And coal emission, gas spill, oil spill, dam burst, dam construction dont?
>but it is a fact that our society has great difficulty dealing with nuclear waste.
France has no problem.
> France has no problem.
France is part of the world, and thus has part of the problem. Maybe France isn't contributing to it, but we as humans own it now.
France got waste reprocessing to the extent where decades of electricity provided to Paris only leave several glass slabs of waste behind [1].
France has solution to the problem [2], where the rest of the world choses to ignore it while championing solutions that are not really helping.
So, France got the answer.
[1] https://www.heritage.org/environment/commentary/recycling-nu...
[2] Decarbonization in 10 years: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EYp2uVFVcAEWAoW?format=jpg&name=...
We're kinda good at recycling it (so, indeed not the horrifying process your [1] describes), but the final non reusable waste is in fact just stored where it's produced, waiting for better ideas on what to do with it, so it's not exactly ideal. There are a dozen of publicly funded current research projets on that, so let's cross fingers. Overall, I'd say that our policies are pretty solid to get us towards a good solution in the best possible shape, but I wouldn't say that France got the answer yet.
(Also, old plants deconstruction is a planned problem with currently no planned solutions.)
Heavy metal wastes never become safe. A dump site for cadmium or chromium or lead or arsenic waste will be exactly as hostile to life around it in ten thousand years as it is today. The only way for it to "become safe" over time is for it to leak into the environment and distribute the damage over time. In practice, the "solution" for heavy metal industrial waste is to store it where it's produced and ignore it. Usually in huge open pits, which are just great for the environment around them /s.