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Comment by jeffwilcox | Hacker News Reader

Having visited the Hanford site in Washington State, it's a pretty epic thing there trying to deal with the waste from WWII.

Actual nuclear waste is a 10,000+ year problem, not hundreds of years. But the 100s of years problem is more about where long-term storage should be (Yucca Mtn. etc.).

When you tour Hanford, what do you see (free tours for US citizens, BTW)? You see many ancient reactors - all disabled now except the preserved first reactor. You see -every single decommissioned nuclear submarine-'s reactor in long lines. And they remind you: based on ice ages, in 15,000 years or so, it won't matter... the entire plateau around Hanford will be under water. So it's going to need to be somewhere else.

Wild stuff.

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Not really. Plenty of people live in areas with radon producing rocks in the ground, or where altitude causes higher exposures. Long-lived waste emits less radiation than short-lived. If people are fine in Guarapari, they would be fine on top of Hanford in 5,000 years.

Then there's what you don't see. Long-lived radionuclides in groundwater, heading for the Columbia River :(

Dumb question- why not launch it into the sun?

Do the (projected) costs of storing it for 10k+ years exceed the costs of leaving Earths orbit?

Not a dumb question, but as the sibling comment reflects - it has been pondered before, and it is indeed a "dumb solution", unfortunately.

In addition to cost of launching such huge mass, and the risks of catastrophic failure (blowing up mid-launch would probably end up being worse than the chernobyl-distaster -- think a really, really big dirty bomb with areal detonation) -- there's also the risk of missing the sun, and ending up with a man-made comet.

We're talking about a massive amount of mass. Sending mass to space costs tens of thousands per kilogram. Storing mass costs far less in the short term, and the long term isn't perceived as the problem of the person paying the bill for the short term.

For that matter, with the number of launches required, at least one of them would fail badly enough to spread radioactive material.

Even if this weren't insanely expensive...

The sun is far away in terms of delta-V. Getting to low-Earth orbit requires something like 9.4 km/s of delta-V. Getting from LEO to the Sun requires another 21.3 km/s of delta-V.

There are probably transfer orbits that could use gravity assist to make this figure lower, but those orbits spend a lot of time looping around planets and generally hanging out in the solar system, which is probably not the best thing to do with our waste.

It's actually cheaper to escape the solar system than to shoot for the Sun - around 18.15 km/s delta-V from ground to escape.

You would be throwing away the next generations fuel. We only use a tiny portion of that available energy from nuclear fuel. This is stupidly wasteful - we should be reprocessing it and putting it back into the reactors.

A lot of the waste that remains should be used in breeder reactors, such as the LFTR. The amount of actual waste left over if we actually use the entire fuel is tiny compared to what we currently call "waste".

Rockets still tend to go "boom" on the launchpad or shortly after launch at an uncomfortably high rate. A rocket carrying tons of radioactive waste that exploded 30 seconds after launch would create an environmental disaster that made Chernobyl look like a coffee spill.

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