
Nuclear plants release less radiation into environment than coal plants (2007) - ch4s3
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-radioactive-than-nuclear-waste/
======
notahacker
If ever a headline deserved to be changed from the original statement on HN,
it's this one. Not only is it linkbait, it's also a lie.

Even the footnote introduced by the publisher admits the headline is, at best,
misleading. Sure, it's true, in a trivial sense, that nuclear waste _when
stored in a manner that effectively shields it from emitting radiation into
the surrounding environment_ emits less radiation into the surrounding
environment than a relatively benign substance emitted indiscriminately into
the surrounding environment. If the article were trying to claim that coal
dust in itself was particularly harmful that might still be an interesting
comparison. But as it is, for those of us that know that properly-functioning
nuclear plants don't pump nuclear waste into the surrounding atmosphere but do
create storage hazards, it's about as insulting to the intelligence as a
headline claiming that shandy[1] is more likely to cause alcohol poisoning
than absinthe[2]

[1]ingested [2]not ingested.

~~~
blablabla123
I think the level of density/concentration is an issue hardly ever discussed.
But at the end of the day concentration is the only thing that counts. If you
can successfully lower the radioactive concentration below the natural
radiation, things are actually pretty safe. If you store nuclear waste in a
salt deposit, usually a lot of ground water gets into the deposit. (Asse II is
an extreme case) It gets contaminated and the question is: is the water much
more radioactive than the water elsewhere? If not, it is actually relatively
safe to live in proximity and do farming. According to this article it might
be even safer than doing farming near a coal plant.

Actually another thing hardly ever discussed outside of Physics courses is the
difference between solid radioactive objects and radioactive gas. The latter
is actually a much more dangerous than the former. Not only because solid
objects are easier to handle. The lungs are much more sensitive to
radioactivity. Moreover gas particles can land on food, thus also getting
directly into the body. Once "harmless" radioactive particles are inside the
body, they radiate from within...

In Southern Germany there are areas with a lot of mountains. There people
often have the radioactive gas Radon in problematic concentrations in the
cellars. It is emitted by stones and when breathed cancerous and one of the
top reasons for lung cancer. (Besides smoking)

~~~
erichurkman
Radon is a serious issue everywhere, not just Germany, and not just near
mountains. Testing and mitigating radon in homes is one of the easiest and
least expensive ways to reduce cancer risks.

The EPA has a good guide on radon and homes [1]. Even if you do not have a
radon detector, it's very inexpensive to get periodic tests done (you can do
them at home with a test kit). IIRC they are around $15-20 retail, although
some fire departments or cities may provide them for free.

The only way to be sure your home does not have a radon issue is to test it
yourself.

[1]
[http://www.epa.gov/radon/pubs/citguide.html](http://www.epa.gov/radon/pubs/citguide.html)

~~~
001sky
Also the map page>
[http://www.epa.gov/radon/zonemap.html](http://www.epa.gov/radon/zonemap.html)

------
slashnull
"Coal-fired plants emit more radiation in their immediate environment than
their nuclear equivalents".

There.

I once tried to find other facts that could support this dumb-ass title, and I
was unable to. Coal mining produces a tiny tiny amount of radioactive
contamination, and the amount of radiation in fly ash seems to dwarf the
amount of radioactive stuff we lose in the nature because of accidents and
nuclear waste storage and that kind of stuff.

Even if you state that premise as "coal power has some radioactive waste
issues", it's still a lie.

------
afterburner
False dichotomy, it's not a choice between nuclear and coal. Cheap solar is
here, yes, cheaper than coal even:

[http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/04/15/rising-
sun](http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/04/15/rising-sun)

[http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/18/opinion/krugman-
salvation-...](http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/18/opinion/krugman-salvation-
gets-cheap.html)

Not to mention any number of other renewables (wind, wave, tidal, thermal,
etc...)

~~~
TeMPOraL
Cheap solar is here, but it's enough only for a small part of our energy
needs.

[http://www.withouthotair.com/c18/page_103.shtml](http://www.withouthotair.com/c18/page_103.shtml)

~~~
001sky
Not to mention the damage all of this does to the environment. The amount of
square footage required to be destroyed for wind-farms and solar arrays (at
any scale) is undenialy an ecological disaster, not to mention the duplication
of power-transfer infrastructure required to geographically disparate
generation stations into major human cities.

[If you need citations for this, try hiking/walking through one of the many
wind-farms in the SoCal Desert. Particulalry, the 2012 generation windfarms in
th Mojave which are ~double the scale of earlier generations. Then imaging
living next to something like this on a global scale. see also>
[http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/20/magazine/its-the-end-of-
th...](http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/20/magazine/its-the-end-of-the-world-as-
we-know-it-and-he-feels-fine.html?_r=0)]

~~~
mcv
Why would any square footage need to be destroyed? Have we run out of rooftops
or deserts? And why do we never hear these arguments when it's about roads or
more polluting plants and factories? If we're going to use space, we'd better
us it for something that solves a problem than makes it worse.

~~~
001sky
_Why would any square footage need to be destroyed? Have we run out of
rooftops or deserts?_

What on earth makes you think you are entitled to deface a desert landscape?
Go take a look at the 395 corridor and look at what happened to owens valley.
What do you think allows people to live in LA? Who the hell is polluting CA
and driving 2-3 hours a day in their cars? Same people who destroyed the
eastern escarpment. It's amusing listening to so-called "environmentalists"
spew out such ignorance.

~~~
mcv
So it's okay to deface the entire rest of the country, but the desert is
sacred? Or is your solution to abandon society, decimate the population, and
go back to the caves?

