I'm sorry but why should we dump this planet's waste somewhere else? I'm ok shooting it into the Sun, but just sending it out in a random direction...

We can use other processes to clean the nuclear waste now.

Would be cheaper to reprocess it like the industry said they would.

Uranium is one of the most heavy elements. Also if you place it in earth orbit it will be part of space trash that can hit other objects. Next problem is if you want to send it into the sun. For this you will need a lot of delta v.

You haven't seen that Futurama episode haven't you

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Or gets targeted by an attack. Dirty bomb for free

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Because it's insanely expensive to do so.

Because it tends to get caught by gravity and come crashing back to earth.

Because rockets don't always launch perfectly.

"Reliable" in nuclear technology means something very different from "reliable" in space, not least because the failure modes are different.

If a Falcon Heavy with ordinary cargo fails, a few fish will die on impact, but otherwise the damage to the ocean and the atmosphere is not that great and lasting.

"Seeding around" tons of nuclear waste into the atmosphere and into the ocean water would be a major disaster. This stuff will circulate for decades or even thousands of years, depending on its half-time.

Not true. Once it's in space... what then? Guess what? It floats around, gets caught by gravity and falls back to earth.

Because it’s too expensive. Look up Kurzgesagt on YouTube

I say we just tip it all into active volcanoes.

The main reason is that the risk of space flight doesn’t justify the marginal (if any) benefit.

According to Wikipedia there was 47,000 tons of high level radioactive waste in 2002. I’m too lazy to look up more up to date numbers. If we launched that all into space on F9 heavy rockets it would take 1,807 launches if all the mass was used for waste. That’s using 26 tons capacity to GTO. We would probably want to put the waste in a really strong container that will probably take up 25-50% of the mass needed so now we are up to about 3000 launches.

Since no rocket system is perfect we have to expect some failures. Let’s assume SpaceX gets a 99.9% reliability schedule that means we blow up 3 rockets on launch, spreading 50-75 TONS of high level radioactive waste all over the planet.

Compare that to just letting it sit there and not bother anyone. It’s far better to spend a fraction of the money of 3000 launches on building insanely strong storage areas and just leaving it alone.

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Weird how you thought of this yesterday and this just comes up on the news feed - https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/techandscience/nasa-to-test-nuclear-rockets-that-could-fly-astronauts-to-mars-in-record-time/ar-AA16H22U?ocid=entnewsntp&cvid=83e7df7f51744470b45e8dfe0af046a9

Slingshot would be too weak, you'd need something stronger like a trebuchet.

kurzgesagt is like xkcd. they cover a lot of things

We already don't store nuclear waste underground. Modern radioactive waste containers are extremely safe and durable.

Falcon heavy can only carry half of what the Saturn V could. That’s why.

Other than being expensive and dangerous, it’s a great idea, though.

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As everyone else is mentioning, rockets tend to explode when they don't work correctly, which is more often than you think.

A space elevator would be ideal to expel waste (or anything) off the planet safely.

Not only that, but having nuclear waste floating around in earth's orbit could be pretty shit. Because getting it out of earth's orbit would be horrendously expensive.

I came into this thread thinking "I'm pretty sure I saw a Kurzgesagt video about exactly this."