That is purely psychological perception. Noone seriously calculated that nuclear waste would be orders of magnitude worse than coal per TWh. Neither safety, expense to manage nor other externalities.

>Noone seriously calculated that nuclear waste would be orders of magnitude worse than coal per TWh

Not sure what you mean here but I agree that nobody was able to predict what the cost of nuclear would actually end up being when they first started with it in the 50s.

EDF was bailed out for 50 bn despite having neglected maintenance so badly that half their plants were offline in 2022, and the first thing France did when they took over was to double the purchase price. If that's enough remains to be seen.

If you mean that you disagree that nuclear is an order of magnitude worse per TWh, then perhaps you don't know how much more energy we get from coal, or how much money, time and effort is spent on nuclear?

Just as an illustration, during the 40 years it was active, Fukushima generated as much electricity in total as the world gets from coal in one week.

No it isn't. All current nuclear waste models purely rely on geology and perfect engineering and assume that 100 to 300 years in the future those sites need zero staff, zero maintenance and zero monitoring.

Which is of course a "cool" assumption to make if you're profiting from this being the conclusion today. Critics of these models (like me) are sceptical of that overly opportunistic conclusion, especially since the timeframes involved are so long and the storage still needs to be maintained long after the profits stopped for one reason or another. I am not saying that this can't be done, I say the current models are insufficient and rely on future generations "dealing with it" somehow.

If you can convince me my worry is unfounded, I'd be happy to hear why I am worrying too much or why we can be certain that this works out as we wish it would.