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The German nuclear phaseout may have caused up to thousands of excess deaths annually according to several studies. It’s no secret that the phaseout was a disaster. But when you start digging into the real-world consequences, that’s when reality really hits. Over the past decade, several researchers have tried to quantify the consequences. One topic that keeps coming up is how many people have died as a result of coal replacing nuclear. Most studies agree that the number is in the hundreds or thousands per year, but they reach that conclusion in different ways. Some, like Jarvis et al. (2022) and Núñez-Mujica et al. (2025), model the increase in coal emissions, run those through atmospheric dispersion models, and apply dose-response functions to estimate the health impact. Their numbers land around 725 to 800 excess deaths per year. Neidell et al. (2021) take a different route. They look at reduced electricity consumption following the phaseout and estimate over 1,100 additional deaths per year linked to cold exposure and energy poverty. Kharecha & Sato (2019) project out to 2035 and estimate a long-run average of around 2,286 annual deaths, based on increased air pollution alone. Then there’s Kaariaho (2025), whose number (170 deaths per year) is much lower. That’s not because the health impact was smaller, but because the scope was. Kaariaho only looks at respiratory diseases, and only at observed mortality using a synthetic control method. In other words, it’s a very conservative lower bound. I’ve put these results together in a single graphic. Each dot represents a study. Together, they show a clear pattern: coal replaced nuclear, and people died because of it. This isn’t about nuclear versus renewables. If you remove clean energy while fossil fuels are still on the grid, guess what fills the gap? In Germany, it was coal. And it killed people.