I know others have addressed the dangers of this, but I had a little fun looking at the logistics. The UK alone produces 2Mt of radioactive waste[0] per year, ~9% is of "intermediate" level. Just sending those 18Mt into LEO would take 129,000 Saturn V launches per year. That's about one launch every 4 minutes. And LEO is not where we want to send anything. Lets assume a Trans-Lunar Injection is enough, bringing that number up to 370,000, almost one launch per minute.
Just the RP-1 & LH2 fuel cost would be around $600,000 per launch[1], so about 222 billion USD per year (The fuel is the cheapest part of the launch). Each launch releases around 440,000 kg of CO2[2] into the atmosphere. That's 163Mt, an increase of 44% of the UK's current CO2 pollution from the launches alone.
Just for fun, if we wanted to send all nuclear waste all the way to pluto using only Falcon Heavies we'd have to launch around 1.8 per second. Going off the 80 million USD price tag for these launches, that's 4.5 quadrillion USD. That's about 60 times the Gross World Product to cover the UK alone.
Launching waste into space with a rocket is a silly idea. We don't really care if the waste gets damaged as long as it doesn't break up and make a mess. Why not build a giant railgun to launch it?
I'd consider them equally as silly, considering we're actually capable of launching rockets into space yet the closest we've gotten with a space gun is a measly 180km apogee @ 3.6km/s[0]. The original question was why we don't send our nuclear waste into space. We can't send our nuclear waste into space using a rail gun because we can't currently send anything into space with a rail gun.
Cause someone murdered the leading scientist in the field. Also there's concerns that it'd be too easy to turn it essentially into a very long range, highly effective weapon that could lob nuclear or conventional projectiles at countries on the other side of the planet with little to no warning.
We already have highly effective weapons that can lob nuclear or conventional projectiles at countries on the other side of the planet with little to no warning: ballistic missile subs.
It's cheaper and safer to store it in deep crystalline bedrock. I guess if we geologists can't convince we the people of that maybe the railgun idea would work, especially if you could hit the sun where the fast fusion neutrons would consume the hell out of it.
Because of the extremely high energy density of nuclear fuel, the amount of waste produced per Gigawatt-year of electricity generated is very small.
A Saturn V has a payload of 140 Mt to low earth orbit. Total high-level waste is 22,000 cubic meters, possibly 220,000 Mt, assuming a density 10 times as great as water. 1,572 Saturn V launches would carry away all of that. All the high-level waste ever produced that has not been recycled. Most of it can be recycled in breeder reactors, so there is no need to carry it away!
2Mt is 2 mega tonnes. If you look at the source only 0.03% of radioactive waste in the UK is "High Level". The expended fuel itself is a tiny portion of the nuclear waste. At lot of things other than nuclear reactors also produce radioactive waste that requires proper disposing, as your source confirms.
Oh, this reminds me of high school, when I asked a physicist my mother dating about the same idea. He worked for the Rand corporation and was overall pro-nuclear. Still, He considered for a second and did his best to explain...
What I remember of his explanation was the point that if you launch a payload of material into space, you have essentially placed that payload in an elliptical orbital path, one that intersects earth's elliptical path. And since orbits are periodic, that payload is going to be intersecting earth's orbit regularly, meaning that in this instance, the chance of the material coming right back into the atmosphere is quite high.
I like to remind people that we already live on a radioactive planet. We can build nuclear reactors because radioactive stuff naturally is everywhere. There probably wouldn't be life here without it.
So to me the "let's get it off the planet" idea is an overreaction. Radioactive material just need to be handled with common sense.
Hmm... what's the over-under on dropping barrels into a volcano?
You get a little radioactive steam surely...but eventually turns into radioactive dust...
As an aside, ignorant physics question, does the half-life of something decrease with heat? Like does more beta-decay mean it gets to safe levels faster?
Maybe a few years in between tectonic plates would do a planet good eh?
> As an aside, ignorant physics question, does the half-life of something decrease with heat?
Short answer: No. Definitely not in a Volcano.
Long Answer:
Decay rates are ultimately determined by the subatomic structure of the nucleus. This is why different chemicals, and different isotopes of said chemicals, will decay differently. A lone neutron will decay after about 15 minutes (which is a long time in subatomic scales), however, the two neutrons in (4/2)He will happily stick around forever.
So melting a material won't have any impact on the structure of the nucleus, you're just disassociating the intramolecular bonds; same goes for turning said material into a gas.
