The fact of the matter is, that we can dump all our waste on a couple of football fields worth of space. Or even better: store it in a cave somewhere deep and dark and away from rivers.
My old man worked at TMI. We moved to a new house and one day he set off the radiation monitors going into work. Turns out we had a radon problem. This part of PA isn't exactly coal country, but close enough.
My bro was an auxiliary operator at TMI until a few months ago... shut down.
It's the pinnacle of "perfect is the enemy of good."
Well, not just Earth but from almost everywhere in the solar system (assuming being on an almost circular orbit).
Just imagining the solar system as a bowling ball at the center of a trampoline surrounded by fast moving billiard balls. The problem is probably the speed the earth is moving at, plus the speed we had to get the rocket up to, to get it off earth.
Yes, which is around 30 km/s of delta-v, as compared with only 12 km/s delta-v to boost an object from Earth's orbit (assuming you launch it in the same direction that Earth is traveling) to escape velocity from the solar system.
throw the waste in a bucket strong enough to survive hitting earth at terminal velocitty. place bucket in spacex falcon9 rocket. launch rocket into orbit with escape velocity. watch nuclear waste vanish into vacuum of space forever. if crash, collect bucket and restart with new rocket.
financially costly? yes. solves the 'what about in 5000 years when someone opens it or it leaks?' questions, yes.
Earth is huge. At the rate reactors create waste, the amount of land consumed by storing it is staggeringly low (the higher risks are transportation, which unfortunately the rocket idea doesn't solve unless we build a dedicated rocket site next to each reactor). Low enough to justify the risk-over-time of securely sequestering it instead of throwing it away.
But as others have pointed out, why would you bother with building space based nuclear plants and then converting that energy to light when you could just use the sun?
For economic reasons you pretty much have to use phased array transmitters, with a reference signal from the ground to make it coherent, so if the beam gets repointed it gets a lot more diffuse than that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geostationary_orbit
Except, as the parent noted, very briefly during the equinoxes.
Truth though: I think Gundam 00 showed a shockingly plausible future (sans mechas, most likely) for our planet if we do not get over our reliance on fossil fuels. Global conflict on a scale that makes WW2 look like child’s play is an inevitability if we cannot mitigate the environmental impact and eventual depletion of fossil fuels, and that includes support to help less developed nations move away from them.
For a lot of plants, an anonymous cyberattack could probably do it. That'd be way worse than an attack to geostationary, which very few actors could manage, and probably nobody could pull off anonymously.
Space junk seems a more serious problem:
https://physicsworld.com/a/space-debris-threat-to-geosynchro...
I've seen various proposals to clean it up but it'd take some work.
1. Reprocessing is a better technological solution.
2. That waste is much safer in it's current location in a dry cask in the back lot behind a power plant than it would be on even the safest rocket.
3. Even if we punt waste disposal or reprocessing to future generations, we are still better off stacking waste in dry casks in the back lot behind power plants than burning coal.
But I think the real problem is emotional. People are afraid of mushroom clouds and mutants.
They don't say that because that's not how we're wired. We come up with better sounding arguments to believe. But what need to be solved is the emotional problem.
The fuel itself is just a small part of it.