The US decision to not get the government pushing reprocessing was the correct one. You will notice that after Reagan lifted Carter's ban on reprocessing, no commercial firms here jumped into the market. That's because it's not economically justified.
I don't think burying waste anytime soon at Yucca Mountain is economically justified either, by the way.
Not in context, because the context was that that decision was part of a general policy on the government's part to kill nuclear energy. If the government had wanted to help nuclear energy, it would have said, sure, reprocess if you want to, as long as you're willing to deal with whatever the economics of it turn out to be. (In the 1970's, when the Carter administration made the decision, uranium mining was considerably more expensive than it is now, so reprocessing might well have made economic sense then, even if it doesn't now.)
In that environment where nuclear growth did not match the central plans, reprocessing made no sense.
Another super-reasonable thing to do with nuclear waste is burying it in large salt deposits or deep crystalline bedrock. Both are actually totally reasonable and practical solutions. People just go nuts though when you talk about it.
That's true now, yes. But anyone who realizes this also realizes (as you do) that nuclear waste disposal is not an issue: you just store the spent fuel now, and at some point (in the not too distant future if we were actually using nuclear energy for a large portion of base load power), mining and enriching new fuel will be more expensive than reprocessing, at which point all of that so-called "waste" will be useful. The idea that it needs to be stored safely for tens or hundreds of thousands of years is just ludicrous.
Also, reprocessing makes disposal of what's left over much easier, because the stuff you actually have to dispose of afterwards (i.e,. the stuff that isn't now reprocessed fuel) has much shorter half-lives and so only needs to be safely sequestered for a much shorter time.
I'm not totally convinced that uranium mining will ever be more expensive than reprocessing. For one thing, (and especially when you go to deep-burn non-reprocessing breeder reactors) the required uranium is so minuscule that extracting the (near infinite and truly renewable) uranium from seawater is practical using tech that's 3-6x more expensive today than traditional mining.
On the other hand advances in industrial controls and robotics could conceivably reduce reprocessing costs.
Either option would be fine for a much expanded nuclear fleet providing 24/7 low-footprint carbon-free energy.
Sure we do: reprocess it, like every country except the US that uses nuclear power does. The only reason the US doesn't is stupid politics.