The United States generates and accumulates the largest cumulative volume of radioactive waste in the world, driven by decades of operating the world's largest commercial nuclear power fleet alongside extensive historical legacy waste originating from military atomic weapons programs developed during and after World War II. Other major industrial nations with substantial nuclear programs, such as France, Russia, Canada, and the United Kingdom, also manage massive inventories of low-, intermediate-, and high-level radioactive materials, requiring complex long-term national storage strategies and federally managed geological repositories.