Shorter term (e.g. next century or so) there's also the easy option of just storing it somewhere safe and keeping an eye on it. There's so little of the waste, by volume, that it's not too hard to manage. The advantages of this scheme are:
1. It's easy. It's what we're doing right now.
2. It lets us recycle the slightly used fuel that comes out of our reactors.
Nuclear waste is not useless. Waste from conventional reactors is mostly usable as fuel, but mining it is cheap enough that this recycling isn't economically compelling yet. Our nuclear waste stockpile can be thought of as a strategic nuclear fuel reserve: a valuable resource set aside for the future.
I think I can answer that: here in australia, we have a lot of experience with all aspects of the nuclear industry, and decades of research and concerted policy development has finally led to a world class program to manage our small but significant legacy of radioactive wastes, that sets a standard : We're building a dirt track to a remote arid region, where the aboriginal traditional owners of the land are geographically isolated, politically underrepresented, and economically disadvantaged. Some fringe commentators try to make something out of the risk of transporting a range of materials (from contaminated soil to reprocessed fuel rods) through a jurisdiction that suffers an uncommon level of collisions and derailments, has minimal emergency service capacity and is the epicentre of the single greatest earthquake event in the southern hemisphere - but these concerns are effortlessly overrun by the brute application of raw political power. We're gonna build a shed at the end of the dirt road, and surround it with razor wire. What could go rong?
