"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Also guessing that article is woefully out of date since it mentions: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...
This was always kind of interesting to me, and I'm surprised it's not mentioned more. Not for any practical purpose, but just because you'll often hear people talk about how radiation is super scary because it's "invisible". Which is the case, sure, but it seems like it's hardly unique? As you implied, there's countless chemical contaminants that are just as dangerous, and just as undetectable by human senses. At least with radioactive contaminants you can (at least in most situations) use Geiger counters and dosimeters and whatnot - with some of the chemical threats humanity has cooked up, it seems like you need an entire study just to determine if they're present or not.