It is something that needs doing and it is good that the skills at Dounreay are at last being put to beneficial use. Radioactivity is a wholly intractable property of the atoms concerned whatever their chemical or physical environment or condition. This fact means that any chemical transformation of the radioactive elements in industrial waste is essentially irrelevant to the disposal of that waste.
Radioactivity survives chemical change unaltered.
The second generates a widesspread 'you never know where it is going to pop up' hazard threatening metabolism, the food chains and the genetic prospects. I write with some knowledge and much feeling. I am a graduate chemist who, in his younger days, played a very small part in the 'Manhattan Project' and who once helped to propagate the fairy tale that the nuclear industry would be clean, safe and give us electricity 'too cheap to meter'. I have a bad conscience in these connections.