> The treated water has been building up because more than 100 tons of groundwater seeps into the wrecked reactor basements every day, mixing with highly radioactive debris.

If you can put 100 tons a day into orbital escape velocity, various governments would love to talk to you.

I would rather not talk to them so I'll keep my secrets to myself :X

Seriously though, obvious and good point. Thank you for calling me out.

I know a guy https://youtu.be/C8JyvzU0CXU

"Shooting it just any direction into space" is overwhelmingly likely to be suborbital, meaning that it will just crash back into Earth somewhere. An orbital trajectory might be safer, but it's probably not what anyone has in mind.

An escape trajectory is in practice impossible for this much mass.

Safer option would be to bury it deep underground. Much ado has been said about this approach due to long-term uncertainty, but even 100-1000 years of safe storage is better than dumping it into the ocean, or having it explode on the launchpad - at least imo. Future us can always go back and improve storage as technology brings new possibilities.

You don't want it to end up on an Earth orbit (let alone a decaying one) so you'll want to give it escape velocity. That's a lot more velocity than usual. And fission byproducts are heavy..

> more than 1.2 million tons of treated water

Good luck with that. That's about 100 times more than the mass of all cargo send into space so far.

Unless the rocket explodes and spreads it everywhere.

Most likely would spread it into the ocean. So same thing as status quo.

(Not like it’s actually a problem FWIW.)

we are talking about 1.2 million tons of water.

It’s about $2-3.000 per kg to launch stuff into out of space.

So it’s about $2.400.000.000.000-3.600.000.000.000, not to talk about the environmental impact of all the rocket fuel being burned in the atmosphere.

But what if the cost is reduced to $10-30/kg (the latter for escape)?

https://youtu.be/C8JyvzU0CXU

I read a book or something online by Michio Kaku where he was passionately against launching any kind of nuclear material because of the possibility of the rocket exploding before reaching space.

How is that in any way realistic?

It is treated water that they're thinking of releasing. Still radioactive, but not Fukushima radioactive.

Yes, but you'd have to get it into space first. Rocket equation tyranny is expensive to get past.

Absolutely not. A Challenger like even would be catastrophic with a payload like that even if the size and weight of the payload would not make it impossible for a liftoff with current technology.

The other part is that there are safe ways of getting rid of the contaminated water on Earth.