Most waste is actually from other things, not fuel. Anything your nuclear material comes into contact with is treated as waste. But obviously due to this there's drastically different levels of radioactivity in waste (but everyone acts like it's all fuel waste)
Very much so, spent fuel contains almost as much uranium and in the same U235:U238 ratio as natural uranium it doesn’t need any special handling on it’s own. The issue is everything else in the fuel.
After chemical separating the uranium you still have all the other nasty bits that make nuclear waste such an issue to deal with. Plus all the contaminated machinery you used to do the repressing.
Not the way it’s normally described, U238 is relatively worthless outside of being used in bullets etc.
What we currently care about is the 235 which is actually burned up by the reactor down to close to the ratio in natural fuel. Reprocessing for current designs would result in most of the fuel being discarded as depleted uranium the same way the normal enrichment process works.
The actual way around this is to directly use natural uranium without enrichment via CANDU or similar design. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CANDU_reactor No need for enrichment or reprocessing.
Molten salt fuel cycles where waste products may be separated from the liquid fuel through more conventional chemical separation methods seem like a simpler solution. It's too bad about the negative public view on nuclear. I think next gen fission power research deserves greater funding.
Is there any chance nuclear waste could be useful for something, such as creating more energy, in the future?