It can be, quite effectively. Nuclear waste is more or less a solved issue from a technical standpoint, with the caveat that there are a lot of gotchas but the

It can be, quite effectively. Nuclear waste is more or less a solved issue from a technical standpoint, with the caveat that there are a lot of gotchas but the general concept is well understood and several other countries do it to some degree. With regard to the USA, we don't do it for two reasons. First is political, which that the recycling process is highly susceptible to weapons proliferation. While that's not a problem in the US per se (since we're a treaty nuclear weapons state), there was a ban put on reprocessing in the US because we didn't want it to become widespread due to the proliferation risk. Remember that pretty much all policy regarding nuclear energy was totally subservient to policy regarding nuclear weapons up until like the 1990's. Second is economic. Uranium is cheap as chips and it'd require a big investment to move to reprocessing. We will probably do it some day though, the general sentiment in the nuclear community is that reprocessing is a much better route than ultra long-term geological repositories.