tifosi77's thread of Musk

[Trip McNeely]

I’m sure Tesla execs love that tweet

[shafnutz05]

So witty

[Pavel Bure]

So witty

Stop talking bad about him because he’s rich!

[Troy Loney]

Worst poster of all time

[Shyster]

Elon should have used this one, which IMO is better and more accurate.

[count2infinity]

A bit on the nose, no?

[Morkle]

Someone on threads or twitter wrote a huge long post about how Tesla was committing fraud with gaming the miles and Musk got super offended. I wonder how on the nose it was.

[MalkinIsMyHomeboy]

Elon should have used this one, which IMO is better and more accurate.

Nuclear power isn’t 0 cost to the environment. I understand why people advocate for it but storing the waste is extraordinarily risky

[shafnutz05]

Not really. Compared to the waste byproduct from virtually any other kind of power, it takes up very little room and is pretty safe if done properly (deep underground, lead walls, etc.)

[tifosi77]

I'm very pro-nuke, but "if done properly" bears quite the burden in that equation.

[meow]

no no no we can always trust energy companies to do the right thing

[faftorial]

no no no we can always trust energy companies to do the right thing

Is it you the one that used to work at Consol?

Someone that was on lgp did.

[shafnutz05]

no no no we can always trust energy companies to do the right thing

[Shyster]

Not really. Compared to the waste byproduct from virtually any other kind of power, it takes up very little room and is pretty safe if done properly (deep underground, lead walls, etc.)

It can also be reprocessed to greatly reduce the amount of waste. Right now, the cost of obtaining more uranium fuel and just directly disposing/storing the spent fuel is much lower than the cost of reprocessing fuel, and storage space, while a problem, isn't super pressing, so there isn't much demand for reprocessing. If reprocessing were mandated, the amount of spent nuclear fuel would be much lower, and the spent fuel that would need to be sent to storage would be less radioactive because the transuranic elements, which are the most radioactive, would be processed out. Many of the highly radioactive elements in spent fuel are potential fuel sources for Generation IV reactors (i.e., advance reactor designs that are still under development and go beyond current technology), such as the various molten-salt reactor (MSR) designs. Some proposed MSR designs would have the ability to use up transuranic elements, and others, such as the thorium versions, would not only produce less waste, but reprocessing could take place on site basically as part of the reactor's operation.

There are many more ways to deal with spent nuclear fuel than just storing it. It's basically just a matter of spending the money to develop those techniques.

[meow]

in like 6th grade, we had a whole section in science class about energy and waste and the whole process. I vehemently argued that nuclear waste should be jettisoned into space

[NTP66]

Pissbaby Jr can accompany said nuclear waste en route to Mars.

[Pavel Bure]

in like 6th grade, we had a whole section in science class about energy and waste and the whole process. I vehemently argued that nuclear waste should be jettisoned into space

And, inevitably, when one of those rockets explodes and creates a vast nuclear cloud? It’s just not worth the risk.

[count2infinity]

Look at PB over here… arguing with a 6th grade hockey goalie.

[tifosi77]

Outside of test flights, when is the last time a launch vehicle exploded in the atmosphere? And it's not like these would be orbital missions. Literally, fire that s**t into the sun.

[Pavel Bure]

Outside of test flights, when is the last time a launch vehicle exploded in the atmosphere? And it's not like these would be orbital missions. Literally, fire that s**t into the sun.

Space X seems to have a pretty poor record. Even the shuttle program had its issues. I’m not going to argue and die on a hill. IMO it’s too much of a risk to do with nuclear waste.

Who am I kidding though, give it enough supplementation and someone will do it to make a profit and kill a bunch of people in the process when something goes bad.

[MalkinIsMyHomeboy]

a 6th grade hockey goalie.

ahh so any hockey goalie

[Shyster]

Outside of test flights, when is the last time a launch vehicle exploded in the atmosphere? And it's not like these would be orbital missions. Literally, fire that s**t into the sun.

Space X seems to have a pretty poor record. Even the shuttle program had its issues. I’m not going to argue and die on a hill. IMO it’s too much of a risk to do with nuclear waste.

Who am I kidding though, give it enough supplementation and someone will do it to make a profit and kill a bunch of people in the process when something goes bad.

If I just did the math right, SpaceX either just completed its 300th consecutive successful mission, or it will with the next launch. Yeah, the Starship, which is still in testing and development, is experiencing failures, but the Falcon 9 sure isn't. The last launch that failed to reach orbit was SpaceX CRS-7 in June 2015. The Falcon 9 / Heavy hasn't even so much as lost an engine on ascent since then. SpaceX even has more than 200 consecutive successful booster recoveries, for missions where the booster is not intentionally expended. The Falcon 9 might actually be the most reliable launcher in history.

The last orbital launch that was not a test flight or a mission for a still-in-development launcher that failed to reach orbit was, I believe, the Rocket Lab Electron flight 40, which failed on September 19, 2023.

It seems like it should be easy to shoot stuff into the sun, given that it's relatively huge and has by far the largest gravitational pull in the solar system, but it's actually quite difficult to get anything even close to the sun. Earth's orbital speed is 29.78 km/s, and to get to the sun, you have to come up with some way to negate that velocity. The Parker Solar Probe, for example, at its closest approach will still be roughly 9 solar radii from the center of the sun, and that approach will have taken seven orbit-lowering gravity assists from Venus over seven years. By comparison, the amount of delta-v needed to execute a Hohmann transfer to Neptune is only 11.7 km/s, and Jupiter is 8.8 km/s, so it would be far easier to fire nuclear waste into Jupiter than into the sun.

This lesson on orbital mechanics brought to you by 2000+ hours of Kerbal Space Program.

[Pavel Bure]

The point isn’t that they’ve had X number of successful launches. The point is that it takes 1 failed launch/explosion to irradiate everything for probably hundreds of miles.

[dodint]

Space X seems to have a pretty poor record.

Cool dog whistle bro. And it works!

[Shyster]

The point isn’t that they’ve had X number of successful launches. The point is that it takes 1 failed launch/explosion to irradiate everything for probably hundreds of miles.

Well, yeah. I wasn't saying that trying to launch nuclear waste into space was a good idea. It's a staggering bad idea, both for the risk of failure and for other reasons, such as the fact that nuclear waste is quite dense/heavy, so you would need a massive number of launches (at massive expense) to get rid of it all. The cost would absolutely dwarf the cost of waste reprocessing, for example.