Popular Science answers the question of why we don't shoot nuclear waste into space.They concentrate largely on the safety aspects of such an operation, but they entirely neglect the real reason we don't fill rockets full of spent fuel rods. It's the same reason why we don't shovel Delta boosters full of gold and diamonds; they're valuable.
Indeed, that is the real reason why disposing of nuclear waste is so tricky. It isn't that hard to get rid of the stuff if we never wanted it back–just drill into a subduction layer in a tectonic plate and let it slip into the Earth's mantle or drop canisters on the Antarctic ice cap and let them melt through until a mile of ice covers them. Places like Yucca Flats cost a bomb to design and build because it isn't to keep the waste from getting out. It's to keep it safe until we want to get it back.
In fact, the Americans could solve most of their nuclear waste problem if they simply looked in the mirror and repeated after me, "Plutonium is fuel, not waste. Reprocess it, use fast breeder reactors to create more of it and less waste, and use it all to create loads and loads of lovely electricity. What's left over are valuable isotopes, short-half life stuff that decays rapidly, and the left overs can be handled with relative ease."
See? That wasn't so hard, was it?
But, but . . . Michael Douglas and Jane Fonda PROVED nuclear power is bad! It was in a movie so it MUST be true!
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