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Comment by atemerev | Hacker News Reader

Not exactly, unfortunately. (I am as pro-nuclear as one could be). However, all chemical waste can be neutralized and reprocessed (though this might be expensive to do so). Some nuclear waste can't be reprocessed and has to be stored safely for hundreds of years. This scares some people.

However, it's not _that_ dangerous. Even if containment is breached, it generally stays in the same place and can be collected and put back (happened a lot of times).

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> Even if containment is breached, it generally stays in the same place and can be collected and put back (happened a lot of times).

Asse II springs to my mind: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asse_II_mine An old salt mine used to store low/medium radioactive waste that's under threat of collapse due to ground water. There are plans for the retrieval, but success is far from guaranteed.

This might be a dumb question, but is there any reason other than costs that we couldn't eventually just blast unrecycleable nuclear waste off into the sun/space? There must be an inflection point where the cost of storing the hazardous material safely on earth is more expensive after a period of time than just sending it out of orbit on a space elevator/ICBM.

Sending things to outer space is crazily expensive in terms of fuel; the same holds if you aim for the Sun - the common idea that it's easy is very wrong. The Earth is moving around the Sun at 30km/sec, you need to burn off most of that velocity to actually hit it. For leaving the Solar System, the Internet provides the value of around 40km/sec. You can get most of those speeds by clever use of slingshot maneuvers though, and this is the way we usually do missions to outer planets.

Also, honestly, I don't see the point. The amount of nuclear waste we produce is minuscule compared to other equally or more dangerous chemical substances. Besides wasting perfectly good rocket fuel, destroying it this way would rob us of opportunity to reuse it in the future - hell, we already know how to reprocess some of the spent nuclear fuel for next-gen fission reactors!

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