[ben-schaaf]

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.

[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...

[chongli]

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?

[ben-schaaf]

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.

Otherwise here's a good discussion on the viability of space guns: https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/2370/what-technolo....

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_HARP

[gdpgreg]

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.

[ben-schaaf]

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.

[acidburnNSA]

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.

[petre]

What if it fails and the waste falls back to Earth spreading over inhabited areas or agriculture/fishing grounds? It's a bad idea to begin with.

[richardburden]

2Mt is two metric tons, right? It surely is not 2 million metric tons. See the IAEA's estimates of total radwaste in storage or disposal worldwide: http://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fue...

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!

[ben-schaaf]

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.