I don't know of how many completely uninhabited deserts there are in the United States that aren't protected as national or state parks. In addition, how do you transport nuclear waste to the desert, especially from long distances? Nobody wants a truck carrying nuclear waste around. The biggest issue is that I don't think anyone at the federal, state, or congressional representative level would volunteer or accept putting nuclear waste close to their constituencies.
Would you call scheme unusable? Of course not, people use it every day. It has 12 'fundamental forms' that cannot be implemented within the language itself without a compiler. Every other library function(except low-level IO ones) is defined in terms of these forms. From the language designers, "we realized that the lambda calculus—a small, simple formalism—could serve as the core of a powerful and expressive programming language."
If you don't already know, there is a Church encoding for singly-linked lists that is in the lambda calculus. We can already implement some of the operations you have listed with just lambdas:
(defun cons (x y)
(lambda (z) (z x y)))
(defun car (l)
(l (lambda (x y) x)))
(defun cdr (l)
(l (lambda (x y) y)))
It's not like a lisp with 'just lambda' would be 'absurd and unusable'. I just showed you, we can implement cons, car, and cdr with just lambdas(hooray, closure! not clojure, closure...). Although there are some design decisions that had to be made, e.g. set, list.