What are scientific and ethical problems with long term disposal of radioactive waste materials?
The problem is that radioactive waste is extremely dangerous to all life for around 100,000 years. Building a secure place where the waste can be kept for such a long period of time is a very difficult task, mostly because no man-made structure has ever lasted anywhere near that long. On top of that it is nigh on impossible to guarantee that nobody in the distant future will come across the storage facility and attempt to open it (not knowing, or not understanding how dangerous it is). There lies the ethical problem because, by locking away the waste, you are endangering future people (people who had no say over how to deal with the waste). Of course, alternatively you could launch the stuff into space, but then you run the risk of our waste crash landing on some other planet and ruining it (perhaps even killing alien life, if there happened to be any there). I would recommend watching a documentary called “Into Eternity” (sometimes known as Nuclear Eternity). It was available to watch
There are no real scientific problems .. low level waste is no more toxic than the original Uranium that was dug out of the ground .. as for high level, it’s largely a matter of first extracting all the ‘useful’ bits and then mixing the rest with glass (or a similar substance) to stop it ‘sloshing around’ and ‘leaking’ some-where you would rather it didn’t (and then burying it eg. at the bottom of a few 5km deep mine shafts & sealing it with concrete)). The issues are all ‘political’ = it’s almost impossible to even get permission to move the stuff, let alone process it or bury it. Suggestion that it be ‘launched it into space’ just show how insanity paranoid people have become about such things … Nuclear waste is not going to lead to the end of humanity (the FEAR of Chernobyl has killed tens of thousands of people – whilst the radiation has directly killed (at most) a few hundred …) So you have the EXTREMELY HAZARDOUS situation of high level waste being kept in ‘ponds’ next to Nuc
