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Comment by brunes | Hacker News Reader

The cost to store nuclear waste is $600 / kg

When Starship is fully operational the expected cost to launch payload will be $20 / kg

IE you can have a 30x margin of error and still just launch the nuclear waste into space.

I agree with more nuclear but blasting waste (at least highly radioactive) to space is a problem as there's always a risk the rocket explodes and spreads the radiation on earth. At least I've always understood that's the objection and seems to me reasonable. Yucca mountain type solutions seem more palatable.

You encapsulate the waste so it survives any accident. This adds some weight, but not an enormous amount of weight.

If you can encapsulate the pellets to the point that they can survive getting blown out of orbit, catching fire and raining down over the human population without causing any harm - you can encapsulate them and throw them into Yucca Mountain and save the whole exiting earth step.

Except no, those are not the same thing. Stuff in the repository, for example, is exposed to a much higher cumulative radiation dose, which causes huge and unacceptable changes in many materials.

I'm not sure that's relevant to the broader argument I am making. Don't blast waste into space. It carries with it dramatically higher costs - and drastically higher risks. It's completely untenable according to every study and paper on the matter.

Again, selecting a geographic area away from humans and providing sufficient demarcation is dramatically safer than putting it into a rocket and flying it up into orbit over humans. If you disagree, cite a source on its feasibility - and one on the lack of feasibility of deep geological sequestration. Let's not shoot from the hip on this one. I know I haven't found any.

It's untenable with current launch vehicles. Do you think current launch vehicles are the sine qua non of launcher technology, for centuries into the future? We don't have to shoot stuff into space right this moment.

Thanks. Where does that number come from?

Despite his Twitter account, Musk is not the savior for everything. However, maybe he would like to be blasted into space on the first journey to Proxima Centuri? If anyone can do it, he can!

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