To the Editor:

From a strictly scientific viewpoint, there is a certain element of unreality to the public furor roused by commercial-nuclear-waste disposal. A certain amount of public concern is understandable, but the degree of attention surrounding the issue hardly seems warranted in light of the virtually unanimous consensus of thousands of exhaustive studies produced by national and international scientific organizations over the years.

For example, according to a recent report by the International Council of Scientific Unions, ''nuclear wastes may be safely disposed of using current technology.'' Who are these guys? According to their report, a body that ''is responsible to no government, has no vested interest in nuclear power (or any other kind of power), has access to the world's scientific and technical community and can come to conclusions purely on scientific grounds.''

Our own highly esteemed Congressional Office of Technology Assessment said of mined geological nuclear repositories in a 1982 report: ''There appears to be no insurmountable technical obstacles to developing such repositories to meet tentative Environmental Protection Agency safety criteria at a cost no more than a few percent of the total cost of nuclear power.''

How are such conclusions possible? Consider, for perspective, that a strict comparison of the normal, albeit very low, radioactive emissions from coal combustion reveals a radiation risk thousand of times greater than the maximum theoretical radiation releases from the worst accident during the operation of a nuclear-waste repository. As for radiation risks associated with leaks from a completed nuclear-waste site, they are calculated to be at least 30,000 times lower than the normal risks from natural background radiation.

And if all else fails, look to mother nature. About two billion years ago, when the isotopic composition of uranium deposits was similar to that found in United States reactors today, mother nature operated several natural reactors in an area that is now Gabon, Africa. Basically, when water was present to provide the catalyst for a nuclear reaction, the deposits went critical and generated ''nuclear power.'' When the water evaporated, the reactors shut down. These reactors operated off and on for a few hundred thousand years.

O.K., where's the waste? The short-lived gases diffused into the atmosphere. But the plutonium, americium and other ''bad actors'' migrated 30 feet or less in the soil (plain old dirt) in about two billion years! Man, with the ability to select a better geological medium and provide additional technological barriers to stabilize the waste, ought to be able to beat mother nature's record without difficulty.

Such facts illustrate a fundamental problem, and one that the Office of Technology Assessment and many others have pointed to: better efforts on the part of experts to educate the public about what is known. The real issues seem to be political in nature and not associated with technological reality. JOHN W. MCKLVEEN Tempe, Ariz., March 20, 1987 The writer, a nuclear environmental engineer, is professor of engineering at Arizona State University.