Yes, the radioactivity near coal plants is higher than near nuclear plants due to the radioactive isotopes of carbon as well as differrent contaminations in the coal. Although this is almost negligible in comparison to the dose you get from medical examinations for example.

Most nuclear waste is _not_ usable in other reactors, i.e. the fission products are itself radioactive, yes, but not fissile. For a powerplant you can't just throw in any radioactive material, only few are able to sustain a chain reaction.
Breeding reactors do not use the fission products. The pellets contain non-fissile material like U238 which is transformed by the neutrons into fissile material. If this is fissioned you have to replace it, too. Anyway, breeders are not really used today due to other potential security issues (e.g. liquid sodium), about a handful worldwide.

Even modern reactor types can go critical, there is no absolute safety if you rely on a chain reaction. You can only design the core such that a meltdown is highly improbable. Therefore most reactors have a ceramic basin underneath the core which is especially built to catch it in case it melts.

Sure. We're nowhere near a usable fusion reactor in the near future. Just wanted to point out something that is mostly looked over.

No. Most fusion reactors use Deuterium + Tritium which is not present in the nuclear waste of fission reactors.

The material is the waste AFTER reprocessing. You just breed a lot of nasty stuff you cannot use for anything.

I'd say building a laser capable of firing with this frequency is the smaller problem. They're already designing the next generation of lasers which can do this (see HiPER). IMHO the targets pose a way larger problem. Right now they are all hand-crafted and hand-picked. Target laboratories produce maybe a few dozen per day but a full blown reactor needs about half a million per day! And since they are cryogenic you have too cool them until the very last moment before the laser hits them. The latest system to do this takes ~ 3 hours to bring a single target in place. Even if you fire them with a some kind of gun into the target chamber you have to ensure they are aligned on a micron scale in a chamber with about 10m diameter (NIF).

So far this was of big deal as laser experiments have always been single shot experiments. Current big lasers can shoot only once in a few hours, plenty of time to prepare each shot and align the target. High reprate lasers (with high energy) only start to emerge and people begin to focus on high reprate target production.