[Gibbon1]

I think there is a tendency to think of fuel rods as a problem rather than the solution to a problem, which is raw spent fuel is nasty. The cheapest and easiest way to deal with spent fuel is to store it for decades while the worst of the radio-isotopes decay. Fuel rod technology allows you to do that, a molten salt design doesn't. I'm okay with this argument but is seems to bother people that you can't recover spent fuel now rather than waiting 25 years so they cast about for solutions to what is really a psychological annoyance.

See the quest for reusable launch systems like the space shuttle.

[BendertheRobot]

The cheapest and easiest way to deal with spent fuel is to store it for decades

That is insane.

The best way to deal with waste is to recycle it.

[jccooper]

Waiting for the hottest stuff to go away is part of the recycling process. It's just a very slow part.

[gjem97]

The funny thing about nuclear waste is that it's not the "hottest stuff" you have to worry about. The hottest stuff has a very short half life and disappears relatively quickly. On the other side things like Carbon 14 that have a multiple millennium half life are not radioactive enough to cause much of a problem. It's the stuff that has a half life of about 10 to 1000 years that you have to worry about.