The nuclear waste generation is a _HUGE_ problem, the problem is so big that very few (if any) country really know how to solve it, look a the US for example as a really frightening example of an out of control waste problem, both from civil and military sources...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioactive_waste#Long_term_ma...
It's tricky because of a combination of factors like long half-lives and unusual suitability for some of the material to be reprocessed into a weapon (both fission devices for nation states and terror devices for small groups, the latter more thanks to public perception than any actual effectiveness). This creates a lot of political obstacles, as it's easier to pass responsibility to someone else than it is to double-down and implement methods to reprocess, transmute or reuse the waste.
On the other hand, there are so many cases of contamination with persistent environmental toxins that aren't as easy to detect, or who's toxic effects are initially not understood. Just look the sad history of PCBs or at 3M's ongoing saga with PFOA and PFCs.
You just changed your argument. You originally said nuclear waste is less toxic than “‘regular’ waste from chemical industry,” not just that there was less of it.
Even a smaller amount of highly toxic waste that stays that way for thousands of years is a huge problem.
In every post in this thread, TeMPOraL has been making a consistent argument that nuclear produces orders of magnitude less waste than other not-routinely-treated-as-horrible industrial waste issues.
You appear to be making the argument that “because there isn’t much of it” is a new argument, but that appears to be the core of their argument everywhere.
Perhaps you were confusing who said what?
Anything that remains radioactive for thousands of years is not very radioactive by definition.
It's mind boggling that we can generate all this energy by splitting atoms but we're still burning things and putting up windmills like it's the 1500s.
Its almost impossible to solve because people think about it the wrong way, we need a change of understanding.
Just like Oil before it was useful, we need to think of nuclear waste as a resource. It is mostly fuel and a combination of other potentially useful stuff.
We need to be a nuclear society not a chemical society who wants to 'shut away' all the 'waste'.
And if the UK didn't do silly thing like selling profitable nuke companies to Japan (source senior guy at Sellafield) - and allow you junior collation partners to kill of a key project to placate the green wing of the libdems.
BTW I worked on research for fast breeders in my first job in fact one of the few times I went into our labs was to wrap a dummy fuel pin for two-phase flow tests.