If you were to raise the temperature high enough, and we're talking sun-like (not the measly 5000k that you get on the surface, I mean like 27-million degrees you find in the core), then you'll actually start stripping and fusing nuclei, which will at that point change (but not necessarily decrease) the radioactive rates of whatever material you started with.
In most cases a faster decay rate does mean the material becomes safer at a faster rate, but consequently produces more radiation in that same time. If it was reprocessed we could reuse the high-output waste over and over until all that was left was the low energy but long half life material, but old regulations based on poorly understood science in the past, public ill-will, and potential international political conflicts could appear as the reprocessing technology is basically the same technology needed to make nuclear or radiation bomb source material.
The classic answer is to bury extremely long lived waste in a subduction zone at the bottom of the ocean, such as the Mariana Trench.
A "subduction zone" is where two tectonic plates collide and fold into the depth of the planet. So anything you bury there would naturally travel deeper into the planet over the eons.
I haven't heard any serious arguments against this, but I suspect it's impossible because people think it would "contaminate the oceans".
I dont think it is so easy. Subduction zones have what are called accretionary prisms, which are basically sediment that is sloughed off the top of the subducting plate. Thus, if you want the nuclear waste to be subducted, you have to bury it deep enough, though I can't say quite how far - given the scale of the crust, I'd say you're looking at something on the order of miles at least. Which is extra challenging considering subduction zones are already under thousands of feet of ocean.
And even if it were subducted, the descending seafloor sediments liberate water and other volatiles once they get deep/hot enough, and this produces volcanism.
Because we already know how to store it for thousands of years with minimal leakage without creating a contraption that could lead to nuclear waste raining down on our heads.
To be fair, we already know how to store it with minimal leakage for thousands of years, but the tentation to just dump it in the Mediterranean (1980's), Somalia (1980-90's), seed it over Irak (Gulf's war) or leak it into the Japanese Sea (2011-17) is irresistible.
Yes, but how much coal versus uranium would a household use, if used to generate electricity in the most efficient way possible (cogeneration presumably)?
One answer is that it probably isn’t possible to do what you say, but if it were the failure states are wildly unacceptable. Any “cannon” (or rail gun) capable of accelerating an object to escape velocity from the surface would likely burn the object up during its flight through the atmosphere, spreading its radioactive contents into the air to float around as low level global fallout for decades.
But if instead you just launched it into space on a rocket... well what happens when a launch fails and the rocket blows up on the launch pad? If you’re lucky, you mark a few square miles as no-go zones and then move on to the next launch pad? Doesn’t strike me as a sustainable solution.
One of my favorite ideas is to encase the waste into giant glass blocks, and build pyramids in the desert... but I doubt that’s very practical either.
We'll have to pack it very carefully in any case. Perhaps we should assume that this will happen and work with that scenery in mind. The concept of a fire resistant box is not new at a smaller scale; We can vitrify the less dangerous waste and store the crystal in steel containers. Then we could theoretically design explosion-proof containers for it with some outer sacrificial disposable layers made of a plastic clay-like matherial or so.
Is much worse than that :-). The "space solution" can be split in three different possibilities. I will name the first "The slingshoot"
We have succesfully used a "Slingshoot" approach to put heavy things up to 100t in the space many times. Hubble telescope (12t) or the orbiter from the space shuttle (100t) fall in this category.
We could split our waste in chunks of 500Kg, pack it really well and just put it in an orbiter; the problem is that we can't go really far with this system (around 500 Km or so). We just will put the waste in a low orbit where things can fall again into the earth sonner or later. We had the Thiangong-1 case in 2018.
Thus this "solution" after a few years would be the same as dumping the waste into the sea, but in a very expensive and creative way.
Just the RP-1 & LH2 fuel cost would be around $600,000 per launch[1], so about 222 billion USD per year (The fuel is the cheapest part of the launch). Each launch releases around 440,000 kg of CO2[2] into the atmosphere. That's 163Mt, an increase of 44% of the UK's current CO2 pollution from the launches alone.
Just for fun, if we wanted to send all nuclear waste all the way to pluto using only Falcon Heavies we'd have to launch around 1.8 per second. Going off the 80 million USD price tag for these launches, that's 4.5 quadrillion USD. That's about 60 times the Gross World Product to cover the UK alone.
[0] https://nda.blog.gov.uk/2017/04/03/how-much-radioactive-wast... [1] https://www.quora.com/How-much-fuel-does-it-take-to-travel-t... [2] https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/13082/calculate-fa...