It's worse than that. It is my concern that our current policy is causing us to overuse an aging reactor population, in effect, manufacturing a domestic variation of Chernobyl. A vibrant nuclear industry would replace those old reactors with newer and safer technologies. They would consume those stored wastes as fuel and make us all less liable to use military power to secure our access to foreign sources of energy.
No matter how advanced, every reactor produces some waste; it's an inevitable aspect of the periodic table. Without the government honoring its decades-old commitment to receive and dispose of that waste, building new reactors (no matter how theoretically efficient) was legally and financially impossible. It's the opposition to Yucca Mountain, and the opposition to nuclear power in general, that has delayed those new, safer, cleaner reactors. We'll still have to fight to get the new reactors built, but at least we can fight that battle now, rather than having to continually rehash an issue decided 20 years ago.