Fusion has no waste products except ordinary elements, low on the periodic table. It's an entirely different beast. You could theoretically have a little Tony Stark reactor powering your home, safely.
No, that is entriely false. The main product of all currently plausible fusion reactors are neutrons. Those are extremely destructive to living tissue, requiring heavy shielding. Even worse, any material which absorbs neutrons becomes radioactive itself, so the shield inevitably becomes radioactive.
The advantage of fusion is that this radioactivity is short lived compared to uranium - decades instead of centuries or millennia. However, this also means that you have to stay much farther away from it, as it's much more radioactive than a piece of uranium which you can typically hold in your hand without any ill effects (just don't hold it under your pillow for a few years).
How? The initial plan was discussing something on the order of 850 passengers per hour between SF and LA. Fundamentally, such an expensive piece of infrastructure with critical safety concerns can't be a mass transit system.