Nuclear power plants don’t just produce “waste”, they produce uranium that’s mixed with various isotopes that don’t help sustain fission reactions. While all of

Nuclear power plants don’t just produce “waste”, they produce uranium that’s mixed with various isotopes that don’t help sustain fission reactions. While all of this waste is “hot” the amount and makeup of the various waste product varies based on reactor design. There are two things that can be done with the waste. First, not all of the nuclear fuel is consumed. The fuel is spent when enough waste has built up to slow fission, which isn’t the same as the fuel being gone. You can re-refine spent rods to reclaim usable fuel and put it back into the reactor. Second, the real dangerous waste isotopes are the cold ones which produce a little radiation but will do so for millennia. So you can shovel those into a subcritical reactor[0] and hurry the stuff along to non-radioactive metals like lead, all while making some electricity to boot. 0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subcritical_reactor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subcritical_reactor