Small amount of radioactive materials go missing and it becomes international news. Things might be pretty good when it comes to nuclear materials safety after all.
Reddit had fun with this story. One guy was posting daily images of a small metal capsule he'd found, wondering what it was. Everyday the image deteriorated a bit, and he described feeling sicker.
Comments were along the lines of "your passion for collecting is truly radiant".
I mean nuclear materials safety is top notch, for various reasons - including national security, as the material can be used to create a dirty bomb.
The problem of disposal is political; nobody wants a nuclear waste storage bunker in their back yard. In the US, this has caused every nuclear power plant to have their own growing stockpile of nuclear waste - much more than they should have at any given time [0].
This comment was just from things I've read over time; I didn't realize the US actually has a $44B stockpile budget to build a nuclear waste disposal site, built up since the 80's.
This is what a nuclear waste storage might look like: [1]
