Gorbachev once speculated that it was actually Chernobyl that brought down the USSR.
I personally wonder if it’s also why we’re going to have a climate catastrophe.
Current thinking is that the best approach to long term disposal is to find a cold hard-rock mountain where nothing has changed much in millions of years. Dig tunnels that are far above any possible flooding. Drill vertical holes in the tunnels. Package the nuclear waste in stainless steel thimbles, with the waste embedded in ceramic. Place thimbles in holes. After a few decades of nothing happening, fill in the tunnels.
Sweden and Finland, which have lots of stable, isolated hard rock mountains, are working on this. So is China, which now has two vitrification plants for nuclear waste.
The incidence rate of people inclined to terrorism is vanishingly low. And when you start talking about plots that require numerous people to cooperate, rather than a single lonewolf nut, there is even less to worry about. The more people a plot requires, the less likely it is to actually happen. Coordinated attacks against nuclear power plants or waste disposal facilities are fantasy.
There's some temporal sampling bias, here.
The threat of terrorism was huge and salient in 2002, and a lot of NRC regulations were updated at that time. It was less obvious in 2010. Here in 2021 it's hardly a threat at all. If we see another 9/11-scale attack this decade you can bet that will change.
Ceramics, though, hold up well over millenia. The oldest ceramic pot known is 16,500 years old.
One can hope. "Gen III" fission reactor construction is coming along, mostly in China. Sanmen Nuclear Power Station has two Gen III reactors, designed by what's left of Westinghouse. Future versions are being entirely designed in China.
Most of the "small cheap reactor" concepts are arguments for why they don't need a containment vessel. That's probably not going to sell. Chernobyl wasn't supposed to need a containment vessel, and didn't have one. Fukushima didn't have a big enough one. Three Mile Island did have a good containment, which is why that meltdown was expensive, but didn't cause much trouble outside the plant.
Chernobyl, too, sure, but if Hiroshima hadn't already shown the terrible risks of "nuclear", I think it would have mattered a lot less.
Lftr can use old waste for fuel or breed yo usable fuel.
Transport of spent fuel rods is a legitimate problem.