That's primarily a political issue rather than a technical one.
The US may be fucked & awful here, but I cannot imagine the rest of the world is particularly less fucked or less awful. I'm sure some folks have not gotten quite so tied up in this question, but I also don't have high confidence they have been paranoid & political enough about how properly they ought to be dealing with waste that will live for hundreds of thousand of years. If they have to come deal with really awful problems in 20k years, at enormous expense, well, that factors against the advantage of nuclear power too.
Heritage Foundation (!) agrees: https://www.heritage.org/environment/commentary/recycling-nu...
So far breeder reactors have been some of the least economic energy-generation systems on the planet. We also attempted them only in the most limited window of time, long ago, when nuclear was so young, and have never tried again. It seems unlikely cost will really come down (unless we actually factor in the network-externalities of dealing with the waste, which so far no one has ever had to face). I think a lot on the sharp-as-a-tack Charles Stross's Nothing like this will be built again, which isn't a breeder reactor but speaks to a more ambitious & open ended time. And I semi-weap for a humanity that cannot experiment, cannot try great things, that is market driven, risk-averse, & rational to a fault, at the cost of ignoring so much potential. https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/rants/nothing-l...
"Never been tried again"
There has barely been a break and all of them failed just as abysmally.
Personally I would really like to see ambitious high tech safe nuclear options be a thing, and to have thoughtful long term handling plans.
The Integral Fast Reactor getting canceled (1994) seems a real shame to me. A safe cheap transuranic-burning-capable low-proliferation-concern breeder sodium fast reactor could help us greatly deal with waste, could be gamechanger. But perhaps it was too soon, that it would have only been another mark against ambitious nuclear. GE Hitachi has kept the plans updated & moving along, which is interesting. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integral_fast_reactor
And TerraPower has recently reached out expressing interest in working together towards an IFR inspired design. https://neutronbytes.com/2022/02/03/terrapower-teams-up-with...
But given costs as is, focus on being extremely cheap not advanced makes some sense, albeit it sort of also feels like it limits the potential, & keeps us from addressing actual real total costs.