Why Don't We Shoot Nuclear Waste Into Space?

Here in the Kotart 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? Nuclear 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 3% 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 toward 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 getting 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. Just 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 1 kg 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 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.

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 35 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 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 kilograms of spent nuclear fuel would be a nightmare for space junk management and satellite collision avoidance. Worse still, at this altitude, there's still 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 further. 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 around 1.5 billion adjusted for inflation per launch—could get about 43.5 tons from the Earth to the moon. So, we'd 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 into the sky in random directions, and you'll get one back eventually. So, we'd 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.

Okay, 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. This means 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's 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.

Nothing works. The thing is, it gets even worse. Problem three: rockets go boom. Rocket engineering has taken huge steps since the Apollo era. We've made them relatively safe. We've mostly replaced the toxic explosive cancer fuels of the past decades with much safer 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 miniature noble, but instead of being contained under a slab of concrete, radioactive particles could make their way to far-away places by riding on the winds.

Most would fall into 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 wouldn't be happy.

Conclusion and opinion part: 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 tons of coal each year leave ash as a waste product that includes about 36,000 tons of radioactive materials—less radioactive than high-level nuclear waste, but there's also a lot more of it and it's 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 2,000 times over the acceptable limit, and this is on top of other toxic chemicals like heavy metals and, of course, their massive CO2 emissions.

And yet, while nuclear energy is flawed and its current form may only be a transitory technology, nuclear power plants are a harder sell than coal. Nuclear waste and the lack of willingness to deal with it are a real issue. It's not insurmountable, though. There are good methods to handle it, like burying it deep underground or reprocessing some of it into new fuel.

But however we ultimately deal with this issue, we hope one thing is clear: shooting nuclear waste into space is one of the worst ideas ever. Researching this crazy thing, conducting all of these important tests, and of course creating this video took us around 2,000 hours, which is insane for a YouTube video, and we couldn't do it without you.

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