I'll start once again by saying I can provide name date references if you can be bothered reading them.
Disposal costs are externalities, just like climate change costs, economic loss of life costs etc etc. These are all costs that are external to the financial marginal cost of supplying the energy. Sure the costs come in different forms but economists attempt to make them equivalent for anlaysis. By no means am I saying that nuclear waste disposal is costless, but it is finite and we can measure it. The cost of not managing climate change is not finite, we have estimates and they start many times larger than nuclear waste disposal. NB the end goal is to displace coal and gas from the energy mix and supplement other renewables not replace them.
I'm pretty sure that I pointed out that I worked at the coal face with a few different power companies to try and reduce emissions. My wife has an environmental management masters from Harvard and works to try and get public private partnerships up. So we're not clueless bystanders.
Australia only has one reactor, but globally nuclear forms 10% of supply and this is much higher in some countries. Regarding shutting them down, see what's happening in Germany as they keep extending the life of their reactors in order to shut down their lignite power plants and keep the lights on during winter. Korea and Japan have backflipped on shutting their reactors as they have realised that they would have to replace nuclear with gas and coal to get by.
The total cost of network capex in NSW between 2009-14 was $15bn, and that was just to improve reliability. I haven't looked at the ABS statistics for the total country since then but I'm sure it's been a lot more, and it will be a lot more again to deal with intermittant and distributed sources. $400m would not buy a transmission line these days or come even close to upgrading all of the substations in Sydney to allow distributed generation. The proven cost of a Korean APR1400 is somewhere between
$6-10 billion per reactor depending on PPP of the country building the reactor. NB the cost has dropped a little as the koreans got better at building them, similar to the french in the 70 and 80s.
Au contraire! See
this and
this for a discussion of the deaths by energy source. I remember when the WHO analysis came out 10 years ago and was shocked that the world was happy to bumble along with coal. NB the number for wind and solar was a lot worse 10 years ago, and the table below includes all excess deaths from Fukushima and Chernobyl.
If the goal is waste reduction then it would be a FBR to reduce the volume of waste by up to 100 times. The waste left over if encased in epoxy concrete would essentially be inert and almost impossible to extract or disperse. The question then becomes how to protect life forms from the radiation. The simplest way would be to bury at the bottom of mining shafts or oil and gas wells that are unlikely to be exposed in the next few million years.
The comparison to laminates is that we essentially bury them. Recycling solar panels and wind blades is possible but not economic and carries it's own risks from the heavy metals in the panels and silicosis from the fibreglass. All of this pales in comparison to the problem of trying to extract CO2 out of the atmosphere. It can be done but it's energy intensive, and we need to do fuckloads of it.
And this is my point, nuclear is superior to coal and gas and would supplement wind and solar, and we need all the help we can get.