[dminuoso]

What is even more interesting: At a given power rating, coal plants produce up to 3 times more radioactivity than nuclear power plants directly in leftover ash because coal contains large numbers of radioactive isotopes. It might not seem like much, but when you consider that a 1TWe coal plant burns 3.2Mt of coal a year compared to 27t of uranium for an equivalent nuclear power plant, this might become more apparent.

Most of that waste is captured in ash via particle filters and has to be treated like any highly toxic and radioactive waste, but as far as I know this waste it not destined for secured long term nuclear disposal where it would be kept safe from interacting with the environment. We don’t seem to have a problem with that…

Further, some low percentage (literature tends to point at .5%) of it is in gaseous form or cannot be filtered, so it gets vented into the atmosphere. That’s assuming modern and intact particle filters. And we aren’t even talking about CO2 here.

It’s somewhat absurd we have to have discussions about nuclear power plant waste in this reality.

[fsh]

Nuclear power plants produce many many orders of magnitude more radioactivity than coal power plants for a given amount of energy produced. You are probably misinterpreting the famous 1978 study [1] where the radioactive emissions of nuclear and coal power plants were estimated to be roughly the same. This does not include the solid and liquid nuclear waste, only the radioactive gases that are inadvertently leaked from nuclear reactors. Coal ash is barely radioactive at all, and the radioactivity is completely negligible compared to the chemical toxicity.

[1] https://doi.org/10.1126/science.202.4372.1045