The problem is that anything involving the word 'radioactive' is heavily overladen with emotional angst, when other similarly dangerous things are not.
some scepticism  is perhaps justifiable considering the appalling effects of over exposure of national servicemen and the local populous  in the 1950s, when the attitude was more gung ho. (https://www.justsecurity.org/56127/devastating-legacy-british-american-nuclear-testing-kiritimati-christmas-malden-islands/ )

However, the problem is that to attempt to reduce all exposure to natural levels is very much over engineering - the very lowest level nuclear waste is probably less radioactive than many naturally occurring minerals.  The other unknown is one of inadvertent concentration - does a certain plant or animal ingest and then accumulate radioactive material re-concentrating it from the dilute into something more concentrated and dangerous? Humans do in the thyroid, hence iodine tablets which suppress this effect. As longer studies are possible in  places like the area around Chernobyl occur, this sort of thing is far better understood than it was last century.

In practice there is not a huge amount of really dangerous waste and there are ways of storing it that we can be pretty confident about. I'd not be too worried about  it, but then I'm a professional  whose career is grounded in the physics.
Mike

Note as an example that the reason our nuclear subs are so expensive to decommission is not that the original builders had no plan - on the contrary, they expected them to be towed out to sea, pumped full of concrete and sunk in deep enough water not to be disturbed. This is no longer considered as acceptable

That's really going to go down well with the public.

Nuclear power is too expensive.  So we'll make it cheaper by dumping low level nuclear waste in the sea.

Well of course we already do,  'low level' in this context means you can swim in it and the ill effects will be due to other things, sewage probably, if its the UK coast we are considering, that and hyperthermia at this time of year.
Your comment about it not going down well with the public is exactly my point, it is only expensive because by choice we made it so.
If we banned carrying petrol in single skinned tanks at 70mph a few inches above the road surface, and required special fuel containment, cars would be more expensive too, but for some reason, that is a risk we are happy with.

Mike.

(if you have just fuelled up it is enough petrol to launch the driver into orbit if used as efficiently as a propellant, but  that is most unlikely so quite correctly  it does not worry you. You are far more likely than that to be burnt to death while in the vehicle, and far more likely still, to arrive at your destination completely unhurt, though how likely that is  depends slightly on who is driving..)

PPS , perhaps don't get in if the Taxi looks like this... risk is a very subjective thing - he is happy with it...

There are two problems here:

What is nuclear waste?

How dangerous is it?

Used reactor fuel is not nuclear waste. It is a valuable resource containing reusable fissionable materials and various medically useful isotopes.

After the used reactor fuel has been reprocessed there will be some highly active isotopes that do not have a current use. As highly active materials have a short half life (basic physics) they can be allowed to decay in suitable shielding for some 10s of years.

What is left to be radioactive waste? Building waste, Used protective clothing? At what level does it need to be classified as radioactive waste?

The amounts of material are quite small. Nuclear power and nuclear weapons manufacture have been around for quite a few decades and there is no shortage of storage space in the current facilities.

How dangerous is radiation?

Sievert levels of radiation delivered in a short space of time are dangerous/fatal. That is generally agreed. Below that level there is huge uncertainty and limited real data. This chart displays the situation quite well:

www.hko.gov.hk/.../00298-variations-in-the-environmental-radiation-levels-around-the-world.html

No health effects have been demonstrated for doses below around 100 mSv.

The current legislative framework (LNT Linear No Threshold) assumes ,without any data, that all doses are hazardous and uses collective dose to generate fatalities from large numbers of people receiving low doses. It also takes no account of the rate of delivery of the dose.

Most of the scary predicted numbers of deaths from radiation that appear in the media are effectively made up. The Green Activist George Monbiot challenged a couple of anti-nuclear campaigners a few years ago and found there was no basis to their claims and no actual data to back it up.

https://www.monbiot.com/2011/04/04/evidence-meltdown/

https://www.monbiot.com/2011/03/31/seven-double-standards/

I guess the other consideration (over and above the normal radioactive 'waste' produced by normal running) is the effect of nuclear accidents - after Fukushima, Chernobyl, Three mile island and the Windscale fire the public probably aren't going to be easily convinced that the risks are negligible or containable, especially on a small crowded island such as ours.

Worse still perhaps is the possibility of  hostile players attacking such facilities to use them as weapons against us (the likelihood then of any safety systems being damaged or destroyed at the same time as containment being compromised). We've already seen damage to the Zaporizhzhia plant and there are credible threats to Iran's nuclear facilities. It's still within living memory that such attacks were frequently made on our soil - how certain can we be that such things can't recur?

Such problems aren't unique to nuclear of course - we've had Buncefield and the Pembroke Dock refinery explosions with conventional fuels - but the effects do tend to be far less widespread and less long lasting to the public in general.

  - Andy.

The ‘severity’ of a nuclear accident depends on the actual health risks from radiation. Until these are realistically defined and the scare mongering is stopped the perception of nuclear accidents will always be bad. None of the ‘major’ nuclear accidents have actually resulted in many deaths from radiation, far more deaths were caused by the unnecessary evacuations. The WHO suggests maybe 4000 deaths in total from radiation exposure due to Chenobyl.

https://www.who.int/news/item/05-09-2005-chernobyl-the-true-scale-of-the-accident

 What is the equivalent death rate per TWh from the alternative energy sources?

Is nuclear power really too expensive or is it just that it has to cover all it's own costs? The tech industries appear to have looked at the options of renewables plus long term storage or nuclear power and have come down in favour of nuclear power. 

Google turns to nuclear to power AI data centres (bbc.com)

Renewables might be claimed to be cheap when subsidised in various ways and operating parasiticly using the existing fosil/nuclear powered grid as a back up. An appropriately sized reactor appears to offer better value when consistency of supply is important.

So do we waste tax payers money on unnecessary civil works or tell the truth by admitting that existing requirements are totally over the top.  

Spreading fake information  to panic politicians over the internet should or has be banned

Whilst working for disability bathroom companies undertaking electrical work,  I worked in both Seascale next to Sellafield in Cumbria and Theddlethorpe in Lincolnshire. 

Sellafield has the nuclear waste, Theddlethorpe is the proposed nuclear waste dump.

theddlethorpe.workinginpartnership.org.uk/

It's a long way between them without a railway into Theddlethorpe. So as a casual observer it would seem far more practical to open the new coal mine at Whitehaven, which is just up the railway line from Sellafield and when the coal has been dug out the nuclear waste could be put into the mine.

Though I can see it is not going to please a lot of people. 

Now here is another thought for you. 

Whilst working for the disability bathroom companies and travelling for other purposes, all my journeys and places I visited were recorded on my Google Maps Timeline on the Google servers.

Google are changing the the means of storage for the Maps Timeline from their servers to the mobile devices being used with in app storage taking up storage space on the mobile device. 

I have just lost around eight years of data recording where I have been with the switch to the data being stored on my phone, plus the information is no longer being shared with my IPad through the server. So I no longer have a complete record of where I have been for the last eight and I am going to have to ensure I fill in my paper diary daily if I want to be certain my records are really correct. 

Presumably Google are making the changes to reduce the number of servers they require and the amount of electricity they need. 

The relevance of this is that Google have just ordered six or more nuclear reactors to power some of their AI data centres. 

https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/technology/2024/oct/15/google-buy-nuclear-power-ai-datacentres-kairos-power

Being able to ask your phone a question, telling Alexa to turn the lights on or anything else that requires interaction with a computer and AI requires electricity and it seems that as a result of this using Google services and AI is going to produce nuclear waste that will need to be stored safely indefinitely.