There is no evidence nuclear waste can be disposed of safely in the medium or long term. Only technocrats and elites want more nuclear energy. Its not the will of the voting public. This is a defeat for the environment and democracy.
You could put all the nuclear waste the US has ever produced on one football field stacked 3 stories high.
Roughly 83,000 metric tons.
Meanwhile we produce over 50 million tons of electronic waste that is full of nasty heavy metals that can, and do, leech into the environment causing wide spread destruction, because instead of storing them in some sort of containment vessel we just dump them on whatever country will take a pittance payment.
Nuclear waste storage is a NIMBY problem, in terms of environmental pollutants you could probably find hog farms that churn out more waste.
Concrete and a train is the usual method.
Nuclear waste isn't some magic death substance. It is hazardous, but so are a lot of other substances that are dealt with in large volumes every day, and again, nuclear waste isn't even that large of a volume!
Meanwhile coal plants pump radioactive particles directly into the air, and communities surrounding coal plants have higher rates of cancer, but people complain less because it is in the air and not in barrels labeled with a scary symbol.
With modern nuclear plant designs, the waste would be even less, and there are even designs for plants that would use existing nuclear waste as fuel.
Nuclear is a technology with trade-offs like anything else. There is no need to dismissing it outright.
Only technocrats know how to build an operate an electricity grid, it isn't commonly held knowledge.
The voting public are not equipped to vote on how to create a reliable, performant and affordable energy grid. It isn't an issue that should be decided by the public's will.
The public can overrule anyone on anything, but on technical issues it is usually wiser to defer to the technocrats.
This isn’t to say there should be no supervision or accountability; more that the elites are called so for a reason (a better word would be “experts”), and that there’s otherwise a risk of micromanagement and all that it entails.
It seems quite reasonable to say that if "the public" want unclean, unsafe, high-carbon energy sources and deny that climate change is a problem, they should be unable to have any input in the same way that someone who wants a tall building that is unsafe can't have one, and someone who wants a car on the road without passing any safety tests can't have one, and someone who wants to provide unsafe medical treatments is not allowed to.
We aren't doing anything that nature doesn't do on its own.
Worst case, you dilute it back down to ore levels and bury it in the ground. Take care to avoid the water table, and it's exactly as dangerous as a lot of the stuff that's already in the ground.
Can you do better than that? Sure. Leaving it sitting onsite until there's enough will to do reprocessing is probably better.
There's no evidence that it can't be. And given that it's pretty safe, pretty stable, and there's not much of it, the burden of proof is VERY much on the small minority of fear mongers to explain something so obviously easy is, in fact, impossible.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breeder_reactor#Waste_reductio...
I'll bet my life that fewer than 10% of the people who voted Conservative last December had any idea what the manifesto said about nuclear power.
(I don't mean this as a jibe at Tories in particular; my point is just that no-one reads manifestos, and even fewer people bother to learn about the finer details of their party's nuclear policy in an election that's completely dominated by one issue [Brexit])
Also, there are some reactor designs that can burn the waste we currently have, so we could get more energy and less waste.
To the extent that this is true it's because of anti-scientific FUD. The problem of nuclear waste is utterly insignificant compared to fossil fuel emissions.
You can dispose of nuclear waste "safely" by having a (single) Chernobyl style meltdown, continent-wide fallout, and long-term deadzone and still come out ahead of all the coal power plants.