https://idlewords.com/2006/04/argentina_on_two_steaks_a_day....
Also a big fan of https://idlewords.com/2010/03/scott_and_scurvy.htm
This is among the reason I've thought nuclear waste should be disposed of in space. Send the stuff onto the moon; if future lunar inhabitants want to mine it for plutonium in the naturally radiation-soaked landscape that is the lunar surface, let them.
Congrats; you have come up with a way to make nuclear waste disposal 100x more dangerous and 1000x more expensive!
Reprocessing is very expensive; $1000/kg and up. Launch to space will likely become much cheaper than this as fully reusable launch vehicles become available. Even if the spent fuel must be armored against accident the cost of launching it to LEO, and then to the moon, is likely to become much cheaper than the cost of reprocessing it here on Earth.
Space disposal has the positive advantage that the seven very long lived fission products are removed from the biosphere, along with the very long lived actinides like Np-237.
You don't say.
https://www.centauri-dreams.org/2024/04/17/medusa-deep-space...
I'm a fan of the nuclear lightbulb myself: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gas_core_reactor_rocket#Closed...
Sometimes I think that while it may be appealing to mine gold or platinum or whatever out of the solar system, what people really need to figure out how to do is mine uranium. While I could advocate with a straight face that maybe we need to freak out a bit less about lifting the occasional few dozen pounds of uranium into orbit, and point out that more radioactive material has already been launched than people realize, it is fair to observe that we probably can't afford to make lifting hundreds of pounds of fission fuel into orbit the sort of routine event it needs to be to really have a space civilization. One of the biggest major issues with any sort of space habitation is access to dense energy sources. You can smooth over a lot of other problems and get a lot more slack in the system if you have a lot of energy available to play with. Part of the challenge with current space technology is that you start out on the very edge of feasibility as it is.