This is exactly the reason I think Richard Nixon’s 1973 plan for “1000 nuclear power plants by the year 2000” would have been so impactful for us. It’s hard to get good at only building a handful of something.
A thousand! We’d be so rich in carbon free energy we’d be exporting it to Canada and Mexico and still have hundreds of GW left over to, I dunno, produce hydrogen 24/7 for other uses.
We could decarbonize our grid today with only something in the vicinity of ~200 new plants. This is entirely doable. France showed how it’s done in the 80s. It’s sad we can’t start now.
Unfortunately that was a very different regulatory era for nuclear development than we have today, so who knows if it would be feasible. Watergate happened not long after that declaration, and one of Gerald Ford’s first major acts as replacement President was signing the Energy Reorganization Act of 1974, to split the Atomic Energy Commission (responsible for both civilian and military nuclear development) into the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (responsible for regulating civilian nuclear power) and the Energy Research and Development Administration (responsible for supporting military nuclear development).
To be fair those are completely different things. Commercial needs a profit and uses low enriched material. Military is not concerned with profit and uses highly enriched material.
I am not as familiar with the commercial side but I can say the military model is safe as all get out and produces less waste since you only need to refuel ever few decades or so.
Also NRC is very much still involved with Military applications, which at this point just involves moving expensive war ships around.
To godelski point yes there is low level stuff that really isn't a concern except to jandrese's point it's political. If I walk out of a reactor room and my gloves from my contamination suit pop too high they get put in a bag that is marked nuclear waste.
Granted the too high mark could still be perfectly fine to throw into a landfill and not impact anything, but nobody wants that in their neighborhood.
As to high level stuff which is what you are asking about, the spent stuff is really hot. To recycle, it would need to cool down first. Commercial plants place that in cooling pools, which is kind of bad if you have a Tsunami hit your plant (Japan), our something else.
So as to the waste element think I have 2% enriched object that is 100 cubic meters. The same in a highly enriched say 90% would only be about 2 cubic meters. This means my pools would be smaller, my overall size is smaller, and I can contain the smaller pool easier preventing the release.
On the politics side the idea of highly enriched is dangerous because it could be used for other purposes, however when those decisions were made I don't think anyone every imagined the concept of a dirty bomb in which enrichment is really going to matter one bit.
Due to some logistics complexities recycling fuel doesn't make as much economic sense as it does for places like France. Though if we did have 1000 plants it would make a lot of sense haha.
But besides that there is always waste. The key part is understanding what level of waste. There's a fair amount of low level waste (low radiation levels). In fact, this is like 90% of total waste (even more if you count my volume). But this type of waste is not the kind people are typically concerned with because it isn't radioactive for long nor is it producing dangerous levels. These types are not really recyclable though (concrete, steel beams, etc).
I do suggest reading up on our own AcidburnNSA's post about waste[0]
Recycling used fuel still doesn't make much sense. It's very expensive to recycle and new nuclear fuel is cheap. Storing the waste isn't technically difficult either. The total quantity of waste is tiny, but politically it's very difficult to deal with.
France delivered 50% of their nuclear cores (the 900MW model) between 1980 and 1985. It isn’t very good because they will all EOL at the same time. I hope Nixon’s plan would have been to streamline and spread their production, which then becomes extremely efficient, a bit like our P’4 in this graph:
e: I misremembered; it was actually 1000 by 1980