A damned fine read if you have a little while to spare.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/resources/idt-sh/deep_sea_mining

Interesting read that.

Not sure how I feel about it tbh. Certainly a very real risk of losing/affecting things we know nothing about which could have consequences unexpected.

Just read that, fascinating stuff.

No easy answers.

Oil industry has shown that if we want it enough, we’ll take it.

I think that means this is inevitable

Wouldn’t it be a shame if a a new cure for cancer or antibiotic were found in the novel biodiversity that lives in these places. It’s certainly not unheard of, and probably presents a potentially strong economic argument against this “progress”….

interesting read, i guess the raw materials for all the new tesla’s need to come from somewhere!

Really good read thanks for sharing.

Surely most of the metals we need are readily recyclable?

I wish humans would clear up after themselves first. Loads of derelict buildings and concreted over spaces all around the world and yet we still mine for more materials. Can’t we get it into our thick skulls that we only have one planet. Get into the habit of reusing the materials and then returning spaces back to their natural state.

Then Musk goes and throws a flippin’ Tesla into space. Why couldn’t he have done everyone a favour and launched some of this nuclear waste into the asteroid belt?

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jul/03/runit-dome-pacific-radioactive-waste

Although an incredible technological feat by all involved I’m calling into question Musk’s moral compass.

Although an incredible technological feat by all involved I’m calling into question Musk’s moral compass.

Seems to me that launching a bit of spare metal into space on top of a maiden flight rocket (with a 50-50 chance of going bang on the launch pad) is slightly more preferable to potentially spreading nuclear waste over much of Florida.

Why couldn’t he have done everyone a favour and launched some of this nuclear waste into the asteroid belt?

And if the experimental new rocket they they were testing had exploded on the launch pad…?

Why couldn’t he have done everyone a favour and launched some of this nuclear waste into the asteroid belt?

Because that is arguably more irresponsible than storing it underground where we know where it’ll be for the next 100 years.

Unless you’re going to provide that waste with some thrusters to maintain it’s orbit, they WILL fall back down to earth in the near future. Suddenly you’re now raining down nuclear waste on random parts of the planet.

Coupled with the above point about the super experimental rocket that Elon himself said had a 50/50 chance of not exploding.

So no… not a good idea

“Why couldn’t he have done everyone a favour and launched some of this nuclear waste into the asteroid belt?”

Others have already pointed out that putting nuclear waste on top of a rocket, which relies upon the controlled combustion of flammable liquefied gas and several hundred thousand moving parts of unproven reliability could end up scattering nuclear waste over a huge area if it goes bang – see Cosmos 1402 for what happens when a nuclear powerplant disintegrates upon re-entry.

Also, nuclear waste is very, very dense in comparison to volume (lead used to be uranium for example) and depending on the type of waste, it can be vitrified in molten glass. Nuclear storage sites are by necessity very large. You’ll need something like a Space Elevator before we can reliably move nuclear waste off planet.

So that incident regarding Kosmos 1402 didn’t discourage the Russians and the Americans from sending more nuclear reactors into orbit. They still risk sending them up yet they don’t send nuclear waste which is currently seeping into the waters surrounding the Marshall Islands.

Yeah but most people don’t know about all that stuff that goes on daily so the powers that be just carry on normal service. For instance Britain still has every nuclear submarine it’s ever had in service. More than 50 years later they still don’t really know what to do with the decommissioned ones so they sit rotting away in the water.

If they tried to launch waste into space then everyone would know about not only that but light would be shone on how they deal with it now. That would be a bad thing for those in power.

So that incident regarding Kosmos 1402 didn’t discourage the Russians and the Americans from sending more nuclear reactors into orbit. They still risk sending them up yet they don’t send nuclear waste which is currently seeping into the waters surrounding the Marshall Islands.

What nuclear reactors are all those, then?

Well, I saw Sizewell B take off earlier, maybe that’s one of them?

I’d rather have nuclear waste hurled into space rather than bury it in the Earth. Most stuff in space is radioactive anyway so putting back some radioactive stuff back  into space, where it came from originally, seems the most sensible option to me. We don’t actually generate much nuclear waste anyway so its a teeny tiny amount in reality. You couldn’t even fill up an average sized 3 bedroom house with all  the nuclear waste mankind has ever produced. The thing that makes it bulky are all the large radioactive shielded containers we surround it in. But the logistics of hurling it into space are pretty challenging. Burying it is asking for trouble – you’ve got to contain it in a shielded container which wont last the hundreds of thousands of years this stuff will be dangerous for, so eventually the containment systems will degrade and fail and the ground will be contaminated.

The earths resources are there for us to plunder. The Earth is a temporary life boat, so as long as we manage it well and not screw things up too much in extracting it and using it, then its all good.

Wobbliscott I think you should check the validity of your assertion on the volume of nuclear waste created. I’d recommend a visit to Drigg.

The best option would be to send huge barges full of the stuff into our (or a nearby) star, I guess.

But just sending it out into space randomly is problematic – it’s quite hard to predict where things will go after a short time. A great example of that is the Telsa – they’re not really sure where it’s going to land (if it ever does), and SpaceX themselves didn’t calculate for it:

Scientists Think They Know Where Elon Musk’s Space Roadster Will Ultimately Land

We don’t actually generate much nuclear waste anyway so its a teeny tiny amount in reality. You couldn’t even fill up an average sized 3 bedroom house with all  the nuclear waste mankind has ever produced.

I missed this first time around. That’s an incredibly naive claim.

Drigg itself has millions of cubic meters of the stuff.

“A typical nuclear power plant in a year generates 20 metric tons of used nuclear fuel. The nuclear industry generates a total of about 2,000 – 2,300 metric tons of used fuel per year.

Over the past four decades, the entire industry has produced 76,430 metric tons of used nuclear fuel. If used fuel assemblies were stacked end-to-end and side-by-side, this would cover a football field about eight yards deep.”

https://www.nei.org/Knowledge-Center/Nuclear-Statistics/On-Site-Storage-of-Nuclear-Waste

Most stuff in space is radioactive anyway so putting back some radioactive stuff back into space, where it came from originally, seems the most sensible option to me

You didn’t do physics at school, did you? Otherwise you’d be aware of the fact that radioactive materials exist within the earth’s crust, granite is radioactive, pitchblende is, coal is, even bananas have trace amounts of radioactivity, radon gas seeps out of the ground…