Some opponents of using Yucca Mountain, Nevada as a nuclear waste repository site have come up with a particularly hare-brained idea: use ICBMs to transport the nuclear waste to the Moon. Even before reading the article I could think of so many things wrong with this stupid idea; I’ll confine myself to just a couple. First of all, there’s the obvious issue of a launch disaster that could conceivably contaminate a much larger area than anything that might possibly happen at the Yucca Mountain site. Secondly, I think that humans might like to visit the Moon again without getting irradiated. Although their plan calls for precisely targeting a crater and burrowing the waste into soft regolith, that’s a lot to ask out of a system that’s supposed to be cheaper and more reliable than earth-based solutions. Granted, the moon has no atmosphere with which to distribute radioactive material from the crash site area, but it’s not like a missile slamming into the moon is going to bury itself nicely under 30 feet of soil without any sort of explosion! Designing any sort of terminal guidance system to automatically land and bury the waste will almost certainly be prohibitively expensive. Although this plan adroitly sidesteps the NIMBY syndrome encountered any place even studied as a possible disposal site, the potential for permanently contaminating our nearest satellite neighbor makes this a pretty dumb idea in my opinion.