Comment by IAmBroom

Most of your post is accurate, but:

> Nuclear waste can be reprocessed to reduce its volume, and the more "spicy" it is, inherently the less long lived it is.

That is only true of fission-ready amounts - that is, near-fuel-level radioactive levels that are "hot" with decay particles. Unprompted radioactive decay is the most stable process known to us currently; we base all our best clocks on it.

99.9% of nuclear waste is essentially either "slightly radioactive", or "suspected to be slightly radioactive" - and it won't change for a looong time.