How dangerous is nuclear waste?

"Nuclear waste" is one of the most overstated problems in energy. Used fuel is solid, contained, and astonishingly small: all of it ever produced by the entire US commercial fleet would fit on a single football field stacked a few meters high. Its radioactivity falls off steeply as the short-lived isotopes decay, and unlike fossil waste, it's never released into the air you breathe.

The genuinely open question — why this is labelled contested — is the disposal policy: deep repository, extended surface storage, or recycling. Reasonable experts differ. But the engineering challenge is modest and solved many times over; this is a manageable footnote, not a reason to forgo clean power.