And if the Rocket pops half a mile off the pad you've got another Chernobyl/Fukushima/Trinity Test fallout area to stay away from.
So realistically you'd have to build a launch facility in the middle of nowhere so if a launch failed there would be minimal societal impact. Which means you have to get the earth's let's say 1000+ tonnes of nuclear waste from all over the planet to that place but moving it also carries a risk of contamination while it's traveling.
Lets say a total payload of 1 tonne meaning you need 1000 launches to get rid of the 1000 tonnes of maaterial - if there is a 1% failure rate in launches that's 10 tonnes of nuclear waste spread across that area...
Oh and looking it up, the current radioactive waste audit says there is 445,000 tonnes of heavy metal fuel waste, and millions of tonnes of additional varying grades of radioactive level waste.
EDIT - In addition to that I've just looked up how many space launches there have been in known human history, it's between 35,000 and 40,000 so assuming we could launch a tonne of waste at a time it's going to take 10 times as many launches than have ever happened to clear the backlog of just the most problematic waste... I don't know how many of those launches were suborbital, orbital and extraorbital but as the aim is the sun a hefty percent of those 40,000 launches to date would not qualify as counting, too...
The realities of launching nuclear waste in to space don't really stack up...
Lol the shooting it into space thing was kind of a joke but yeah who knows it could happen someday. You can get radiation from just being in your basement. As for a failed launch if it failed and the load is properly protected it isnt going to just go everywhere. spent fuel isnt a powder or something it is a super hard Dense rock in a container see below picture of spent fuel.
This is the canister and how the spent fuel is protected.
That little pellet is the uranium pellet that goes in the tube this is the uranium the radioactive component of a nuclear reactor. They go inside of what we call a plug or fuel rod. that little pellet ways 10g when nuclear fission occurs it breaks downon the molecular level and produces gamma's alpha's neutrons in a process called fission(This is different then fussion btw) there are millions inside of a reactor.(This is all on the commercial side btw)
neutrons are absorbed into uranium/plutonium and do 1 of 2 things become stable at the next isotope up or they undergo fission and the neutrons produced in this cycle continue to cause additional fission. When fission occurs the gammas, alphas heat up the transfer medium to extreme temperatures under pressure this heat is then transferred to boilers using the medium weither it be sodium water etc to create stem to rotate turbine generators.
the uranium moecule that split then becomes a biproduct which is constantly decaying to become a stable molecule the most common is cesium-137, xenon-133, and iodine 131 this scale is what types of products can occur some have extremely long half lives. cesium which is the most commonly known one has a 30 year half life(this means in 30 years half of the product will be gone so if you had 2 then now you have 1 etc. it becomes barium-137).
Anyhow back to the process of what happens after the fuel is spent.
It is put into a pool for storage where it will either be reprocessed to usable fuel again or put underground in a storage facility.
They are then put into dry storage casks or other forms of storage and put 300M under the earth's crust. in secure locations. Now you might here things such as "Nuclear waste has 24,000 years of half life." what they are talking about there is Plutonium-239 and a few other rare fission products that can occur. This does not happen very often at all you get about 1.15% of spent fuel as plutonium overall 53% of it being Pu-239 now we might think oh plutonium 239 is awful but actually it is used further when reprocessed as either reactor grade fuel or weapons grade plutonium. so sure we could let it decay for that long or we can use it. i hope this eases your concerns a bit and gives you a bit more education on the subject. pretty much we dont take spent fuel out of a fuel assembly unless we are reprocessing it it stays inside the plugs along with all of their nuclear by products.
As for the 445,000 tons of heavy metal fuel waste 250,000 of that is spent nuclear fuel dating back all the way to the 1950s. The 84000 tons i mentioned earlier is only the united states which none of that fuel has been reprocessed it just sits in their storage facilities underground never to be touched because the United states refuses to acknowledge reprocessing it. I'm sure it will come one of these days which will reduce the amount of waste we have.
If you want to be against nuclear power thats fine like i said to the other guy we can agree to disagree that is way more clean than coal oil etc. I will never agree that putting as much carbon dioxide into the air is better than a little space we use 300 m below the surface to store not completely depleted uranium. if anything destroys this planet those will be the culprit long before nuclear reactors.(Nuclear bombs are not nuclear reactors lets get that straight now)
