Nuclear waste "recycling" is a bit of a misnomer. If you read the article, the fuel rods, and that is the only part that is being "recycled", is just a small pa

Nuclear waste "recycling" is a bit of a misnomer. If you read the article, the fuel rods, and that is the only part that is being "recycled", is just a small part of the contaminated material that needs to be handled. You're not recycling the reactor rubble, the contaminated water or soil. And reprocessed nuclear fuel is not like recycled glass or aluminum that can be reused an almost infinite number of times - nuclear fission always produces waste products like iodine or cesium, which cannot be turned in to fuel again and need to be disposed of. Even when you leave out the fuel, dismantling a nuclear reactor is a challenge in itself. Even the "safe" thorium and potential fusion reactors leave highly contaminated ruins behind. Read about the THTR-300 if you're interested. The German AVR reactor is also a dirty mess that nobody knows how to clean up, even though no major nuclear incident happened there. When thinking of nuclear waste, most people think of spent fuel rods - plutonium and uranium. Those are easy to handle, they're solids, they're comparably small and you put them into molten glass. But storing an entire contaminated reactor building, that we don't know how to do other than do like Chernobyl and just cast the whole thing in concrete.