Waste in the form of long-lived nuclear fission products is fundamentally an unsolvable issue. Transmutation has been proposed but isn't really practicable, shooting it into the sun isn't really an option either, so the only choice is to confine it for geological timescales somehow.
Both options are really much better, in my opinion, than pumping more carbon dioxide into our biosphere.
This is a major fallacy that makes people think DT fusion is more promising than it actually is.
Engineering problems are perfectly capable of killing a technology. After all, fission after 1942 was "just an engineering problem". And DT fusion faces very serious engineering problems.
I include cost issues as engineering problems, as engineering cannot be divorced from economic considerations. Engineering involves cost optimization.
You also have the associated economic problems; the up-front cost of a launch loop would be so huge that you could never convince anybody to build it instead of using rockets. Fusion has the same problem; even if you can design a fusion power plant that produces net power, it needs to produce net power by a massive margin to have any chance of being economically competitive with fission let alone solar.
You apparently stable salt mines start leaking. Locals don't like having toxic stuff buried below them. Other countries dislike that you dump nuclear waste in the middle of the Atlantic. Digging deep becomes too expensive.
Fusion is only better insofar as the public don't yet understand how radioactive the reactor will become, but counting on that ignorance is a bad long term strategy.
Activated D-T reactor parts only have to be buried for a few decades and then they're fine.
Long-term fission waste is almost entirely transuranics, formed by heavy atoms absorbing neutrons without fissioning. If we were to use fast reactors or thorium molten salt reactors, then that problem would go away, and we'd be left with just fission products, which are only troublesome for a couple centuries.
Never mind what's required to deal with the fuel & waste products.