Yes, thanks for pointing that out. Uranium tailings are one of the biggest environmental issues with nuclear power, and one of the ones I never hear anyone mention.
The radioactive waste produced by the plants is more of a political issue than a technical one, as is the switch to far safer, more maintainable, non-proliferating reactor designs.
The statement that nowadays reactor engines can be designed that are "far safer" always riles me up a little bit because, of course, a few decades ago the OLD designs were already sold to the general public with the promise that they were "perfectly" safe. And if you had the temerity to question this, you were of course a Luddite.
Even the old Western designs are/were safe within the parameters of their design. Many are running even today because it has proven politically impossible to replace them.
The one major exception is Fukushima Dai-Ichi (which used one of the oldest BWR designs), and even Fukushima Dai-Ichi has not killed anyone from radiation directly.
But just to contrast, the nearby set of operating reactors at Fukushima Dai-Ni (which also used an old BWR design with a minor containment upgrade) both managed to safely achieve cold shutdown even despite getting hit by the exact same tsunami that hit their sister site just a few kilometers up the coast.
Obviously you should always question the safety of a new technology instead of blindly trusting it. The modern reliance on computers and the magic of the Internet seems to come to mind for me as an example of where blind trust leads to problems. But questioning nuclear just because it's nuclear may well have made one a Luddite. The basics of nuclear engineering are not actually as difficult to understand as it's portrayed to be, but people object to the technology without even the slightest attempt to understand it, which may well make one a Luddite as well.
The radioactive waste produced by the plants is more of a political issue than a technical one, as is the switch to far safer, more maintainable, non-proliferating reactor designs.