Earth has been dumped and stored on the dark side of the Moon. The 311 inhabitants of Moonbase Alpha are cut off from Earth, and travelling through the cosmos on an unknown trajectory.
