Just the RP-1 & LH2 fuel cost would be around $600,000 per launch[1], so about 222 billion USD per year (The fuel is the cheapest part of the launch). Each launch releases around 440,000 kg of CO2[2] into the atmosphere. That's 163Mt, an increase of 44% of the UK's current CO2 pollution from the launches alone.
Just for fun, if we wanted to send all nuclear waste all the way to pluto using only Falcon Heavies we'd have to launch around 1.8 per second. Going off the 80 million USD price tag for these launches, that's 4.5 quadrillion USD. That's about 60 times the Gross World Product to cover the UK alone.
[0] https://nda.blog.gov.uk/2017/04/03/how-much-radioactive-wast... [1] https://www.quora.com/How-much-fuel-does-it-take-to-travel-t... [2] https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/13082/calculate-fa...
Otherwise here's a good discussion on the viability of space guns: https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/2370/what-technolo....
Because of the extremely high energy density of nuclear fuel, the amount of waste produced per Gigawatt-year of electricity generated is very small.
A Saturn V has a payload of 140 Mt to low earth orbit. Total high-level waste is 22,000 cubic meters, possibly 220,000 Mt, assuming a density 10 times as great as water. 1,572 Saturn V launches would carry away all of that. All the high-level waste ever produced that has not been recycled. Most of it can be recycled in breeder reactors, so there is no need to carry it away!
What I remember of his explanation was the point that if you launch a payload of material into space, you have essentially placed that payload in an elliptical orbital path, one that intersects earth's elliptical path. And since orbits are periodic, that payload is going to be intersecting earth's orbit regularly, meaning that in this instance, the chance of the material coming right back into the atmosphere is quite high.
So to me the "let's get it off the planet" idea is an overreaction. Radioactive material just need to be handled with common sense.
You get a little radioactive steam surely...but eventually turns into radioactive dust...
As an aside, ignorant physics question, does the half-life of something decrease with heat? Like does more beta-decay mean it gets to safe levels faster?
Maybe a few years in between tectonic plates would do a planet good eh?
Short answer: No. Definitely not in a Volcano.
Long Answer:
Decay rates are ultimately determined by the subatomic structure of the nucleus. This is why different chemicals, and different isotopes of said chemicals, will decay differently. A lone neutron will decay after about 15 minutes (which is a long time in subatomic scales), however, the two neutrons in (4/2)He will happily stick around forever.
So melting a material won't have any impact on the structure of the nucleus, you're just disassociating the intramolecular bonds; same goes for turning said material into a gas.
If you were to raise the temperature high enough, and we're talking sun-like (not the measly 5000k that you get on the surface, I mean like 27-million degrees you find in the core), then you'll actually start stripping and fusing nuclei, which will at that point change (but not necessarily decrease) the radioactive rates of whatever material you started with.
A "subduction zone" is where two tectonic plates collide and fold into the depth of the planet. So anything you bury there would naturally travel deeper into the planet over the eons.
I haven't heard any serious arguments against this, but I suspect it's impossible because people think it would "contaminate the oceans".
For comparison, lead has a density of 11.34 g/cm^3.
It's heavy.
But if instead you just launched it into space on a rocket... well what happens when a launch fails and the rocket blows up on the launch pad? If you’re lucky, you mark a few square miles as no-go zones and then move on to the next launch pad? Doesn’t strike me as a sustainable solution.
One of my favorite ideas is to encase the waste into giant glass blocks, and build pyramids in the desert... but I doubt that’s very practical either.
We have succesfully used a "Slingshoot" approach to put heavy things up to 100t in the space many times. Hubble telescope (12t) or the orbiter from the space shuttle (100t) fall in this category.
We could split our waste in chunks of 500Kg, pack it really well and just put it in an orbiter; the problem is that we can't go really far with this system (around 500 Km or so). We just will put the waste in a low orbit where things can fall again into the earth sonner or later. We had the Thiangong-1 case in 2018.
Thus this "solution" after a few years would be the same as dumping the waste into the sea, but in a very expensive and creative way.
