First, although lava at 2,000 degrees F can melt many materials in our trash – including food scraps, paper, plastics, glass and some metals – it's not hot enough to melt many other common materials, including steel, nickel and iron.
Other examples of metals and ceramics that can withstand lava's temperature include; titanium, iridium, iron alloys, osmium, nickel alloys, aluminum oxide, mullite, and silicon nitride.
But there's a critical standard that a volcano would have to meet to properly dispose of the stuff, explains Charlotte Rowe, a volcano geophysicist at Los Alamos National Laboratory. And that standard is heat. The lava would have to not only melt the fuel rods but also strip the uranium of its radioactivity.
Lava flows, however, can bury homes and agricultural land under tens of meters of hardened black rock; landmarks and property lines become obscured by a vast, new hummocky landscape. People are rarely able to use land buried by lava flows or sell it for more than a small fraction of its previous worth.
Drop Them In A Giant Vat Of Molten Metal
An ironworks would be best as iron melts at roughly 1510°C, but a steelworks would also be fine at a cool 1370°C. Molten lava will be rocking around 1200°C - still perfectly sufficient.
You would never fall into a lava lake the way you would a swimming pool, the molten rock is much more dense, so you would simply land on it, sink a little, and be burned."
Lava won't kill you if it briefly touches you. You would get a nasty burn, but unless you fell in and couldn't get out, you wouldn't die. With prolonged contact, the amount of lava "coverage" and the length of time it was in contact with your skin would be important factors in how severe your injuries would be!
First, although lava at 2,000 degrees F can melt many materials in our trash – including food scraps, paper, plastics, glass and some metals – it's not hot enough to melt many other common materials, including steel, nickel and iron.
Dipping your hand into molten rock won't kill you instantly, but it will give you severe, painful burns — “the kind that destroy nerve endings and boil subcutaneous fat,” says David Damby, a research chemist at the USGS Volcano Science Center, in an email to The Verge.
Less dense things rise above more dense things, so if you attempt to replicate the actions of the authorities in a particularly egregious 1997 Hollywood movie and build a wall of concrete around a massive lava flow, it won't stop it – the blocks will float on top of it, heat up and begin to melt.
If you dropped a nuclear bomb into the crater of an extinct volcano, you would flatten the mountain out a bit but you wouldn't set the volcano off because there wouldn't be any pre-existing upwelling of magma.
Lava flows and lava domes
It does, however, destroy everything in its path by a combination of burial, crushing and heat. Such eruptions are also associated with emission of volcanic gases and aerosols.
The answer—quite surprisingly—is yes, they can! Not only do sharks survive in underwater volcanoes, but it seems that they thrive there. In fact, Kavachi's entire marine community appears to be accustomed to its acidic, blistering hot water and frequent eruptions.
To put it simply, a diamond cannot melt in lava, because the melting point of a diamond is around 4500 °C (at a pressure of 100 kilobars) and lava can only be as hot as about 1200 °C.
Actual lava is red-orange in color, given its temperature. Truly-blue lava would require temperatures of at least 6,000 °C (10,830 °F), which is much higher than any lava can naturally achieve on the surface of the Earth.
In fact, as it spills out onto Earth's surface as lava, the runny rock's temperature is only a little lower than the hottest part of a candle flame: about 1200 °C. On the other hand, a big blob of lava contains many more bouncing particles than a small candle flame, so it has a lot more heat energy.
One person has survived falling into much cooler lava in Tanzania in 2007, according to field reports from the Smithsonian. That lava was less than 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit, though, and the person who survived was still recovering and in pain more than five months later.
Is lava hotter than the Sun? While lava is still intensely hot, it is not hotter than the Sun. On average, lava can range between 1,300 to 2,200 degrees Fahrenheit, depending on its location. It's safe to say the sun at all parts is much hotter than lava.
Tardigrades are among the most resilient animals known, with individual species able to survive extreme conditions – such as exposure to extreme temperatures, extreme pressures (both high and low), air deprivation, radiation, dehydration, and starvation – that would quickly kill most other known forms of life.
The colour of lavas can be associated with the temperature reached at the surface: dark red at low temperatures (475°C), orange at 900°C and white at extremely high temperature (>1150°C) (Kilburn, 2000).
The temperature of the lava in the tubes is about 1,250 degrees Celsius (2,200 degrees Fahrenheit).
Lava does have a smell – sort of acrid, and a bit sulfury (most of the sulfur gas comes out at the eruptive vent, but there is a little in the lava itself).