Too Complicated?

Adam Nicholson writes about yet another method of disposing of nuclear waste:

Gibb's idea has a brilliant circularity about it. The very heat that nuclear material generates, which is at the heart of much of the difficulty of storing the waste at all, could actually be put to use. His idea is to drill enormously deep holes right into the granite of the continental crust, perhaps 5,000 metres down, at the bottom of which it is quite hot anyway: about 900C. Add some canisters of high-level nuclear waste and the whole bottom of the shaft turns molten. The waste is then "engulfed", in Gibb's word, by the surrounding rock, which would resolidify in a matter of weeks. The waste would be entombed for millions of years until erosion would again expose it. By then the nuclear material will have lost its potency. Gibb calls his solution "the granite coffin".

If it works, great, yet I have a vague feeling that this is all too complex. There are several known ways to dispose of such waste, from Yucca Mountain to the various types of vitrification. But the problem isn't actually an engineering or technical one. It's one of perception. All the talk is of the long-lasting radio-nucleides, the millions of years that they must be stored. This view quite ignores two salient facts. One, that by their very nature of having long half-lives, they aren't very radioactive. It's the short term stuff that's really dangerous. Second, even for the long-term stuff there's an error of perception in how long they actually do need to be stored for. One calculation I've seen is that after 3,000 years (ie less time than that which separates us from the Pyramids) the wastes are less radioactive than the ore from which they came. 6,000 and they are less so than rock, the granite which Edinburgh, or the US Capitol, are built of.
The opposition to nuclear power does seem to rest upon three things, a fear over radiation itself (you get more, much more, radiation from sharing a bed with someone for 8 hours than you do from a nuclear power station), the fear of catastrophic accidents (We've had one of those, Chernobyl, absolutely the worst that could have happened. 31 people died at the time and subsequent radiation deaths are put in the 30-300 range over the last 20 odd years, which is, I'll wager, a great deal less than will be killed erecting windmills all over the country. Those death figures BTW, come from the UN Commission that looked into it.) and these concerns over the dispoal of waste, which as above, we know how to do safely.
Or, to put it in a nutshell, the reason we're not building nuclear power plants is ignorance.