| You would be surprised how much toxic industrial waste is been currently stored in deep geological repositories in Europe. https://www.kpluss.com/en-us/our-business-products/waste-man... For example Herfa-Neurode underground repository contains (as of 2025): 690,000 tons of waste containing dioxins and furans , 220,000 tons of waste containing mercury, 127,000 tons of waste containing cyanide, and 83,000 tons of toxic waste containing arsenic. https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Untertagedeponie_Herfa-Neurode So nuclear waste is not a technical problem, mostly political problem. And it's not very much talk about, but the real issue is geopolitics. Each nuclear trans-uranium waste repository (spend nuclear fuel) could in future be mined to retrieve the stored plutonium for nuclear weapons. And even better, over centuries the most radioactive short lived isotopes are transmuted into more stable isotopes, so the mining and handling of this material is much easier. And even even better over millennia, the undesirable isotope Plutonium-240 (with half-life 6561 year, much shorter then Plutionium-239 half-life 24110 years) will decay away and the reactor-grade Plutonium waste will itself transform, without any external action, into very usable weapon-grade Plutonium. Therefor spend nuclear fuel and storage of spend nuclear fuel in non-weapon countries is subject to monitoring by the enhanced verification measures of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Additional Protocol. https://scienceandglobalsecurity.org/archive/sgs07lyman.pdf https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_proliferation#Addition... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reactor_grade_plutonium https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weapons-grade_plutonium U.S. goes to great lengths to prevent other countries from acquiring material usable for nuclear weapons. Like, for example retrieving plutonium and highly enriched uranium from Semipalatinsk Test Site in Kazakhstan. https://www.belfercenter.org/publication/plutonium-mountain-... "The Megatons to Megawatts Program, also called the United States-Russia Highly Enriched Uranium Purchase Agreement, was an agreement between Russia and the United States whereby Russia converted 500 metric tons of "excess" weapons-grade uranium (enough for 20,000 warheads) into 15,000 metric tons of low enriched uranium, which was purchased by the US for use in its commercial nuclear power plants." "The program was credited for being one of the most successful disarmament programs in history, but its low set price for nuclear fuel caused Western companies to not invest in uranium refining capacity, resulting by 2022 in Russia's government-owned Rosatom becoming the supplier of about 50% of the world's enriched uranium, and 25% of the nuclear fuel used in the US." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megatons_to_Megawatts_Program |