Waitaminnit, waitaminnit, waitaminnit…
If we blast that crap “out into space” we’re taking the risk of REALLY getting our butts kicked by some POed aliens! It’s bad enough we’re leaving junk on Earth for our ancestors to deal with; can you imagine littering up space so our ancestors have to deal with POed aliens?
(why did Gary Larsen have to retire? I can see a whole series of “Far Side” cartoons on this topic!)
~VOW
I was thinking just dump it to the bottom of the ocean. Surely nothing bad would come out of that.
I doubt it would be the reason. Nuclear wastes from some other countries, including Japan, are treated and vitrified in France, in La Hague processing plant, which implies them being shipped from Japan to France and back.
If you reprocess your own wastes, not only you get more energy from the same quantity of original fissible material, but also you considerably reduce the quantity of final wastes you have to dispose of. But if you were to import wastes from a foreign country, you wouldn’t get that much energy from them and you would have to take care of the final wastes. I somewhat doubt it would be a good deal. My wild guess is that it’s probably the main reason explaining that nobody import nuclear wastes to reprocess and use them.
Actually, sending it backwards in time might not be a bad idea. As long as we can send it back far enough (say to the time when the Earth was still a molten mass), our ancestors will never have had to deal with it.