You hear all the time about how there's thousands of tons of high level radioactive waste and that sounds scary and huge but really when you're talking about th

You hear all the time about how there's thousands of tons of high level radioactive waste and that sounds scary and huge but really when you're talking about the scale of an entire country that's absolutely peanuts. I do think the way we handle nuclear waste in America needs to be overhauled but even just deep burial in long term casks would be sufficient. The only chance of someone accidentally digging one up is contingent on such a massive loss of knowledge and continuity of society that it would have to be an apocalyptic event. But if you're interested in other approaches that could be taken nuclear waste is primarily U-238 and Plutonium. Rather than bury it all the waste can be reprocessed to extract usable fuel and depleted Uranium from the waste which reduces the amount of waste to deal with by about 90%. Another thing commonly repeated is that nuclear waste has a half life of tens of thousands of years. This is wrong, isotopes have half lives, nuclear waste does not. Nuclear waste is a toxic soup of different isotopes, some short lived, others long lived. As the isotopes spontaneously fission the concentrations in the waste change. 10kg of nuclear waste on day 1 is immensely more radioactive than 10kg of nuclear waste on day 1,000,000. Fresh nuclear waste has substantially higher amounts of short lived isotopes which is why when spent fuel is removed from a reactor it has to be stored in a cooling pond for a long time before it can be stored in a cask. Radioactivity has an inverse relationship with the half live, short lived isotopes are extremely radioactive and extremely long lived isotopes are barely radioactive. If you wanted to go further than just reducing the amount of waste you can actually burn up waste so to speak. If you bombard it with tons of neutrons (like from a fusion reactor hopefully in the long term) you either split the fissile isotopes or breed them into a different isotope. Just by processing our waste we could split the waste into stuff that has a short half life that you would just let decay naturally, stuff that has a long half life that can be buried without any real concerns about someone building a dirty bomb with it, and stuff in between that could potentially be burned up in a reactor or just buried in more secure facilities like what Yucca mountain was supposed to provide.