Nuclear Waste Storage

What does the United States do with its nuclear waste?
According to the Department of Energy, there is enough spent nuclear waste in the United States to fill a football-field-sized hole 15 feet deep. From a plethora of proposals, scientists and politicians have selected on-site storage as the safest solution for the buildup. But it's a temporary solution. The waste will be fatal to humans and other animals for tens of thousands of years — yet the storage tombs are expected to last only a hundred years.

Wired takes a look at the process we use now and the challenges we'll have to confront in the years ahead. Link

(image credit: Jason Cohn/Wired.com)

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I think putting it into space is too risky and expensive. How about dropping it in a volcano? The waste is very heavy and would swiftly sink in the lava where it would melt and diffuse in the magma layer. You might be able to put it in a streamlined ceramic shell so it does not melt until it is very deep.
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"...so far away that the pieces will never even come remotely close to Earth when you blow it up..."

When we blow up Earth?

Actually, I would just push it into the sun. And yes, we could load the space shuttle with it - those hardly ever blow up.
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It'd be hard to keep track of the pieces if you detonated something in space. Better to just push it toward another large gravitational field so you can find/avoid it later.
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Not to beat a dead horse, but do you guys get how BIG space is? Like Douglas Adams said, "you just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space." Something the size of a football field is insanely tiny in the enormity we're talking about. Seems like if you throw this stuff way the heck out there, I mean really far, so far away that the pieces will never even come remotely close to Earth when you blow it up, there really wouldn't be a problem at all. Sure beats sticking it in the ground for millennia. Am I just crazy?
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