Storing nuclear waste for 10,000+ years is also unpopular and no-one wants it stored in their backyard and further does it add up to put aside proper funds to steward waste for 10,000 years.
Remove those elements plus the higher actinides (Neptunium, Americium, Curium, ...) and almost all of the radioactivity in the fission products has decayed by 500 years... It's less radioactive at that point than the Uranium ore was when it was mined.
Burying the fuel rods was a half-baked idea that was come up with in a hurry in the 1970s because of racist fears that brown people would learn to reprocess nuclear fuel and develop nuclear weapons. Now we are facing the certain danger of getting fried by global warming as opposed to a hypothetical threat of nuclear war.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pakistan_and_weapons_of_mass_d...
with this result
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/reaction/read...
That was is just the fuel and fuel is just a small part of all the waste.
Yes it is very radioactive but that doesn't mean that the rest can be stored on a landfill. It is still so radioactive that we don't have a proper solution for it's storage. Only because the fuel is SO MUCH MORE radioactive, doesn't make the rest disappear or the football field argument valid in any way.