Sep 18, 2024 08:47 PM
https://bigthink.com/starts-with-a-bang/...rbage-sun/
KEY POINTS: With more humans than ever (over 8 billion) on Earth, the amount of waste we cumulatively produce on an annual basis continues to rise and rise: a problem that’s getting worse with time. Much of that waste is hazardous, some of it is radioactive, and all of it needs to be kept out of food and water supplies. Environmentally, there’s no 100% safe place to put it. Periodically, people suggest that we launch our waste into the Sun, destroying it forever while keeping Earth clean and pristine. But this is something we must never do, and physics explains why.
EXCERPT: As much fun as this is to consider, however, there are three barriers to the idea of launching our garbage, even the worst of it, into the Sun.
KEY POINTS: With more humans than ever (over 8 billion) on Earth, the amount of waste we cumulatively produce on an annual basis continues to rise and rise: a problem that’s getting worse with time. Much of that waste is hazardous, some of it is radioactive, and all of it needs to be kept out of food and water supplies. Environmentally, there’s no 100% safe place to put it. Periodically, people suggest that we launch our waste into the Sun, destroying it forever while keeping Earth clean and pristine. But this is something we must never do, and physics explains why.
EXCERPT: As much fun as this is to consider, however, there are three barriers to the idea of launching our garbage, even the worst of it, into the Sun.
- Launch failures are still a real possibility; more than 1% of even the most reliable launch vehicles (like the Ariane V rocket or the Soyuz spacecrafts) still fail. If you have a launch failure with hazardous or radioactive waste on board, that waste will be uncontrollably returned to the Earth, with potentially disastrous consequences.
- Energetically, it’s a much easier and safer task to launch your payload out of the Solar System than into the Sun; it’s choosing a harder problem over an easier one to accomplish the same task: ridding the Earth of its waste.
- And even with the recent advances of commercial and private spaceflight, the cost to lift our waste off of Earth’s surface and into orbit, alone, is prohibitively expensive for the sheer amount of hazardous and radioactive waste we already possess.