We really do. Nuclear waste is less toxic than plenty of trash we just bury. And calling it "waste" is a bit reductive, given it almost certainly becomes valuable to reprocess within another century or two.
Radioactive waste is decidedly nasty stuff, but the total volume of it is tiny. There are plenty of chemicals that are just as nasty that were simply buried in the ground in much larger quantities over the years with nary a peep from the population. Nuclear waste is a political problem not a technological one.
The crazy part is that people want to insist that the sites need to be absolutely safe even if they aren't maintained for 1,000 years, but by that point the radioactivity would be no more than the base ore anyway so demanding these extended timelines doesn't make anybody safer. They're just red tape.
It's peculiar that it's a political problem in pretty much every country though? I know Finland is well on its way for long term storage but that's the only example I know of.
There's also quite a few cases where it is a technical problem. Gorleben in Germany for example.
Joking here since it would be impractical, but I guess you can bury it under my house. I'd not be bothered at all to live on top of a modern nuclear waste deposit like Finlands.
Waste from modern nuclear power plants seems to be a giant nothingburger. And yes, I came from the other side but flipped as I learned more about the technicalities, how Finland has solved it and how near you need to get hurt.
