There is, however, a marked reduction in the amount of nuclear waste in need of storage as well as a marked increase in the amount of available fissionable material. Given that one of the arguments against nuclear fission is the amount of waste which needs to be stored for a very long period this in itself is worth the effort of reprocessing spent fuel pellets. Do this at a large enough scale and the price of reprocessing will come down as well. As long as nuclear fusion is still 10 to 30 years away nuclear fission is one of the few reliable day-and-night hell-or-high-water power sources which doesn't (or, let's rephrase it, shouldn't) scare those who believe in the CO₂ scare nor does it (or, also rephrased, should it) rely on resources from politically volatile regions.

Waste handling is also a bad argument for reprocessing. It turns out it's cheaper to just procrastinate. If you want to reprocess to reduce waste, you spend less money (incorporating the time value of money) if you wait 10 years. And then you spend less if you wait another 10 years. And so on, indefinitely.

You keep on returning to the argument that it costs less to do X instead of Y while I point out that one of the arguments against nuclear power has been the problems with nuclear 'waste' as well as the fact that reprocessing this 'waste' increases the amount of fissionable 'fuel' by a large factor. It may cost less money to ignore the 'waste' problem but doing so only adds fuel to the fire stoked by those who want to stop nuclear power no matter what. If access to enough fissionable material is guaranteed - in other words if that material is found within national borders and can be mined without hindrance by 'green' activists (which is not the case in e.g. Sweden where Uranium is available but not mined) and there is a stable storage facility for the resulting nuclear 'waste' and the same 'green' activists are kept at bay it may a good solution to 'procrastinate'. You'll notice there's a lot of 'ifs' in that sentence.

s long as nuclear fusion is not available it makes sense to further develop nuclear fission, including the 'waste' problem.

I keep returning to cost because it's the only issue that matters.

Nuclear power is in trouble because it costs too much. The other issues -- safety, waste, proliferation -- they don't make any difference. Make nuclear much cheaper and we'd build much more of it. Improve any of those other metrics without making it cheaper and it will go nowhere.

Cost also matters because in any situation where choices have to be made between alternatives, you need a way to evaluate the tradeoffs. This can only be done by reducing the alternatives to a metric that can be compared, and that metric is in units of some currency. Even human life is reduced to a dollar value when evaluating choices, the so-called "statistical value of a human life".

Nuclear power is expensive partly because it is bound and tied in endless bundles of regulation and legislation even though going by the statistics it is one of the most safe power sources available. Take away the regulatory burden - which does not mean 'let them do whatever they want', it means 'make sure it is safe and no more than that' - and it will get less expensive rather quickly. Stop treating every single nuclear power plant as a on-off project which needs its own decade-long regulatory approval, replace it with type approved reactor systems and most of those issues disappear.

Nuclear power is expensive because it is supposed to so expensive not to be viable, not because of inherent problems with nuclear power. If the same regulatory burden had been placed on e.g. wind and solar - treat every turbine as a one-off project in need of approval, use land use approval procedures to stall construction, put a turbine blade recycle burden on the turbine owner, etc - those power sources would be just as expensive and unviable. The same goes for coal, oil and gas plants, hydropower installations - which are starting to be treated similarly where I live (Sweden) since the 'green' politicos decided they don't like small-scale power hydro plants - and any other power source. Regulations can make or break a power source, in case of nuclear it seems to be hell-bent on breaking it.

Ok, now you're repeating the usual nuclear bro bullshit.

Nuclear isn't competitive anywhere. Even in China, vastly more renewables are being installed (even taking into account capacity factors.) If the putative excuse you are desperately depending on there is so powerful it applies universally, even in non-democracies, what chance is there it could be overcome?

The same regulatory burden isn't placed on wind/solar because there's no need for it there. Wind and solar are not subject to low probability, very high cost accident scenarios that are the driver for nuclear regulation. And, wind/solar have the advantage of being highly redundant, not being grouped into monolithic units with higher internal interdependency. This makes the renewables far less dependent on extreme reliability of components and their connections, and far less dependent on the skill and consistency of labor and those overseeing construction.

The fact that you're starting to use expletives ('nuclear bro bullshit', 'putative excuse you are desperately...') tells me you're clutching at straws.

Wind and solar are fine until they are not and then what? Gas-fired plants are denounced because they emit scary CO₂, not to mention coal and oil. What are you going to use when the sun is absent and the wind is down? If geography allows for it hydropower is a good option, it also adds the potential for energy storage (pumped hydro) when the sun and wind are cooperating. Many countries lack such geography and in countries where it is available 'green' politicos sometimes make it hard to use this option - this is true for Sweden where the 'environmental party' (miljöpartiet) has been pushing for the removal of small-scale water turbines. What is left to provide the base load when renewable sources are not available? Nuclear is one of these options with the caveat that the high expense of building nuclear generators in combination with the relatively low cost of actually running these installations means that nuclear power stations are only viable if and when they can be run at full capacity 24/7. Given that the backup base load capacity has to be large enough to actually provide the base load and that a nuclear 'backup' option only is viable if it can run at full capacity this means that additional power sources like wind and solar will take up the role of providing extra capacity instead of base load capacity. If and when long-term - think 'months' instead of 'hours' - energy storage from renewable sources (other than hydro which already has this capacity) becomes available this situation will change but until such a time there is a need for a reliable 24/7 base load generation capacity. Given that fossil sources - gas, coal and oil - have been declared to be existential threats to 'the planet' what is left is hydro and nuclear. Hydro is great when it can be used but it is not an option in the flatlands. Nuclear, then, is the remaining option.

Notice I did not use any expletives? Try to do the same and you have a better chance of convincing me I'm wrong and you're right. You may be interested to know I built my own solar infrastructure here on our farm, 15 kW capacity, prepared for high-voltage storage. Since I built it we have only seen negative electricity bills, i.e. we sell more than we buy. I'm not what you'd call a 'nuclear bro', whatever that may be but I do appreciate the fact that there's power to be had from the grid when the sun is gone (which it is for about 20 hours per day) and the wind is down (similar in winter).