61–66 of 66 posts
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Anathem was so chock full of interesting ideas, too bad the last parts of it were so rushed (or at least felt that way to me).
I always describe it as an excellent 300 page novel crammed into 900 pages.
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You need to think more clearly about this. Reprocessing is very expensive; $1000/kg and up. Launch to space will likely become much cheaper than this as fully reusable launch vehicles become available. Even if the spent fuel must be armored against accident the cost of launching it to LEO, and then to the moon, is likely to become much cheaper than the cost of reprocessing it here on Earth. Space disposal has the pos…
Currently, the most reliable rockets are maybe 99% reliable but certainly not 99.9%. If you are trying to send nuclear material to space, you have to account for the possibility that * The rocket blows up on the launchpad * The rocket gets you part way up, then blows up during ascent * The rocket fails before orbital insertion, and your nuclear payload re-enters the atmosphere at near-orbital velocity In all of those…
Conservatively it might add an order of magnitude, and likely less. This still renders future reusable launchers much cheaper per kg of spent fuel than reprocessing would be, unless you are projecting very large improvements in the cost of reprocessing.
You might object current launchers aren't cheap enough, but I wasn't proposing doing this right now with current launchers, so that would be a strawman objection.
> There are some drawbacks to the nuclear bomb rocket. You don't say.
The more you know
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I am trying to be friendly with the paywall.
It might be worth a heads up, but your writing is excellent and you totally get to ask for payment.
I do feel like the free sample guy at Costco, confident that once people try the cube of summer sausage on a toothpick, they'll want to buy the whole thing. But I sure appreciate someone else saying it!
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That $1000/kg figure is reprocessing something like 10kg of material to get 1kg of enriched material. Current costs to launch a kg to orbit are something like $2,000-$6,000. If we're comparing it to you enriched amount, you'd have to launch 10kg, which means you'd have to hit $100/kg launch costs to break even. I'm not convinced that will ever be possible; that's on the order of a first class arline ticket for a 50kg…
> Current costs to launch a kg to orbit are something like $2,000-$6,000. This is false. Launch on Falcon 9 is under $1K/kg. Moreover, current launch costs are just a milestone toward future launch costs, which promise to me much lower. Ultimately launch will be a few times the cost of propellant (just like air travel), so $10/kg is a reasonable expectation. > vaporizing in the atmosphere How does this happen? Launch…
Every number I find is ~$2,700 or so per kg. I'd be interested to see your data.
>$10/kg is a reasonable expectation.
Citation needed. The tyranny of the rocket equation means you need about 95kg of propellant for every kg of payload. To be clear, assuming it costs $0 to build a rocket, you're going to need to find propellant for under 10c/kg.
Or flip it around. Falcon 9 can lift 18,400kg. You're suggesting therefore that the gross income for spacex will be $184K per launch at $10/kg. It currently costs them about $15-20M per launch. They have to reduce their cost 100x to make a profit with your numbers. From $15,000,000 to ~$150,000. That seems... unlikely.
> Entry from near-orbital speed? Also survivable passively.
... To be clear, you're suggesting that a rocket in a bad state (engine failure / tumbling) is able to survive a re-entry at 17,500mph? Also -- your "armored canister". How many kg of armor per kg of payload? 50:50?