You're making the perfect the enemy of the good. You say nuclear power is "not worth considering" because of waste, but the current dominant methods of energy generation not only generate waste but evenly distribute it over the entire earth, to the extent that it threatens our way of life on a timescale of decades. Nuclear power is strictly better from a waste perspective - all the waste is in one place. Species don't go extinct from nuclear power.

You can obviously power a Tesla with nuclear energy...

Gen 4 Nuclear reactors produce significantly less waste, cost less to produce, and are safer than current reactors, in some designs they're even able to consume nuclear waste to generate energy:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_IV_reactor

The waste problem is regulatory. If the nuclear regulatory authorities allowed us to build breeder reactors and thorium reactors the waste situation would basically go away.

France get's around 80% of its energy from nuclear and recycles the uranium so the half life of the fuel is in 100s of years instead of 1000s[0].

The chinese are going to leap frog the US in nuclear tech with their thorium reactor research[1].

The biggest issue with the US adopting nuclear is the cost and political will(less jobs). Natural gas, coal and other fuels sources are much cheaper up front costs.

[0]:https://www.heritage.org/environment/commentary/recycling-nu...

[1]:https://www.environmentalleader.com/2016/08/chinas-research-...

> because we have no story for dealing with nuclear waste.

We have no story for dealing with CO2 waste from fossil fuels, and so far we know that's destroyign the planet while nuclear waste isn't.