Nuclear fuel waste is much less dangerouns than many other substances created in industrial chemical processes, and occur in much smaller amounts. Managing that is a non-problem compared to other hazardous waste. That people are afraid of radioactive waste and aren't of what their friendly neighbourhood chemical plant produces is pure FUD.

Not exactly, unfortunately. (I am as pro-nuclear as one could be). However, all chemical waste can be neutralized and reprocessed (though this might be expensive to do so). Some nuclear waste can't be reprocessed and has to be stored safely for hundreds of years. This scares some people.

However, it's not _that_ dangerous. Even if containment is breached, it generally stays in the same place and can be collected and put back (happened a lot of times).

> Even if containment is breached, it generally stays in the same place and can be collected and put back (happened a lot of times).

Asse II springs to my mind: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asse_II_mine An old salt mine used to store low/medium radioactive waste that's under threat of collapse due to ground water. There are plans for the retrieval, but success is far from guaranteed.

This might be a dumb question, but is there any reason other than costs that we couldn't eventually just blast unrecycleable nuclear waste off into the sun/space? There must be an inflection point where the cost of storing the hazardous material safely on earth is more expensive after a period of time than just sending it out of orbit on a space elevator/ICBM.

Sending things to outer space is crazily expensive in terms of fuel; the same holds if you aim for the Sun - the common idea that it's easy is very wrong. The Earth is moving around the Sun at 30km/sec, you need to burn off most of that velocity to actually hit it. For leaving the Solar System, the Internet provides the value of around 40km/sec. You can get most of those speeds by clever use of slingshot maneuvers though, and this is the way we usually do missions to outer planets.

Also, honestly, I don't see the point. The amount of nuclear waste we produce is minuscule compared to other equally or more dangerous chemical substances. Besides wasting perfectly good rocket fuel, destroying it this way would rob us of opportunity to reuse it in the future - hell, we already know how to reprocess some of the spent nuclear fuel for next-gen fission reactors!

1) Breeder reactors are reducing the amount of spent fuel to store about 100x. Existing nuclear waste can also be reprocessed.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breeder_reactor#Waste_reductio...

2) What monster could be left by stone-age people to us that modern technology couldn't handle?

Modern spent fuel processing methods are great and quite safe (vitrification / underground disposal). I can't imagine a newsworthy worst case scenario with vitrified containers.

1) Sodium-based breeder reactors are terrifying, and considered by most to be a dangerous failed experiment: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breeder_reactor#Breeder_reacto...

2) As long as we assume that society continues on its current trajectory forever, then yes, there's nothing to worry about. But if it's true that we're in the twilight years of US dominance or relevance as a world power, then we could be in for a significant period of upcoming political/economic turmoil.

So here's another way to look at it: How would the monks and agrarian fiefdoms of the middle ages been at handling a monster leftover by the Romans?

"Caring for" meaning simply not entering the tomb labeled "This is not a place of honor"?

Thousands of years is a really long time, especially when you look at how awful people are at learning the lessons of just a generation or two ago.