It's true that what the world has now is not what was envisioned 40 or 50 years ago. Light-water reactors were supposed to be just one aspect of a system that would incorporate breeder reactors, with reprocessing to harness the full energy potential of uranium, and waste disposal needed chiefly for fission products. Instead, we have LWRs fueled mainly by uranium-235, with a little mixed-oxide plutonium fuel added in here and there, a few reprocessing facilities, and headway toward the final disposal of civilian high-level waste only north of the Baltic Sea. With the possible exceptions of France's closed Phenix reactor and Russia's BN-600, there doesn't appear to have been a commercial-scale breeder reactor anywhere in the world that could boast both dependable long-term operation and worthwhile generation of new fissile fuel. Uranium may be plentiful (at the moment) and cheap (ditto), but the world's nuclear programs cannot simply keep building LWRs and letting spent fuel pile up at reactor sites.
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