Name: Why Don't We Shoot Nuclear Waste Into Space?
Uploaded: 2022-08-21T16:45:59.000Z
Duration: 10 min 55 s
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Here in the Kurzgesagt 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 is  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.

Nuclear waste is a fuzzy term  and comes in categories which  

vary from country to country. But in  general there are three broad levels:

90% 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.

7% 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 is 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 3% is where our problems begin.

High level nuclear waste is very concentrated  spent fuel taken out of a reactor core. Formerly  

uranium, it is now made of various dangerous and  often highly radioactive elements. As a bonus it  

is 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 tonnes of high level nuclear  

waste each year. Since 1954, we have accumulated  400,000 tonnes 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 yeeting away this  mess. There are a few tiny problems though.

Even though spaceflight is getting  more affordable, it’s still extremely  

expensive. Just to get something into low earth  orbit costs on average about $4,000 per kilogram.  

Putting that into perspective, it costs about  $1600 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 per year.  

To deal with all the 440 operational nuclear  power plants’ high level nuclear waste, would cost  

some $44 billion per year for space launch before  packaging, transport and security costs are added.

Ok let us pretend we don’t care. Currently  we could not 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 tonnes.

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 tonnes 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!

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  casks of spent nuclear fuel would be a nightmare  

for space junk management and satellite collision  avoidance. Worse still, at this altitude there  

still is a little bit of atmosphere causing  a tiny bit of drag, so we might have nuclear  

waste raining down from space within just a few  years. Experts would call this a huge problem.

Clearly, we have to launch our waste farther.  If we wanted to send it to, perhaps, the moon,  

we either need way more rockets or we need to  build much bigger ones. Making it even more  

expensive. A single Saturn V, the rocket used  by the Apollo program, which cost about $1.5  

billion adjusted for inflation per launch, could  get about 43.5 tonnes from the earth to the moon.  

So we would need about 260 Saturn V rocket  launches every year. And of course, using the  

moon as target practice for nuclear-waste  tipped rockets kind of makes a huge mess.

So maybe don’t aim for anything – space  is empty, do we really need a target?  

Shooting waste in any random direction is,  you guessed it, also a bad idea. Orbits are  

loops which means they have a tendency to come  back to where they started. Put enough in the  

sky in random directions, and you'll get one back  eventually. So we would want to launch our nuclear  

waste deep into space, which means we need EVEN  bigger rockets that would be even more expensive.

Not that we would be completely safe then. Earth  might run into these interplanetary caskets at  

some time in the far future and experience a  pretty meteor shower made from radioactive dust.

Ok. But how about we shoot it into the sun?!

Ironically, the sun is pretty hard to hit.  

While the sun has very strong gravity, everything  on earth is moving with respect to the sun,  

including the rockets that we launch,  meaning a rocket would have to ‘cancel  

out’ all the orbital motion it has around  the sun so it can stop orbiting and fall in.

Because of this it is actually easier to  launch a rocket entirely out of the solar  

system than it is to launch it into  the sun. But to do either of these  

things we need even bigger rockets,  probably the biggest we’ve ever built.

Rocket engineering has taken  huge steps since the Apollo era.  

We have made them relatively safe. We’ve  mostly replaced the toxic explosive cancer  

fuels of the past decades with much saner  mixes of liquid oxygen and hydrogen or  

kerosene. The newest designs even land  themselves so that they can be reused.

And yet, Out of the 146 launches in 2021, there  were 11 failures. Which means that a sizable  

number of our rockets carrying high level  radioactive waste would be exploding on the  

launch pad or in the worst case: disassembling at  high altitude or crashing from hypersonic speeds.  

Each failure would be at least equivalent  to a mini-Chernobyl – but instead of being  

contained under a slab of concrete,  spread throughout the atmosphere. 

Radioactive particles could make their way  to far away places by riding on the winds.  

Most would fall in the ocean but some would  land on the inhabited parts of the world.  

They could cover farmlands and get concentrated  into our food, or enter our water supply. Which  

is, well, bad. Imagine regular large scale nuclear  disasters happening. People would not be happy.

Nuclear waste is scary. But the fear  of it and horrible ideas like shooting  

it into space reveals how bad we are at  understanding risk. Because the largest  

amounts of radioactive elements like uranium  and radon are actually released by coal. Burning  

millions of tonnes of coal each year leaves  ash as a waste product, that includes about  

36,000 tonnes of radioactive materials. Less  radioactive than high level nuclear waste,  

but there is also a lot more of it  and it is handled way less carefully.

Some of this ash is caught by filters, but most  is simply pushed back into leaky mines, shoved  

into piles exposed to the wind or poured into  ponds that regularly spill into rivers and lakes.  

Living within 1.6 km of an ash pile  increases your cancer risk up to  

2000 times over the acceptable limit. And this is  on top of other toxic chemicals like heavy metals,  