You can make the calculation return any result you want, for example by including cost of millennia of nuclear waste storage in price of nuclear power;
You can calculate arbitrarily high costs for anything if you try hard enough. What of it? We're not going to deal with nuclear waste by sticking it in Yucca Mountain and guarding it for thousands of years; that would be silly. Here's a summary of how to realistically deal with nuclear waste. We have more than enough money for this budgeted as part of every nuclear plant's operating and maintenance fees.
another thing - nuclear power gets massive federal insurance subsidies
Not true (PDF warning). The nuclear industry runs its own insurance pool, paid for out of their own pocket. The regulations requiring this do say that the federal government may help out in extreme circumstances (i.e. something on the scale of Chernobyl) but to date the feds haven't spent a dime on this. And I see no reason to believe that they ever will.
If you know what result you want, you will be able to come up with it.
If you're motivated to play games with the figures, consciously or not, then sure you can. But I try to avoid that sort of thing, and it tends to be pretty obvious.
Note that I'm not accusing you of dishonesty -- but I'm guessing that you ultimately got those arguments from someone who was trying to make the numbers fit his position, rather than the other way around.
Another thing to calculate on the cost of nuclear power:
photovoltaics don't have evacuation plans, labled evacuation routes, large government monitoring safety boards, or National Guard/Air Force aerial defense concerns.
It's hard to look up data on so-called "externalities" like that.
This is our monthly thread for collecting these little gems and pearls of wisdom, rationality-related quotes you've seen recently, or had stored in your quotesfile for ages, and which might be handy to link to in one of our discussions.