Already in 1999 Sen. Pete Domenici (R-N.M.) suggested that the spent fuel should be transmuted. http://www.lasvegassun.com/news/1999/aug/06/domenicis-plan-could-contain-yuccas-fate/ After transmutation the waste needs to be stored some 300 years instead of 100 000 years. The main reason for the long time is the transuraniums. http://www.ornl.gov/~webworks/cpr/pres/109121_.pdf In 1999 the best solution was assumed to be accelerator transmutation of the waste, but nowadays a better technology is just to burn the waste in a reactor. It could be an http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integral_Fast_Reactor using metal as coolant or http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molten_salt_reactor using salt.
Sooner or later, the plasma physics problems of thermonuclear vessels will be mastered, and plasma processing of fissile fuel will become possible. Then we will be able to handle this waste more effectively than simple long-term storage.
Unfortunately, that time is not yet visible on our horizon, to my chagrin, so storage is the way to handle the need.
Yucca Mt should have been commissioned long ago to accomplish that. Clinton and Reid are responsible for this failure.
Thanks for the pings.
The “green” movement are actually those who are devoted to our destruction; it is and has been bankrolled by foreign powers devoted to our destruction; it will always be devoted to our destruction.
Nuclear energy produces deadly waste that stays deadly for a long while, but the French breeder reactors were one way of dealing with the waste. Naturally that has never been tried here. The Germans developed the safer (though less efficient) pebble bed technology, only to cast it away in the face of a rising wave of “green” politics.