alt Hacker NewsWhy wouldn't they be low? In the limit, if launch becomes operationally similar to air travel, costs will be a few times propellant cost. And propellant is very cheap. LOX is almost free (the second cheapest industrial liquid after water) and liquid methane isn't very expensive either.
Low earth orbit would just be where it's transferred to something to carry it farther out, for example using solar-electric engines.
For all this, remember it isn't done immediately, it's done in (say) 300 years when the short lived fission products are mostly gone.
I think the onus is on you to explain why costs would drop by >3 orders of magnitude (>4 accounting for the 10x launch armor). It’s something like $1500/lb on a fully loaded Falcon Heavy and all indications are that SpaceX isn’t making money at that price.
Plus even if this were free, “shoot 180k tons of nuclear waste into space” seems like a terrible idea in general. It’s one of those ideas that make sense only until you think about the ramifications. What happens when inevitably one of the 3 thousand Falcon heavy rockets explodes and the armor fails and we spread nuclear waste over 3 states?