"Ideally, the steel cylinder provides leak-tight containment of the spent fuel."
Also guessing that article is woefully out of date since it mentions:
"The NRC estimated that many of the nuclear power plants in the United States will be out of room in their spent fuel pools by 2015, most likely requiring the use of temporary storage of some kind"
It's not too hard of a problem to solve, it just requires political will to bury it in a dry geologically stable desert somewhere in the US, which we have plenty of.
I have heard this before, but is this just the physical waste's volume? Isn't that a useless metric? What would happen if you included the volume of the containers required to safely house it?
Immensely more manageable than e.g. toxic, radioactive coal ash [1]. TL; DR Spent fuel isn't a real problem. We dispose of tonnes of similarly-nasty stuff every day without mention. (And unlike with radiation, it's difficult to indpendently check chemical toxicity.)
[1] https://www.wsj.com/us-news/coal-ash-cancer-epa-north-caroli...
Coal ash doesn't have that feature.
Not really. Even intentionally turning nuclear waste into a critical mass would take some effort, assuming it's been minimally reprocessed.