> My girlfriends oldest brother died in what was a wave of cancer infant deaths [..] That's horrible, and I don't want to diminish it in any way. Nuclear power

> My girlfriends oldest brother died in what was a wave of cancer infant deaths [..] That's horrible, and I don't want to diminish it in any way. Nuclear power has killed many people, and impacted many more others negatively. Thousands, certainly, possibly tens of thousands. Some (very disputed) estimates for Chernobyl range as high as hundreds of thousands of premature deaths. Each of those is a unique tragedy. On the other hand, fossil fuels kills thousands of people per day. There's no free lunch here. Deactivating a nuclear power plant and then having to rely on more coal than otherwise costs actual lives. You can point to some actual victims of Chernobyl, so it feels realer to you, but the victims of fossil fuels are all around you too, and outnumber them enormously. > of course a lot improved after Chernobyl Quite true, but again, coal is hundreds of times more deadly than nuclear even if you include Chernobyl in the statistics. If you assume things have gotten better since then, then the deck is even more overwhelmingly stacked in favour of the safety of nuclear power. To be clear: Even if you assume that nuclear power is a horrifying thing that will send a plume of radioactive ash across Europe every few decades causing birth defects and death, it still beats coal on safety. Of course, nobody thinks modern nuclear power plants are remotely that dangerous...and yet we're still building new coal plants, even today. Oh, and not that it matter hugely, but: > E.g. how much does it cost to store 1 kg of nuclear waste safely for 10 000 years? So low it rounds to zero. I'm sceptical about the true unsubsidised costs of nuclear power, but waste storage isn't a particularly hard (or expensive) problem. On the other hand, flip it around; what's the cost to store 1 kg of the radioactive waste safely? Wait, we can't store it safely; by the design of the plant it emits it straight into the atmosphere. > Please convince me that nuclear isn't a Ponzi-scheme on the future generations. The real question is whether it's affordable for current generations. It's clearly just fine for future generations.