Our nuclear reactors are essentially the beta product. There are alternative reactor designs that create much less waste like LFTR (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_fluoride_thorium_reacto...) and others like TWR that cab consume our existing spent fuel (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traveling_wave_reactor).

There are a lot of reasons we predominantly use solid fuel light water reactors, most of them being the decades of sunk costs + commitment inertia that was created by the government investment in the technology... because it was good for the military (submarines, maybe bombs).

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/03/the-s...

There are some companies trying to address this like Flibe Energy, who is working on LFTR designs (https://flibe-energy.com/) and Terrapower with TWR (http://terrapower.com), of which Bill Gates is Chairman of the board.

Nuclear could be great. We need massive investment in these alternative technologies.