Thirty years ago I suggested to my physicist brother-in-law that the long term solution to reactor by-products was to launch them onto a trajectory that would take them into the sun. "That should do it." was his response. The problem then was how to get them safely off the Earth's surface and onto that trajectory. I think it is within our technical capability today to design and build a rail gun that could fire a vitrified projectile onto such a trajectory. Such a system could also serve to cheaply send materials either into low earth orbit, geostationary orbit or to one of the L5 points and could make development of a facility on the Moon sustainable and support asteroid capture and mining. Once acceptable reliability has been demonstrated we would have eliminated a major obstacle to next generation nuclear power plants. The project could be justified on the basis of the waste disposal alone.
 

"It is not necessary to have hope in order to persevere."