If nuclear power is great except for the waste, why not just dump it somewhere other than Earth?

Question

I mean, you could store it and send it to Venus every 10 years or something like that. It's very unlikely that E.T. life would survive on Venus (or an equally harsh planet), so instead of letting it rot on Earth, why not just send it away? Once its half-life is over, it's no longer harmful anyway, right? So the chances of causing any trouble that way is very small.

Answer 1

You are looking at the problem all wrong. Nuclear waste is still usable. Since it is radioactive it must be stored in such a way that keeps it out of the environment until technology finds a method to extract radioactive uranium (and thorium and plutonium). Once this new technology is available, is must be able to be retrieved easily. Also, contrary to another answer, the WIPP site near Carlsbad, NM is not used to store spent fuel, but for products contaminated while using radioactive technology. This includes items such as gloves used during nuclear medicine in hospitals, along with other applications.

Answer 2

The problem with that is the enormous cost of sending it to another planet. It costs approximately $1.3 Billion to send the shuttle into space with an extimated extra payload cost of $196lb, and the cost would be astronomical to send a few thousand tons of nuclear waste along with it. The amount of fuel burnt escaping the gravity well will more than likely cause more eco damage than storing the waste hear on earth.

Edit: Another thing to think about is the possibility of disaster. What would happen if a shuttle carrying nuclear waste exploded in the atmosphere? A global disaster.

Answer 3

Venus would be a very poor choice, as it is one of the most terraformable planets in the Solar system. But shipping it off to the Moon or the sun has been considered and rejected. The reason? What happens if there's a Challenger style accident on the way up? Would YOU want all of that nuclear waste raining down on YOUR head? I think NOT! Better to store it as a ceramic, in the safety of an old salt mine, so we can have access to it if we ever figure out a way to make it safe again.

Answer 4

half life3 for various radioactive elements may be measured in millenia, or days, so just dumping it on another planet isn't really a good idea. even if the half life is just a few weeks, the radiation may never disappear, just become unreadable on an instrument.
as for sending it off planet, the expense is currently beyond the realm of feasability. a single ship could only handle a few thousand pounds at most, but since most radioactive material has a critical mass, it isn't likely to be feasible to send more than a few pounds per flight off planet when the total amount of waste is measured in tens of hundreds of thousands of tons, metric.
a single flight costs in excess of tens of millions of dollars and is not commercially viable. only governments could afford such expenses, but there is none now even willing to consider such an expensive proposition.

Answer 5

Rockets are not entirely reliable. If one blew up, it would spread the nuclear waste throughout the world. An ecological disaster.

Yucca mountain will open in a few years, and solve the nuclear waste issue.

Answer 6

In theory that's possible--and has actually been studied.

But we do not have the spacecraft required--and won't in the near future. Espicially with an administration whose idea of a lunar program is to say "we're going to the moon in 2020"--and then providing no funding--nor provide funding to develop advanced spacecraft.

Answer 7

Half life means the radiation is half of what it was. Still could be dangerous. The salt mines that have built in New Mexico is deep and in a salt mine that has been stable for thousands of years.

Answer 8

Whatever we send up into space has an excellent likelyhood of eventually re-entering our atmosphere in the form of acid raid.
That's why they don't send trash into space.

Answer 9

The danger is that the rocket may explode during take-off.

Answer 10

cause it's cost prohibitive to haul it into space