There are good and bad ways to handle this. More pollution is a bad way, more
solar is a good way. Nothing is 100% perfect, but continuing down a bad road
because a significant improvement doesn't instantly solve all the world's
problems, is downright stupid.

~~~
001sky
No, the people who defaced LA and Defaced the Owens valley now want to deface
the Mojave. What is downright stupid is not doing the math on how you connect
the dots.

------
hernan604
that article is from 2007. Nowadays everyone knows NPP are the worst
technology human has invented and doesnt knows how to use and decomission. See
whats happening at fukushima, its killing the pacific ocean. And making a lot
of seals sick in california. If you heard about it you know the details. And
its only the begining because man made radiation does not go away, it stays
and its bleeding radiatiation as i type.. that means years from now, it will
be more acumulated.

Cesium is a fission product that emits radiation. Has a half life of 30yrs and
when you consume it, you body thinks its Potassium because of similarities in
structure. Therefore accumulates on the muscles, specially the heart and emits
radiation on closeby cells.

Strontium, another fission product that emits radiation is similar to Calcium.
Once consumed is transfered into the bones.

Sites like enenews.com can tell better news about NPP.

------
iprashantsharma
holy fuck, I am working in power plant.. what should i do? this is insane! Fly
ash, bottom ash, coal ash every thing is here.

~~~
evanb
The dose you receive is very likely negligible compared to your other routine
activities.

[http://xkcd.com/radiation/](http://xkcd.com/radiation/)

~~~
ch4s3
I love that chart, I always show it to people who are afraid of Nuclear power.

------
m1
Did you just read this on the Guardian too?

~~~
ch4s3
No, I saw it on reddit, and though it might be HN worthy, despite the bad
headline. I'm not sure how meaningful the dose of radiation is, but the
comparison it super interesting.

------
personZ
Ignore the "waste" element of the title and understand that they're saying
that if you're living in the shadow of a nuclear power plant, and everything
operates ideally, you'll undergo less radiation than near a coal plant. Which
is quite reasonable.

Yet the waste of nuclear plant isn't the harmless water vapours coming out of
cooling towers -- which is what this article bizarrely focuses on -- but
instead the used fuel that will need to be contained and managed for tens of
thousands of years. Further the fear of the nuclear industry isn't ideal
situations, which is manageable, but situations like Chernobyl and Fukushima
Daiichi: The "super promise 100x never going to happen triple safeguard" sort.
A single major incident suddenly undoes much of that good many times over.

~~~
hga
Well, civilian reactor "waste" is potentially very valuable stuff, but we're
rather stupid in our approach towards it. And the "tens of thousands of years"
is grossly overstated, at least if you apply the metric that after 600 years
it'll be no more radioactive than the ore from which it was mined.

The Chernobyl RBMK design is criminal, and literally so in the US, where
Edward Teller made sure reactors with positive void coefficients were outlawed
(one reason we don't do CANDU, although the proposed Advanced CANDU reactor
addresses this). The Japanese demonstrated long before Fukushima Daiichi that
they don't have a nuclear safety culture at the level they should be allowed
to run serious reactors, and that incident prompted me to look at boiling
water reactor designs for the first time, and I don't like them at all.

Yeah, the above is in danger of the No True Scotsman fallacy, but we have heck
of a lot of counter experiences, including the pressurized water reactor worst
case incident at Three Mile Island which harmed no one and was never in
serious danger of doing so.

As for what you poise as a bizarre focus, every coal plant in the world is
pumping out a lot of nasty stuff, they're inherently dirty, and _totally_
cleaning them up is not in the cards. As in, right now, every day one is
running, it's potentially doing harm....

~~~
personZ
_And the "tens of thousands of years" is grossly overstated, at least if you
apply the metric that after 600 years it'll be no more radioactive than the
ore from which it was mined._

[http://www.ccnr.org/hlw_graph.html#gr](http://www.ccnr.org/hlw_graph.html#gr)

EDIT: Some have penalized me under the notion that hga's "apples and oranges"
comment was a retort (despite the fact that the chart also has concentrated
uranium near the bottom). It is not. HGA is apparently unaware that uranium
tailings are effectively worse than uranium ore, containing 85%+ or the
original radioactivity of the ore, but concentrated and exposed. If you had
the choice between holding a handful of uranium ore or uranium tailings, you'd
do better to choose the former.

There are a lot of grossly misleading claims from the pro-nuclear lobby, one
of which is that if you only count the product of fission (and not the
actinides), and you compare it against post-processed yellow-cake, it's all
the same.

In no universe is it equivalent to naturally existing uranium after 600 years.

 _every coal plant in the world is pumping out a lot of nasty stuff, they 're
inherently dirty_

But despite the _ridiculous_ lead-in to the linked article (no, the common
notions of nuclear power does not come from the Simpsons), everyone knows that
coal is dirty. Most areas are phasing it out (here in Ontario we have
effectively eliminated coal power, from it comprising 25% of our power not too
many years ago). Is nuclear power the best alternative? That's dubious, not
only because of "exceptional" events that yield enormous ecological damage,
the waste product that we just push to future generations, and economics that
seldom make sense over the life of the project.

~~~
hga
Bzzzt: Apples and Oranges, I'm talking about the original ore, that chart uses
ore _tailings_ , which are certainly not benign (I grew up in an area where
mass quantities of lead and zinc were mined until the end of WWII), but
they're very much not the same thing. Especially if the refining process also
seperates some of the nastier things you'll find along with the uranium.

Find some references with the ore and perhaps we can have a discussion.

' _" exceptional" events that yield enormous ecological damage_'

Which would total Chernobyl, which I've already pointed out a direction of
some of its many problems.

