In effect, shooting radioactive waste into the Sun may cause significantly more damage than it could ever resolve. Nuclear radiation is everywhere. It is created whenever an unstable atomic nucleus doesn't have enough binding energy to contain the nucleus.
The video notes that 11 out of 146 rocket launches in 2021 were failures. This means that rockets carrying nuclear waste could explode during the launch or break apart and crash back down to Earth. The rocket failures could lead to a release of radioactive particles.
The cost is too high
The cost of such a large-scale space mission is bound to be very expensive. In fact, the cost is so high that no space agency will waste time at all considering whether to send nuclear waste on Earth to the sun or the moon.
If you loaded up a rocket with a massive payload, like you might expect for all the hazardous waste you want to fire into the Sun, you'd have to load it up with a lot of rocket fuel, in orbit, to decelerate it sufficiently so that it'd fall into the Sun.
As other answers pointed out, if we just launched a nuke at the surface of the sun and blew it up there, it “would be barely a drop in the oceon. The energy we can add is miniscule.
Lyman said the problem with reprocessing spent nuclear fuel is that it can be hazardous, expensive and time-consuming—taking thousands of years to fully recycle the waste. And there's another big potential problem, Lyman said: Plutonium that can be generated by the process can be used to make a nuclear bomb.
Incineration can be an effective method for radioactive waste disposal but it does have some drawbacks related to managing and storing the ash produced. Incineration combusts or oxidizes wastes at high temperatures, forming ash, flue gas and heat.
No. Not really. According to Jim Clark, a graduate student in aeronautics and astronautics and an avid model rocketeer: “There are more cost-effective ways to deal with nuclear waste.” Indeed, by Clark's calculations, the cost of transporting nuclear waste to the Moon would be high: about $8.5 million per ton.
At the international level, the London Convention and the Barcelona Convention protect our seas from radioactivity. In the USA, Congress passed the Marine Protection, Research and Sanctuaries Act of 1972, also known as the Ocean Dumping Act. This law, as amended in 1977, has made ocean radwaste disposal impractical.
Since the dawn of the civil nuclear power industry, nuclear waste has never caused harm to people. The popular misconception is that because certain parts of nuclear waste remain radioactive for billions of years, then the threat must be sustained for that period. However, this is not the case.
It is arranged in fuel assemblies: sets of sealed metal tubes that hold ceramic uranium pellets. The radioactive byproducts of nuclear reactions remain inside the fuel. No green goo anywhere.
Deep geological disposal is widely agreed to be the best solution for final disposal of the most radioactive waste produced.
Right now, all of the nuclear waste that a power plant generates in its entire lifetime is stored on-site in dry casks. A permanent disposal site for used nuclear fuel has been planned for Yucca Mountain, Nevada, since 1987, but political issues keep it from becoming a reality.
There are a lot of common misconceptions about space junk. Firstly, no, space junk is not radioactive. Lots of people think that objects coming back from space are radioactive, and if you touch it, you may grow extra arms or something. That might be science fiction, but it is not reality.
Microbes are superbly adept at cleaning up radioactive waste, and scientists are leveraging this potential to improve our methods of removing the persistent, insidious material from the environment.
However, the time it will take for the radioactive material to decay will range from a few hours to hundreds of thousands of years. Some radioactive elements, such as plutonium, are highly radioactive and remain so for thousands of years.
The decays occur via quantum tunneling, not thermal activation. So you can't freeze the process to a halt.
There is around 40 trillion tons of uranium in Earth's crust, but most is distributed at low parts per million trace concentration over its 3×1019 ton mass. Estimates of the amount concentrated into ores affordable to extract for under $130 per kg can be less than a millionth of that total.
These important aspects of radiation emited from various radioactive materials can not be changed; they are inherrent to the nucleus that is decaying and can not be "treated away".
Uranium undergoes radioactive decay very slowly. The half-life for U238 is 4.5 billion years. After one half-life, a container that originally held 10,000 kg of pure U238 would be reduced to 5,000 kg of U238, along with approximately 5,000 kg of associated daughter products.
During the period of peak energy output, a 1-megaton (Mt) nuclear weapon can produce temperatures of about 100 million degrees Celsius at its center, about four to five times that which occurs at the center of the Sun.
The Light of the Atom Bomb: In brightness, a nuclear detonation is comparable to the sun.
On July 9, 1962, at 09:00:09 Coordinated Universal Time (11:00:09 pm on July 8, 1962, Honolulu time), the Starfish Prime test was detonated at an altitude of 250 miles (400 km). The coordinates of the detonation were 16°28′N 169°38′W.
Since radiation cannot be seen, smelled, felt, or tasted, people at the site of an incident will not know whether radioactive materials were involved.