It's not really a problem. The alternative is to grind it up into fine dust, spray it into the air, and call it "clean coal".

That would poison the entire country. Nuclear waste is many many orders of magnitude more radioactive than coal per energy generated. The meme about coal emitting more radiation comes from a 1970s paper that compared radioactive emissions and found them to be on the same order of magnitude between a BWR and an unfiltered coal power plant.