Used nuclear fuel has a long history, well over half a century of above ground storage without causing major losses of life, in any setting, accidental, or in normal use.
This is not true of fossil fuel waste, also known as "air pollution" and more recently extreme global heating. Air pollution kills just shy of 20,000 people a day without a wiff of concern leading to restrictions on the use of fossil fuels. In the entire history of commercial nuclear power, stretching over 70 years, used nuclear fuel has not killed as many people as will die in the next six hours from air pollution.
To me, complaining about so called "nuclear waste" is the equivalent of attacking Hilliary Clinton for sending emails in a non-goverment server with having unqualified morons in Moscow texting US war plans as happened last week. It's actually worse than that.
Concern about so called "nuclear waste" is driven by selective attention that in a rational world would be understood to be absurd. It is the result of media hype, and nothing more.
It turns out that radioactive materials are subject to a mathematical structure known as the Bateman equation, which actually works a set of coupled differential equations. Any accumulating radioactive material will approach, asymmtotically, secular equibrium, a point at which it is decaying as fast as it is formed. It is often reported in the scientific literature, depending on the fuel management scheme used, that over a relatively short period of time, the radioactivity associated with fission products will be lower than the radioactivity associated with the uranium ores from which the fuel was made. Full actinide recycling which I enthusiastically endorse will mean that in about 1,000 years the planet, which has always been radioactive, will be less radioactive than it would have been without the use of nuclear energy. This may or may not be a good thing.
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