35x of a small problem is not necessarily a big problem. You need to quantify that objection. Nuclear waste can be reprocessed (see Fast Breeder reactors); the concern raised here is usually proliferation risk.
Given a binary choice, I'd rather have to deal with some nuclear waste than climate change, and I don't even think that climate change is an existential risk for humanity (just likely to cause large and uneven/unjust levels of harm). I think it's misleading to throw out individual objections like this without considering the systemic trade-offs that we need to make.
> the nuclear lobby were the ones that brought us the phrase "too cheap to meter"
I think this kind of blame-throwing is unhelpful. I couldn't care less what marketing claims were made in the past. Does this technology make a good cost/benefit trade-off now, or not? Specifically, compared to the other options we actually have available to us now. That is the conversation I think we should be having.
To address your object-level claim, as the OP describes in detail, one reason nuclear is more expensive now is the ever-increasing regulatory framework that has changed under the feet of in-progress projects. Maybe those regulations have resulted in a good ROI, but it's hard for me to buy that claim. Nuclear is now 10-100x safer than most other traditional/fossil forms of power generation[1], and it's excruciatingly expensive to buy that safety margin. These are tiny death rates caused by power generation.
The problem here is that it's political suicide to say "I think we should reduce safety regulations to make nuclear power 10x more dangerous, because that will avert far more deaths from climate change". In practice perhaps a major push for solar/wind/geothermal would be a higher-ROI solution to our problems, but that's politically much harder to get consensus on.
[1]: https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy