You're right, it sounds like it should be easy to avoid these cartoonishly bad outcomes, but unfortunately reality doesn't always meet our expectations.

"Why Germany is digging up its nuclear waste"

"But the waste had to be stored somewhere, so the voices that warned against selecting Asse II were ignored."

"The office concluded that the risk of groundwater contamination was too big, and the only truly safe option was to retrieve all the waste from the mine and store it elsewhere."

https://euobserver.com/eu-political/132085

(Thank you for offering a fact-based criticism, though, rather than just angrily downvoting.)

> Asse II salt mine should never have been used in the 1960s and 1970s as a site to dump nuclear waste, said Ingo Bautz of the Federal Office for Radiation Protection.

> “Today, nobody would choose this mine to place radioactive waste,” Bautz told journalists during a recent tour of the mine, in the north-western state of Lower Saxony.

How is this applicable in 2022? This proves his point, not yours. The problems from your article have long been solved.

I'm just not convinced by the argument "Nuclear power is safe as long as we don't make any of the mistakes of previous generations".

Chernobyl didn't make the mistakes of Windscale; Fukushima didn't make the mistakes of Chernobyl; and future nuclear power stations won't make the mistakes of Fukushima (hopefully).

It's possible that the track record for nuclear plants, and handling radioactive waste, is getting better, but it's also possible that on the scale of hundreds of years, there will be new things that go wrong which we didn't predict.

I'm not asking for perfection, though. All I'm saying is that nuclear energy has a history of costing more and being more deadly than its proponents claim, and it's already too expensive to build (both generation and waste storage) at scale, safely, and on time in nearly all countries.

Count how many people have died in these accidents directly and possibly from thyroid cancers, and compare to lung cancers attributed to coal. Coal kills way more people. It's killing right now.

There are estimates that more people died from fuel poverty due to closure of Fukushima and subsequent raise in fuel prices, than the Fukushima accident itself.

Coal power plants release more radioactive pollution than nuclear power plants, simply because coal is never 100% pure and the sheer volume of coal burned.

So you are demanding perfection. Your fear of hypothetical future risk of harm is perpetuating the actual harm currently happening.

Here's the comparison: https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy

Great link, as the data is normalized to per watt.

Costing more, Yes, but being more deadly, No.