It's an often (deliberately?) overlooked aspect of nuclear waste discussions. People will loudly say "radioactive waste needs to be stored for thousands of year

It's an often (deliberately?) overlooked aspect of nuclear waste discussions. People will loudly say "radioactive waste needs to be stored for thousands of years", and "you go near some radioactive waste, you will surely die from radiation exposure". This gets combined into something like "This highly dangerous stuff, that you cannot approach stays highly dangerous and unapproachable for 10k years". Then people say "how can we possibly hope to store this incredibly dangerous stuff for 10k years, it's such a hard problem to solve, better not create this stuff in the first place, no more nuclear!". But the stuff that lasts 10k years is a very different beast from the stuff that kills you quickly from just being near it. The supremely radioactive stuff tends to have a very short half-life. We can think about storage methods in very human time-frames, it's much more achievable. The other, long half life stuff needn't be stored with nearly the same extremly stringent standards, because it just isn't so extremely dangerous.