Countries "like the US, which doesn't recycle nuclear fuel" are the only kind of country. Some others have tried, but failed very expensively. This is a nice idea, but so far, it looks like another PR stunt by a deadly industry.

The US developed a reactor, the Integral Fast Reactor (IFR), able to recycle nuclear fuel between 1984 - 1994. This was closed down by Clinton's democrats with John Kerry and Al Gore leading the way. Since then it's been banned on the spurious ground of proliferation - despite being no proliferation threat because it was designed to be proliferation resistant. GE-Hitachi have the commercial version of the IFR. It's called PRISM. It's no wonder that people will fail expensively when environmentalists ban their technology.

reuse idle N plant sites for this alone, hoorah, yes mass produce for reuse alone More jobs for N Industry alone Can reactor work in ships & subs??

Its not right to call plutonium slightly radioactive., Its extremely radioactive and a small dust mote can give you cancer if you inhale it.

I remember reading about thorium reactors a few years ago after the Japanese disaster. They are capable of burning waste and much safer. Their main problem was lack of funding for a startup company and the political power of the biggies like GE. The market will allow these good ideas to fail in the face of well capitalized competition. Government may be needed for change here. Not everywhere but maybe here.

Facts won't go away no matter how much PR. Stable isotopes like 240Pu don't fission, which is why they are not refined and used in weapons. And, as we saw so very well at Fukushima Dai-Ichi #3, 238Pu has a nasty tendency to continue fission WITHOUT water, crippling one of the major 'safety' features of the LWR. As for the putative 'success' of breeders, I remind you that Russia, China, France and even the Brits tried building breeders, had accidents, and barely avoided catastrophes, thus terminating those projects. ALL cases of breeders have proved unreliable. ALL. And that's why you don't see them in the market. Meanwhile, back at the Al Gore / Jimmy Carter hating ranch, reality is that the permanent sequester costs far exceed the value of electricty

Anyone know how well this lines up with ongoing work on Thorium based fission such as the reactor project being sponsored,in part, by Bill Gates? Thorium can burn other isotopes while releasing something like 40,000 times more energy than uranium. The eventual end state is lead.

This is by far not the only design that can burn nuclear waste, personally I much prefer inherently safe approaches:
http://wavewatching.net/2012/09/23/transmuting-waste-and-worries-away/

Far from unreliable, the BN-600 reactor, a sodium-cooled, fast neutron breeder reactor, has been supplying electricity to the Soviet/Russian grid for almost 35 years. Important in this context is that breeder reactors extract much more energy from the fuel than thermal neutron reactors, and generate spent fuel that is much shorter-lived. Following the success and lessons learned from the BN-600, a second reactor, BN-800 is in initial operation, and and more are in the plans.
The massive amount of radioactive waste, and associated storage problems, are mostly political, not technical in nature - in no small part resulting from misguided proliferation fears that had the Carter administration kill the fast neutron reactor technology in the US.

We already have the largest reactor by far, one that can power the entire world if we capture its energy, the sun.