I'm almost anxious to ask, I know very little about the topic, but I've been wondering if it wasn't a viable option to just shoot the waste into space? I know it's prohibitively expensive to do that as of now, but seeing what they're doing with Spinlaunch..
In addition to the raw costs of moving anything into space, there is the contingency cost of what happens if the launch goes wrong. A new satellite blowing up on the launchpad is bad, but a cargo of nuclear waste exploding a few seconds after liftoff is catastrophic.
I’m sure someone here can do the math, but it takes a lot of energy to get things not just in space, but out of the Earth’s gravity. You don’t want that nuclear waste raining back down. It’s far easier, cheaper, and more fool proof to just bury it deep.
