Sheesh, isn’t it bad enough that burning coal pours CO2 into the air, and that the assorted other crap it spews is good for tens of thousands of deaths, but — Hold on to your horses, boys and girls — it seems that fly ash from coal burning power plants, ounce for ounce, is more radioactive than nuclear waste!
I didn’t know that, but it’s not new news. This article from Scientific American in 9 years old now:
www.scientificamerican.com/…
And, reality doesn’t exactly match the headline, even though reality is bad enough. The waste from a nuclear power plant is highly concentrated. Take a nap on top of spent nuclear fuel and you will be in a very bad way. Not so much on fly ash, even though the process of burning coal concentrates any uranium or thorium, or anything else that doesn’t get burned up
I wonder if this is a case of motivated reasoning: it might be seen as a vindication or even promotion of nuclear power. Heck, the nuclear power industry itself will happily share this bit of information, so...let’s just drop it.
Which I can understand, but, all that fly ash makes its way into the environment and do more harms than many of us realized. That seems important to me.
Besides, in this era of global warming, even James Hanson is pushing nuclear. Maybe there’s a little room to talk.
www.scientificamerican.com/...