Can we dispose of nuclear waste in outer space?

Rockets can and do fail. The failure of a rocket carrying nuclear waste could be very significant.

Yes , but you've to stay up there with waste , cause it was your idea.

Sorta like Guardian of the Waste.

**** rockets, what we'd need is a space elevator to a space station and then to move it on from there.

Sure why not? We've screwed up our own planet so we might as well see what other parts of the universe we can screw up now.

No need. All levels of nuclear wast can be stabilised by incorporating them in what amounts to a synthetic rock which has a similar chemical composition to natural rocks, some of which have remained stable for over 2 billion years. The process is called Synroc. It's used at sellafield, Argone national laboratory in the US and in Australia.

If nuclear energy were the only source of electricity that powered your entire life, all of the nuclear waste generated from that could be contained in a piece of Synroc the size of a can of soup.

Deep below the earths surface, in many places, are thick layers of salt formed from evaporating oceans, hundreds of millions of years ago. These layers of salt are utterly impermeable to anything, even hydrogen, whose molecules are so small that they can pass through many solids under pressure. Some of these layers of salt have remained stable for 300 million years.

It would be quite easy to deposit nuclear waste in the form of Synroc, in such salt deposits several km below the surface. Such waste would be safely dealt with for probably hundreds of millions of years. The Synroc itself might be stable for billions of years, like the rock it copies.

Ah give over you, ya misery. We'd still be in the cave if it were up to you.

But no, rockets are too unreliable yet for dangerous and toxic payloads.

If a safer system is developed though, shooting waste of any sort into deep space is definitely worth consideration.

Sorry for suggesting that we should be vaguely socially responsible with the limited resources on the planet that keeps us alive.

Mayor Quimby level thinking is obviously alive and well.

You're not, youre suggesting we shouldn't pollute space, which is irrelevant, as space is one big radiation pit anyway and so nothing humans could send up there could make it any more hostile.

Apology accepted anyway.

just launch it further, it'll be grand...

You'd need him doing it as a full time job. There's a lot of nuclear waste out there and its also surprisingly hard to actually get something to crash into the sun. You can't just throw it at the sun because it carries the earth's orbital velocity and it would miss and end up in a highly eccentric orbit that could end up anywhere

Superman would need to take a few maths classes and swot up on orbital dynamics

If the people doing the estimate only looked at Switzerland, then that could be true. But even a small storage area going faulty, could be a disaster for millions of people.

How much nuclear waste is in the world right now?

In brief. More than a quarter million metric tons of highly radioactive waste sits in storage near nuclear power plants and weapons production facilities worldwide, with over 90,000 metric tons in the US alone.30 Mar 2020

Not a single person has died as as a result of nuclear waste storage. Using hyperbole is just stupid. Planes can crash killing lots of people, non nuclear industrial accidents kill thousands every year. Gas explosions have killed many thousands of people and yet we will continue to put up with the risks associated with all these.

Nuclear waste is benign compared to many other things.

Even taking chernobyl into account, the attributable deaths for nuclear energy are miniscule and vastly les than for almost every other source of energy production. The figures are about the same as for wind and solar, and chernobyl's aftermath was not nuclear waste.

As for your other false claim:

And in Australia, they built a nuclear medicine facility that produces radio isotopes for use in Australian hospitals that also includes a synroc processing section that takes all of Australia's nuclear waste and transforms it into synroc:

Looks pretty real for something that doesn't exist.