It generally doesn't smell like anything. Classic "nuclear waste" -- that is, spent nuclear fuel -- is ceramic or metallic pellets.

Nuclear Energy

If you put nuclear waste in a situation where groundwater can flow over it on the way to a water course, you will obviously get contamination. Nuclear waste stores have to be very carefully considered to find locations that are safe from water access.

in the U.S it is around $96bn and in England it is about £56bn. you have to bury it deep in the ground because it is not bio-degradable and remains active for thousands of years. there is still the off chance that in the ground it can reacts with something and cause an explosion or release of harmful chemicals that come upwards so that crops and harvests contain those chemicals and then insects eat them and then other animals eat that insect and then we eat that animal and so on...

Nuclear energy as it is used to generate power can be dangerous. The nuclear reactors used to heat water to generate steam to spin turbines to generate electricity must be operated by individuals who know what they are doing. If something goes wrong, the duty crew must make all the right decisions and make them first time, every time. Failure to do so can cause structural elements of the core to fail and release both nuclear fuel and waste into the coolant passages in the core. (The fuel rods are designed to hold everything inside throughout the life of the fuel bundle.) This is what happened at Three Mile Island. Both mechanical failure and the failure of the duty crew to react correctly caused a meltdown. Spent fuel presents its own special problems. Fuel bundles must be recovered from the reactor and taken away and stored for an extremely long period of time before radiation levels are low enough to try to do anything with them. Fission byproducts are highly radioactive, and remain so for tens of thousands of years. Links are provided for further reading.

In the US they are stored in the complete spent fuel rods which are stored on power plant sites in water filled tanks. In some places dry storage has also had to be used, because the water tanks are full. In the UK and in France they are stored on site for a while and then taken to a central processing site (Sellafield in the UK)

Spent fuel is stored under water because the residual radioactivity of the fission products is still appreciable and has a long half life. If there is any slight damage to the fuel cladding, probably due to corrosion, even a pinhole fault, the water can become contaminated, and it's difficult to clean up.

alpha particles, beta particles, gamma radiation

The most active and dangerous part is the spent fuel itself, because it contains very active fission products. Less active arisings come from contaminants in the reactor primary system water circuit (crud). The least active category will be clothing and cleaning materials which have been used in slightly contaminated areas of the plant.

Plutionium, Uranium and/or Americum can all be used to fuel a nuclear fission power station

Our state has been arguing that point for years, it is remote and deep enough that yes I believe storing waste there is way safer than any other alternative, however people argue that transporting the waste here poses high risks and there is the potential for groundwater contamination and volcanic or earthquake incidents. The fact is how will we ever know what will happen to the waste during its decomposition process, it takes hundreds to thousands of years and no one can predict that far ahead. We could always ship it to the moon but imagine the cost! Nearsightedness is a poor characteristic when dealing with nuclear waste just look at the test site, there are places there that will never be habitable in a dozen generations because of testing. And the ignorance about it in the 50's caused many people sickness and death, I imagine that there are still watches around with radioactive dials.

In the US they're stored on site.

The most harmful of which are gamma rays. When the human body is exposed to radiation, it can cause tumors and can do extreme damage to the reproductive organs. For this reason, problems associated with radioactivity can be passed on to the victim's children as well. That is why radioactive waste produced by nuclear power plants is so dangerous.

Nuclear wastes may be the cause of radioactive contamination of soils, waters, atmosphere, living beings.

All plants have radioactive waste, especially fossil fuel plants.

They would pollute groundwater if present, the air would be shut out by sealed doors. It is important to choose a repository site without any groundwater even under abnormal rainfall in the area

people got involved..

it sucks, but yeah, blame the humans.

this is why nuclear is not everywhere, because there are people everywhere to screw it up

to tell you what happened with Chernobyl, first you have to understand how a nuclear reactor works.

in a nutshell, you have a fissionable material, it is condensed, and condensed until it produces heat on its own. these heat rods are kept in sheaths like a sword, and they keep the material cool.. there are many rods, and the more rods in the pool brought out, the higher the temperature of the water in the pool. it makes steam, and the steam spins a turbine to make electricity, and the power goes to your home.

Chernobyl happened because they were testing how to make more energy. see, they probably had a similar problem there, that they have here. People want power for their cell phones, and ipods, but they dont want to produce it, they dont like coal, they dont like nuclear. The people wouldnt allow another reactor to be built, so they were testing how the reactor would respond with more rods out of the sheathes than what was considered safe operation. (we have 50 rods, why do we only use 10 at a time? sort of thing)

so they had the normal 10 rods extended out into the pool to heat the water, then they told the computer to bring a couple more out, and a couple more, and they were really impressed, they were boiling twice the water in half the time, it was an exponential increase with just a few more rods, not double.

but what happened is that they didnt understand that the rods can heat up themselves, because they are so dense, but they can also heat the other rods, and they did. the rods got so hot they warped, then when they tried to put them back into the sheathes, they couldnt, and the reactor got so hot they couldnt put water into it fast enough to keep it cool, and it blew.

Chernobyl is still poisoned today. when the 20 or so rods out of the 50 blew, it didnt use all the material and detonate like an atomic weapon, but it detonated some, but blew the rest around, like a dirty bomb. the radiation is nearly gone, but all the plants an animals an people are dead/dying/toxic due to exposure.

nuclear is a wonderful source of energy, this is why the navy has reactors in nearly all the aircraft carriers, there are safeguards in place, and people are not allowed to mess with it. on land, its a different story, and its all about the money money money, and safeguards are put by the wayside. if they can produce double the power using a fraction more rods, they will. and this is how greed destroyed a beautiful town and lives, and the complete nuclear industry

If you look at the history of space missions, you will see they do not all make it. Sooner or later a launch would fail, with the waste be distributed randomly back to Earth. This would potentially make a mess from which we would not easily recover.

None as far as I know, but that is because it is very well controlled and contained. There are tales of things that happened in Soviet Russia, in the 50's and 60's, but little is known for sure. I don't class Chernobyl as nuclear waste, that was a damaged operating reactor.

Some kinds of radioactive waste, particularly spent fuel from nuclear power plants, will remain dangerous to people for tens of thousands and even hundreds of thousands of years. For this waste to decay to the point that it has approximately the activity of naturally occurring materials, it will take several million years.

One of the advantages of the nuclear reactors is that they do not produce smoke particles that pollute the environment and therefore lead to the acidic rainfall. The other advantage is that it is easier to control the output of a nuclear reactor to fit a given need. One of the disadvantage of the nuclear reactors is that the disposal of the nuclear waste is very expensive.

Nuclear waste would harm people and animals rather than the environment as such. I have not seen evidence on the effect of radiation on vegetation. Nuclear waste must be well contained and shielded to avoid damaging people, and so long as everyone concerned is careful and responsible, this won't happen.
If it leaked into rivers or was spread over farmland it would be ingested by grazing animals and fish and hence would enter the human food chain, and if it became high enough would then start to harm human health.

Short of stopping to use nuclear power, and any other handling and refining of nuclear material - you can't.

Nuclear waste is an unavoidable by product of using fission power. It just has to be stored and treated carefully.

You can't if nuclear fission is used. Nuclear fusion would not produce the highly active fission products that are the main problem, but it's not a practical proposition yet.