It might be instructive to point out just what would be involved in recycling nuclear fuel rods, just as a review for anyone else who might be following this thread.

Each fuel element would have to be removed by crane from it's pool of water in the fuel storage building at the plant. This capability already exists since that's how it got there from the reactor vessel after it was used up. Extreme caution is necessary since the elements are physically hot, potentially weakened, and highly radioactive.

Next, the fuel element (which is a bundle of fuel rods held together by metal spacers) would have to be placed inside a transport container. These are massive armored cylinders, with their own self-contained cooling and monitoring systems. Each is a full load for an 18-wheeler, or a railroad flatcar, and are designed to survive a rail or road collision. This capability used to exist, the containers were being tested in the 70s, but I don't think they were ever actually used. No doubt that program would have to be restarted from scratch to exploit 30 years of tech advances.

The container would then have to be transported to the fuel processing facility, with traffic safeguards and probably, military escort. After reaching the nearest fuel processing facility (in a country the size of ours here would have to be several), the container would be opened and the fuel element removed and dismantled so the fuel rods could be removed.

The fuel rods would then be chopped up into small chunks, and the ceramic uranium oxide pellets removed. Since many of these clad pellets might be damaged, you'd have to dissolve all this scrap metal in strong acids. The resulting chemical slurry would have to go into something like an oil refinery, where a series of chemical reactors would reduce all this material to it's elemental components so they could be separated using conventional chemical reactions.

The Plutonium produced by neutron absorption during power generation would be isolated and refined and sent to the military for use in weapons or saved for a future power or breeder industry. The Uranium would have to be sent to a separate enrichment facility so the remaining U235 could be extracted from the inert (depleted) U238, the former would eventually be reincorporated into new fuel elements and the latter saved for other industrial or military uses.

What's left is a slurry of corrosive acids thick with metallic salts and several dozen different lethal radio-isotope fission products in chemical combination with other atoms: oxides, sulfides, nitrates, etc. Using chemical reactions to extract them all will be a long multi-step process. These are fragments of the original U235 nuclei which fissioned to produce the energy in the first place. If these fission products are chemically removed, they can be dispersed in glass solution which can then be safely stored in stable geological formations. They will need to remain there a long time, they will remain lethal for several hundred thousand years.

The remaining slurry can then be refined, some of the acid solvent recycled, and the mess that's left ( a low-to-medium level waste) will have to be disposed of also. This is the stuff that's polluting the former Hanford Works in Washington State now. Google that if you want to hear some real horror stories.

So there it is, and remember, all the steps described above have to be done remotely, with waldoes and mirrors and cameras, from bunkers far away. The operation and maintenance of the reprocessing facilities will also have to be done remotely, once production begins, the place will be too dangerous to walk through.

We have hundreds, perhaps thousands of tons of spent fuel elements now waiting to be processed. Can you imagine what it will be like if we have several hundred nuke plants operating?