"In Finland the world’s first permanent repository is being hewn out of solid rock - a huge system of underground tunnels - that must last 100,000 years as this is how long the waste remains hazardous."
It was eye opening.
Fourth generation reactors (and thorium reactors) do improve the situation considerably (eg, 2 orders of magnitude less waste than a conventional reactor, and the waste stays around hundreds of years instead of tens of thousands[1]).
However there is an existing set of reactors that will be in use for decades, and their waste needs storage. There are also existing "temporary" storage facilities that need better long-term solutions.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorium-based_nuclear_power#Po...
Why not just turn the waste storage sites into reactor farms?
That would sidestep the problems stemming from decentralization and probably achieve some economies of scale too. Maybe smelt some aluminum with the energy. But even if you essentially threw the energy away, it might be useful as purely a waste cleanup solution.
And isn't the fact that they'd be "spec ops" caliber guards reflect that there is in fact a security risk with these materials getting into the wrong hands? If so it seems like a committed enemy could attack one of the thousands of these sites successfully. The distributed model seems problematic.