It takes 10 years minimum from design to build out for a nuclear project, so that lines up pretty well with the end of the cold war once the US didn't need more nuclear material.

in the USA they won't re-process fuel because of fears it will be stolen and turned into weapons. so we have 5x the waste volume than other countries where fuel is re-processed.

also we won't use breeder reactors because of this, which are more efficient and produce way less waste than normal reactors.

yes, it's all political problems. people are ignorant and angry and fearful and won't let nuclear power problems be resolved because they don't understand solutions exist and if you try to educate them they refuse to learn because they want to cling to their fears and emotions about it. a lot of political problems are like this. we have active solutions for many social problems, but people refuse to allow them to be implemented because of fear and delusional belief.

Only ~3% of nuclear waste is really dangerous, that's the spent fuel rods. The majority of "nuclear waste" is stuff that was in proximity and contains intermediate to low levels of radioactivity. It's obviously not great to injest or spend all your time around, but it can be safely stored almost anywhere as it's mostly only emitting alpha and beta particles.

So what about the dangerous stuff like fuel rods? Well, if you took all the dangerous waste nuclear power ever created and piled it in one place, it would cover a football field and be stacked 3 meters high. That sounds like a lot, but remember, that's is ALL the dangerous waste nuclear power has EVER produced. Compare that to literally any other form of energy production, including solar and wind, and the footprint from nuclear is laughably, almost unimaginably, small.

Because the amount of waste we've created is really quite small. Per the US DoE:

U.S. commercial reactors have generated about 90,000 metric tons of spent fuel since the 1950s. If all of it were able to be stacked together, it could fit on a single football field at a depth of less than 10 yards (or meters).

There are ways we can repurpose or reuse spent nuclear fuel. I don't know a lot about this so I won't get into it, but even if we chose to do nothing with it and just bury it, we know enough about geology that we could stick it into some bedrock that will be stable for the next 500 million years.