[Ylpertnodi]

>Waste is still the giant elephant in the room and a lot of people have a fifth grade solution to the problem (we will bury it under ground! We will fly it to the sun! We will resuse it until it is no longer radioactive!)

Could the waste be 'sent' into space? Bonus points for sending a certain human with it. Serious question, though.

[rsynnott]

This was one of the Soviet Union’s proposed use for Energia (a super-heavy launcher which flew precisely twice before the Soviet Union collapsed). In practice, there would be, ah, challenges; no launcher ever built is reliable enough that anyone would be particularly comfortable with _launching large amounts of high-level nuclear waste_ with it.

[mschuster91]

> Could the waste be 'sent' into space? Bonus points for sending a certain human with it. Serious question, though.

Would you want a RUD of nuclear waste in the atmosphere? That's the key thing with sending stuff to space, we are nowhere near close enough in terms of reliability and cost to what would be needed to send the stuff away.

[bell-cot]

By "space" do you mean low earth orbit - where the stuff will reenter the atmosphere within (say) a century? Or geosync orbit - where it'll stay up there forever-ish...but ain't actually gone? Or actually gone, like (say) Mars?

IIR, the current rock-bottom (Falcon 9) launch prices are something like $1,000/lbs. to low earth orbit, $2,500/lbs. to geosync, and $6,500/lbs. to Venus.

A quick Google says the US has about 88,000 tons of radioactive waste. So - 88,000 tons = 176,000,000 lbs. = $176,000,000,000 just to put it in low earth orbit. And something like 4,600 Falcon 9 launches. (Some fraction of which would doubtless go badly wrong, spreading radioactive stuff all over the landscape.)

In short - it's a cool-sounding idea. But neither the numbers nor the politics are remotely near viable.