Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's like the US doesn't already have a number of remote areas like Hanford, Oak Ridge, Idaho Falls, the Savannah River Site, Rocky Flats, etc. that are already set up (and somewhat contaminated already) for handling this sort of material and process. In reality it's a political nightmare, not a pollution one.
Hanford and Rocky Flats are two of the most polluted places on Earth. Hanford has polluted the Columbia River, a tragedy in itself. Nuclear is like the insolent child who refuses to clean up his room. There isn't any cleanup, really. The waste keeps piling up (usually in something that looks like a swimming pool). It must be attended to by humans for decades or centuries. And the uranium cycle leaves its dirty underw…
The radiation plume under Hanford is not as terrible as certain sources make it to be, the same with the contamination of the river. The area around the reservation itself has led to a recovered and strong population of many endangered indigenous animals in the area as well.
Regarding Rocky Flats, again, not as terrible as many make it out to be. Once you factor in living at high elevation there's not a huge increase in overall exposure.
An important consideration that comes into this is that most of these were weapons production facilities (dealing with purifying and handling some of the nastiest material around).
The waste from properly designed and operated power reactors is a much cleaner and much easier to contain process. Condemning an entire avenue of clean energy (most of the fuel needs for a century+ which have already been extracted and refined) because the work done on the technology in the 40's-60's (when we were still figuring out how awful some of the waste is), is not conducive to progress.
Source: Field engineering on projects at Hanford, Rocky Flats, and Yucca Mountain