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Here in the Cortexart Labs, we test very important ideas to see what happens when you blow things up or play with black holes. Many of you suggested that we look into an idea that sounds reasonable: shooting nuclear waste into space. It’s one of those concepts that seems like an easy fix for one of the main problems with nuclear energy, but it turns out this idea is not just bad, but horribly bad and it gets worse the longer you think about it.
Why is that? What is nuclear waste? Clear waste is a fuzzy term and comes in categories which vary from country to country, but in general there are three broad levels. Ninety percent is low level nuclear waste - tools, gloves, or trash used at a nuclear facility that could be weakly contaminated with some short-lived radioactivity. This stuff is generally safe for normal disposal. Seven percent is intermediate level nuclear waste - mostly materials that have been in close proximity to a reactor core long enough to become dangerously radioactive. With proper handling, it’s either safely buried or melted down and mixed into glass or concrete and stored deep underground. So, 97% of nuclear waste is similar to toxic byproducts from other industries - not great, not terrible, we can handle it.
The remaining three percent is where our problems begin - high-level nuclear waste is very concentrated spent fuel taken out of a reactor core, formerly uranium. It’s now made of various dangerous and often highly radioactive elements, as a bonus, it’s also incredibly hot and not easy to handle at all. This is what we want to shoot into space.
All in all, around 440 active nuclear reactors create about 11,000 tons of high-level nuclear waste each year. Since 1954, we’ve accumulated 400,000 tons of dangerous radioactive waste. Most countries are dealing with it by not dealing with it and kicking the can towards the future. Great, so let’s launch it into space!
According to scientists, space is big and nobody lives there, so it seems perfect for eating away this mess. There are a few tiny problems though. Problem one - stuff ain’t cheap. Even though space flight is getting more affordable, it’s still extremely expensive to get something into low earth orbit - costs on average about $4,000 per kilogram. Putting that into perspective, it costs about $1,600 to mine, separate, and fabricate one kilogram of nuclear fuel. So, launching waste into space has suddenly made nuclear fuel for reactors way more expensive and greatly increased the cost of the electricity they produce. To launch one reactor’s worth of nuclear waste would cost at least $100 million dollars per year. To deal with all the 440 operational nuclear power plants, high-level nuclear waste would cost some $44 billion dollars per year for space launch before packaging, transport, and security costs are added.
Okay, let’s pretend we don’t care. Currently, we couldn’t shoot all the nuclear waste into space even if we wanted to - there just aren’t enough rockets in 2021. We saw a record 135 launches into space. If we repurposed each of those rockets and filled them all with nuclear waste, the total amount that could be lifted into a low earth orbit - which is the closest orbit above the atmosphere - is nearly 800 tons. We’d need at least 14 times more rockets to handle just today’s nuclear waste, let alone get rid of the hundreds of thousands of tons in temporary storage. We would need to create entire new space industries to keep up with the demand for giant toxic space trash trucks. And it gets worse - problem two - space is hard. We only made the calculation for low earth orbit, where we send most of our rockets and satellites. Littering the space around Earth with thousands of casts of spent nuclear fuel would be a nightmare for spacemen and women and their equipment. The radiation from the nuclear waste would be incredibly dangerous, and even if it somehow avoided all the satellites and people, the fuel would still need to be stored safely and securely for thousands of years.