Amount of radioactive waste: A couple of tons every year per power plant is realistic.
Space dumping is a terrible idea. Expensive and risky.
Best storage solution so far found is what we've mostly been doing so far. Just having a sealed of area and store it for 20 or so years in a special low population and high security area that is protected from rain, frost, and temperature swings and have a good containment in case of container leaks. And then repackage in 20 years time for another 20 years. And so on. I.e. "actively managing" nuclear waste until the end of time.
Fun fact: The inner core of earth is not cooling mostly because of naturally occurring nuclear fission... so in a way our very own planet is full of radioactive waste already :)
My observation that tends to annoy people is to point out that the best place to store spent nuclear fuel is inside the original fuel rods. The best place to store those is next to the nuclear reactor. The objection seems to center around reprocessing. Course the longer you wait before reprocessing the less radio isotopes you have to worry about.
It's easier/less deltaV to send things out of the solar system than it is to hit the sun.
(Basically, to hit the sun, you have to scrub out all/most of the velocity from the Earth's orbit, or what you've done is put your waste in an orbit around the Sun that may intersect the Earth's at some point in the future)
Technically you could try some clever gravity assists with Jupiter to greatly reduce the ∆v requirements. But that's still a very expensive way of solving a non-problem. We know how to deal with nuclear waste. The problem is with people being scared out of proportion by it.
The reason the Earth doesn't fall into the sun is that it's moving quickly enough that the centripetal force balances the Sun's gravity. If you escape the Earth's gravity well and give it a small push it would still have nearly as much orbital energy as the Earth and way more than Venus, which hadn't fallen into the sun either.
To slow down enough that you could fall into the sun you need to kill 30 km/s of velocity. To go fast enough to escape the solar system you only need about 15 km/s. And crashing into Jupiter is even cheaper than that.
Close to the sun still takes more energy than leaving the solar system, similar to how it's just as hard to charge a capacitor to -9V as to 9V. And in what sense would it "burn up"?
Bring it up does not change the fact that there is now radioactive material on an orbit which still potential overlaps the earth. Out of the solar system is a much better solution.
On the other hand it's not like the Sun isn't spewing out way more radioactive material continuously than we're talking about adding here.
EDIT: To give some orders of magnitude, the back of the envelope tells me that the sun inflicts about 700 TBq of carbon-14 on us every year. For comparison, countries like the USSR and UK have dumped 85,000 TBq of radioactive waste into the ocean (and Fukushima added another 15,000). I don't know how to judge how much of the vaporized waste would end up back on Earth so it's quite possible I'm wrong in the above.
That's only true up to a point. I suspect that if you exposed just about anything to 100,000 kelvin it ceased to look like any kind of matter we know anything about.
This experiment was performed thousands of times back in the 1950s and 1960s. A nuclear weapon's fireball is way hotter than 100,000K, and the exploding weapon contains lots of fissionable material and fission byproducts. The extreme temperatures don't destroy them, they just help spread it around.
Yes, but there is SOME temperature at which heating things up does start to cause things to act weirdly. You know, like in a fusion reactor. That definitely changes the radioactivity of certain elements.
Space dumping is a terrible idea. Expensive and risky.
Best storage solution so far found is what we've mostly been doing so far. Just having a sealed of area and store it for 20 or so years in a special low population and high security area that is protected from rain, frost, and temperature swings and have a good containment in case of container leaks. And then repackage in 20 years time for another 20 years. And so on. I.e. "actively managing" nuclear waste until the end of time.
Fun fact: The inner core of earth is not cooling mostly because of naturally occurring nuclear fission... so in a way our very own planet is full of radioactive waste already :)