THE BAD THINGS THAT WOULD HAPPEN IF WE LAUNCHED NUCLEAR WASTE INTO THE SUN

摘要

A reader inquires: Why don't we just take all the nuclear waste, throw it into a rocket, then launch the rocket into the Sun? Would this make the Sun explode? Let's start with the last part of the question first: Would all the nuclear waste on Earth cause any sort of damage to our Sun? The answer is an emphatic no. The Sun would not care one whit about anything we could throw its way, primarily because the Sun is large, and we, in cosmic terms, are quite small. The Sun already contains far more uranium (a major component of high-level nuclear waste) than we could ever dig up here on Earth. Measurements of solar composition put the amount of solar uranium at as much as one hundred billion billion (10~(20)) tons, which is, even as an upper bound, a whole lot of uranium. Makes our little nuclear waste problem seem positively trivial by comparison.