How loud was it?

It was GREEAAAAtttttttttttt.ttt loud

The main reason is that the risk of space flight doesn’t justify the marginal (if any) benefit.

According to Wikipedia there was 47,000 tons of high level radioactive waste in 2002. I’m too lazy to look up more up to date numbers. If we launched that all into space on F9 heavy rockets it would take 1,807 launches if all the mass was used for waste. That’s using 26 tons capacity to GTO. We would probably want to put the waste in a really strong container that will probably take up 25-50% of the mass needed so now we are up to about 3000 launches.

Since no rocket system is perfect we have to expect some failures. Let’s assume SpaceX gets a 99.9% reliability schedule that means we blow up 3 rockets on launch, spreading 50-75 TONS of high level radioactive waste all over the planet.

Compare that to just letting it sit there and not bother anyone. It’s far better to spend a fraction of the money of 3000 launches on building insanely strong storage areas and just leaving it alone.

Now you are talking socialism.

I agree, they should but my lord would the right explode in furious anger.

It doesn’t matter. Every time I explain this to a conservative they just scream fake news. They can’t wrap their heads around the idea that Republicans actually shut the government down for this specific issue.

The issue with diesel fuel is refining. Back in 2020 Trump negotiated a historic production cut with the US and OPEC+ that extended out to 2022. After that production cut was finalized a number of east coast diesel refineries shut down permanently. The ones remaining are running at 103% of capacity and there is no spare capacity to bring on line.

Refineries historically have been the money losing part of the oil and gas system so there isn’t much financial incentive to build new ones. It’s a systemic infrastructure issue, not a supply issue.

Fun fact, it used to be illegal to export oil from the US up until 2015. The repeal of the Crude Oil Export ban was the negotiating point that republicans used to re-open the government closure they had started.

Exactly and then we removed all financial risk from the companies which let them move right into manufacturing after they designed the formulation.

The speed at which the vaccines were developed was entirely due to taxpayers socializing the financial risk of development. Normal vaccine and medication development takes time because companies have to be cautious prior to paying out the money for large stage III trials. They do smaller studies to make sure it’s worth the financial risk and that usually takes years to get enough people enrolled, do the study, read it out, then get corporate approval to move from stage 0 to stage I then stage II and finally stage III.

For the COVID vaccines the companies had already sold their vaccines to the federal government so they were free to start manufacturing even before the final studies were complete. If they failed the studies taxpayers would have been out a few billion dollars but in exchange we knocked YEARS off of development. In addition so many people actually wanted to be a part of the study they were able to enroll enormous sample sizes extremely quickly. That level of engagement from the public is unheard of in the research world and it allowed a rapid evaluation of the efficacy.

Everyone wants to decry socialism but when it comes to public health socialism beats capitalism any day of the week. Now that the federal funding has dried up be ready for future updates to the vaccine to be much slower and for future monoclonal antibodies to basically disappear.