[cyberax]

> 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!)

The correct solution: put it into dry casks and do nothing right now. Store it simple underground storage facilities or on the grounds of active nuclear power plants.

The casks are fine for the next 300 years, and during that time we can either:

1. Perfect the nuclear fusion, it will provide plenty of neutrons to transmute the waste.

2. Perfect fast fission reactors. See above.

3. Use some of the excess of too-cheap-to-meter green energy for accelerator-driven subcritical fission reactors.

4. Yep, use rockets to slowly launch the waste into space. We can already design a storage capsule that can survive re-entry.

In any case, we have literally hundreds of years to come up with a solution and there are many viable paths.

[qnleigh]

> use rockets to slowly launch the waste into space. We can already design a storage capsule that can survive re-entry.

Do you have a source in mind for this claim? Even if a capsule could survive reentry, surely it wouldn't survive impact.

[cyberax]

Yes. We're _already_ launching nuclear waste into space, in the form of RTGs with Pu-238. So there's been a lot of work towards making them passively safe, although the weight constraints for deep-space craft necessarily limit the amount of achievable safety.

> Even if a capsule could survive reentry, surely it wouldn't survive impact.

It'll be moving at a terminal velocity, and can be engineered to not fragment on impact.

For example, I remember reading about a proposal to alloy the nuclear waste elements with a carrier metal like iron or nickel, and then cover them in an ablative graphite shell.

[maxerickson]

The Pu-238 in Rtgs is produced for the purpose, it isn't isolated from waste.

Of course it is more or less equivalent when it comes to handling.