I don't mean launch it into orbit. I mean launch it into SPACE. Deep space. We do it all the time with probes. Load up a giant garbage truck in space periodically and send it off to 26 Draconis A or some other "near" star.
Unless they could shoot it straight into a star and destroy it, that pile of radioactive mess could come back to haunt us at some distant point down the road. Also, remember we have not exactly mastered the art of space travel. Remember the shuttle blowup in 2003? Imagine if it had a load of nuclear waste onboard. Surely other advanced civilizations in the universe have found a way to power their societies without polluting the rest of the universe or destroying their own planet's ecosystem. It just seems to me that this would start to set us on another bad policy.
Let private enterprise into the space program. Make business out of expulsing waste into space. The odds of something we launch with enough velocity to exit the solar system coming back to haunt us is a number so low it would be difficult to calculate.
Cute idea but come on. Not at all economic and one bad launch would cause big problems. Nuclear has a real issue with waste. Risk of a meltdown is tiny nowdays with advancement, but those spent fuel rods just keep piling up. Their storage units and the plants themselves are easy targets.
As I said, I agree it's not economic under the current model. But make it where someone can make money off it and it'll fly (no pun intended).
If you knew people who worked around and on those ships, you might change your opinion - I did after I heard about a couple of incidents. Not that I am against nuclear powered carriers - just that I am not so sure I would want to swim near one.
Hmmm, someone posted in another forum Paulson was investing in land in California. Wonder if these two things are related... Maybe it's not too late.
The answer IS nuclear fission... but with a twist. Based on the Thorium cycle and not Uranium or Plutonium. Thorium stretches the inventory of 233U by a factor of 5! It is also the baseline cycle that India uses. Its by-products are also not adaptable to weapons usage. It is a great cycle, and Thorium is readily available. Check it out, you might be surprised. If you need a lead to summary public sector documents let me know... after you search a bit.
Solar plus nuclear is a good answer, at least for the US. The Mojave desert has the capacity to produce enough solar electricity to power every house and car in North America believe it or not. Some solar energy production stations are being built but some are pure solar and some are combo natural gas and solar. The investment would be huge of course. Hydrogen is just an energy storage mechanism, there isn't a natural source of hydrogen is there? You don't pump it from the ground, you produce it from another element and it takes energy to do that. Bush and Big Oil funded Hydrogen research for that reason, it's bullshit meant to make them look like they care about something that is not oil...... they just aren't done selling oil but they are looking down the road to when it runs out or becomes prohibitively expensive because they cornered the nuclear fuel market and they can start selling that... my thinking is that an explosion from a single car's fuel cell that let all the energy out in an instant would level city blocks so you can't use that if terrorists can find a way to make a car bomb out of it.... We were sold the idea that nuclear was a terrible way to go so we burn coal. Coal is very dirty, burning coal releases more radioactivity than all the nuclear plants, radioactive material is just inherently part of coal, so is mercury, when you read about fish being so contaminated with mercury it's because of coal burning, the pollution reaches the oceans. Coal is slow suicide by pollution, nuclear has the potential to do it faster but in a smaller area, probably the overall danger, over time, from nuclear is a lot less than from coal burning.....
Don't believe it cause it's not possible. That's not how the electric grid works. They used that line in the HBO documentary for illustrative purposes, it's not actually realistic or possible. Coal pollution versus nuclear, quite a toss up. Radioactive waste knocks out areas for 10,000 years or more. Plus the genetic consequences, look up whats happening around Chernobyl now. Scary.