Science for Democratic Action vol. Some of the news articles and other materials seem to say that an accelerator is all that is required in order to transmute spent nuclear fuel into a more benign form of waste.
Most people know of their quest to turn lead into gold.
A small group of them were also concerned that their growing cities were producing too much garbage. And that was the end of that kind of accelerator transmutation of waste. Accelerator Transmutation of Waste now refers to a proposed set of nuclear technologies for the treatment of the highly radioactive spent fuel from current nuclear reactors. The short answer to your question is that ATW requires a lot more than just accelerators. In addition, in the end, a repository would still be necessary to handle the residual waste from ATW as well as all the radionuclides that ATW cannot transmute.