For what remains after that, well, there's nothing particularly wrong with sticking it in some extremely sturdy armored containers, sticking the containers in a shed, surrounding the shed with a razor-wire fence, and stationing a couple of guards at the gate.
The paranoia over nuclear waste is weird. What if civilization collapses and people in the far future discover the stuff and don't know it's dangerous? It lasts tens of thousands of years, after all! OK, but we leave dangerous stuff all over the place. There are tons of barrels of toxic chemicals, ponds full of poison, and heaps of awful stuff just sitting around, and more being produced all the time. Nuclear waste is bad because it lasts tens of thousands of years? How about arsenic or mercury, which lasts forever? And sure, precautions are taken with those toxins, but not on the "this must be placed in a geologically stable area, packaged to survive the fall of civilization, and signposted so that all future intelligence will know to avoid it" level of precaution.
We have no working waste solution as of today.
We have no working long term storage solution as of today.
We have not priced the cost of long term storage/plant decomissioning etc at the full cost into the price of nuclear power - that is for most countries.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asse_II_mine
http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/dealing-with-ass...
We have no working long term solution for storing arsenic, but people mostly seem fine with "just dispose of it in a way where it doesn't leech into the groundwater" and not the crazy restrictions everyone wants to put on nuclear waste storage.
Can't you protect yourself and go cleanup an arsenic spill "easily" compared to how you would cleanup a radioactive spent fuel rod container which tore open?
IIRC the latter is a real issue currently at Asse in Germany.
Most choices don't get made on the basis of "what would be a better idea?".
What do you mean? The waste is full of nuclear poisons (a technical term, isotopes that stop fission by neutron capture). Reusing it means reprocessing to extract the Plutonium, which is burnable in a reactor (particularly as MOX). The chemistry required for this is pretty messy, and the radioactive environment (fuel from a power station is very 'hot' radioactively speaking) so horrific that you need a fully robotic plant.
This hasn't gone great for the UK, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_Oxide_Reprocessing_Pla...
But we do now have 112 tonnes of Plutonium as a result of our half a century of reprocessing. Which no one knows what to do with, and is an enormous liability.
What to do with the UK's plutonium seems obvious to me: use it as nuclear fuel. If this isn't being done it's presumably because of political opposition, not technical problems.
Not doing that route makes you less exposed to risk.
In an extremely complex world where risk needs to be minimized as much as possible, it's totally reasonable for society to decide not to extract plutonium at mass scale in a free market way.
Sure if the military controlled the whole thing (as they do via their own supply chain) that could perhaps feel more secure... but who controls outflows of waste between governments, etc?
Not doing that route makes you less exposed to risk.
In an extremely complex world where risk needs to be minimized as much as possible, it's totally reasonable for society to decide not to extract plutonium at mass scale in a free market way.
Sure if the military controlled the whole thing (as they do via their own supply chain) that could perhaps feel more secure... but who controls outflows of waste between governments, etc?
Oh and the mind-boggling cost. Who pays?
Nuclear is one of the most expensive forms of energy when you cost in the full price of making it safe, including dealing with waste and ensuring absolutely no proliferation of weapons.
Also, UPower can use the waste without putting it through a chemical separations process. In fact you can just take the SNF grind it up, and dump it into the UPower reactor alongside the rest of the fuel. It actually makes a pretty good fuel that way.
It's 2015, and we remain essentially stuck on 1950s B-Movie era stereotypes on how nuclear works, what it is, and how dangerous it is.