Earlier quoted context omitted.
The old 'what if evil terrorist' nonsense. Terrorist would hurt 1000x more people buy destroying the rails along a high speed train route. Stealing nuclear waste is incredibly hard and borderline useless. And Russia and China don't need to attack civilian nuclear waste, if they want to nuke you they can just do that. Do you actually really believe a general in Russia is sitting around thinking 'mhh we can make the ci…
"The old 'what if evil terrorist' nonsense." The old nothing bad ever happens nonsense. Have you heard about the Ukraine conflict or does your lack of coherent points include a lack of knowlegde of current events? Then there are the frequent insecurities, missing nuclear materials, and other fun new conflicts brewing...
You can easily collocate this with other research operations. Then you don't even have to pay a dedicated secure guard.
> You can't just leave the high-level waste there for anyone to steal
The lots of places where nuclear waste stands around totally unguarded with maybe a small fence. And yet in reality people don't steal gigantic concrete blocks that need spacial transport.
If you are seriously question the argument that digging a huge incredibly complex geological storage is more expensive then a normal storage building then I question your sanity.
Your argument seems to boil down to the typical 'what if highly unrealistic terrorist from a holywood movie set show up'. I prefer to live in the real world, rather then Holywood fantasy land where villains with incredibly dumb and unrealistic plans are a weekly event.