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Comment by Rickthedick | Hacker News Reader

The fact that nuclear power exists and no politician is talking about it makes me question the intentions and ethics of government. It seems like a lot of this just has to do with money. Huge losses would be made if we converted everything but if we did all of our warming issues would be fixed. We can store the radioactive waste temporarily until we can easily ship it to the moon and bury it. We will likely have that space tech very soon. IDK what the hell is going on bc this plan seems SO EASY and fixes EVERYTHING!!

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Tons of politicians talking about it. Several countries actively going that route.

However, nuclear takes a long time to implement. Much slower than renewables.

That is not exactly true. You can't put electricity for all of the major sources of co2 consumption. For example, the chemistry for building cement is emitting co2. Also, steel requires so much heat than electricity is 10x more expensive than coal for this application.

It seems bizarre to bury nuclear waste on the moon. Why not just shoot it into the sun?

It will require even more fuel for one.

But rockets are still risky, I wouldn't want to think of what happens if one of those explodes in the atmosphere. All off-planet storage options carry this risk.

Would it really require very much more fuel? Once you're headed in the right direction, you can just coast. Who cares if it takes months for the payload to get there?

No this is not how orbital mechanics work. You need to escape the earth's gravity completely to go to the sun. In order to go tot the moon you don't.

The "Just point at it and keep going" doesn't work in an orbital system. Here's a nice delta-V map that explains it a bit more: https://www.reddit.com/r/space/comments/1ktjfi/deltav_map_of...

If the rocket taking the nuclear material to the moon blows up during take off, you've just scattered nuclear waste over huge areas of the world. It is basically a dirty bomb.

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