I got to see the huge amount of nuclear waste generated by a single small attack submarine. Now most of it was relatively low level stuff but it was waste nonetheless and it's volume was mindblowing. You have to remember that every glove, every rag, every piece of replaced equipment, had to be thrown away. There was no recycling of a contaminated rag. When you'd enter a containment area, the anti-C gear you'd wear got thrown away. It's not like you could hose it off because any crap on you would go down the drain.

This doesn't include any water that goes into the primary coolant loops that must be drained and replaced every so often. You wouldn't want to sit next to this stuff for any time (believe me, I used to set my TLD down next to piping because you'd quickly reach your monthly limits and not have to spend any more time in the hot and nasty reactor compartment).

Now I say low-level but that doesn't diminish the fact that the contamination on all this stuff has half-lives of centuries. It must go into someplace where it's inaccessible to the public and it won't leech into the water table. Now all this is very manageable as long as states step up to the plate to provide the storage capability as Nevada has done in the past. You might look though into the political turmoil that occurs because of stuff like that.

There are no simple and inexpensive answers.

Art