Lee shannon said:
well if anyone in power could get there heads out of there asses long enough to cough up the required funds we could just fire it off in the general direction of the sun and let it burn up the wast for us
using our current space going capacity and it would require almost no additional infrastructure at all just small high output propulsion system attached to a shielded (shielded against the nuclear radiation getting out and killing the astronauts who brought it into space with them) and a rudimentary guidance system
point it in the right direction and fire
And you have now solved all your nuclear wast problems.
Two problems, one small, one big.
Small: there is no point to disposing of low and intermediate level waste in such an expensive manner. The stuff is pretty harmless even if it does escape, and it simply could be stored above-ground in any of umpteen ways that resist transport for a few centuries.
High level waste is indeed dangerous; hoisting it off-planet not only would be would be expensive, but unsafe as well until some genius works out how to do it with a flat guarantee of nothing falling back to Earth in the wrong form or the wrong place. (Did I hear someone say "Challenger"?)
Big: insisting on permanently sequestering or otherwise disposing of high level material such as spent fuel, whether by permanent sequestration or safe disposal, is criminally short-sighted; the fact that it is no longer suitable for use in the form for which it was fabricated, does not mean that it is not valuable or that it is replaceable or difficult to store safely. The demand that ALL high-level material be so sequestered that no trace or emanation ever could escape and that no one ever could stumble over it in the millions of years that it would take its longest-lived isotopes or products to decay into less harmful forms than say natural potassium is not only unrealistic but irrelevant when the main risks are rather on the scale of decades and the volume of material is tiny, which generally is the case.
Almost the only really biologically dangerous isotope that offers any challenge to contain is tritium, and maybe some Na isotopes, and they are not much of a challenge, given their chemical nature and quantities. Instead of obsessively trying to bury them immediately and forever, the sane thing is to store the material where it can cool down till it is manageable to handle. That isn't terribly challenging; the history of theft of high-level waste is so encouraging that it inspires faith in the progressive improvement of human honesty.
Then why shouldn't we store it (above ground, I reckon, but conveniently in available chambers if someone insists) in a place that presents no marine or volcanic threats and that is reasonably weather-proof? Many desert nature reserves would be perfect. Most unapproachable nuclear hazards or processing or power plants are already de facto reserves. I live near a couple. They are great! And not unique either; ask naturalists that have inspected the evacuated regions round Chernobyl.
It would be important to catalog what is where, against the time that people begin to wonder where to get some of it out again for new use or re-use.
The storage medium should be in a form that could be extracted efficiently, but not rapidly, nor without special equipment, nor in particular inconspicuously. It should be indifferent to earthquake, fire or flood, and in particular to corrosion. Something like hundred-tonne cargo containers with special multiple walls and requiring special tools and much time to breach, and producing long-range distress signals if moved without approval, should do nicely. They even might be powered by waste heat from their own contents. Compared to alternatives such as vitrification (not to mention lifting into space) such storage would be dirt cheap and it all could be used up long before all the important half-lives had expired.
So who needs space launching or deep burial or indeed, long term storage at all? A few centuries should be plenty. Anything likely to survive after that, we could cheerfully burn down to inactivity in a high neutron flux unit.