Grossly overstated. E.g. leave it alone for 600 years and it's no worse than the ore from which it was mined (which, I grant you, you don't want to be rolling around in). Or feed it to breeder reactors, all that's used up is the U-235, there's still plenty of tasty U-238 that you can do all sorts of stuff with, and they also help address the nasty actinides etc.

Don't confuse the bat-shit crazy regulatory regime for this in the US with anything rational or useful. We're wealthy enough for now to indulge in it, we'll see when things get tighter.

I recall going round a nuclear power plant once and they had a display showing that fresh coffee beans were radioactive enough to be considered nuclear waste had they been produced by the plant (whilst obviously not being considered materially at risk outside).

It's stuck with me (though I merely presume it to be true).

This has been formalized with the banana equivalent dose: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banana_equivalent_dose

Potassium-40 is pretty fierce stuff, enough to, in this context, get people to be call for the outlawing more than two people sleeping together. If, you know, they really cared about the level of one kind of safety they insist on, as opposed to shutting down US nuclear activities for their various reasons, and used ludicrous methods like the linear no-threshold model https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_no-threshold_model which due to common sense and radiation hormesishttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiation_hormesis we can even say is unscientific.

So do the math. How much does it cost in today's dollars to guard it for 600 yeaes?