Furthermore, coal releases more radiation into the environment than nuclear power.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-...

All that shows is people are spectacularly bad at assessing risks. Many people, for example, are terrified that what happened in today's headline will happen to them. But the reason it is a headline is it is rare. The mundane deadly things that are very likely to happen to you are not reported in the paper.

The thing that always fascinates me is how people constantly bring up the long lifespan of nuclear waste, while ignoring the essentially infinite lifespan of many forms of toxic chemical pollution.

Tell people that the mercury that comes out of a coal plant will outlast the Earth itself, and you get a shrug. Tell them that nuclear waste will remain dangerous for 10,000 years and suddenly it's a Big Problem that needs Extraordinary Measures in order to Safeguard Future Civilizations.

The other thing about a half-life of 10,000 years is it means the actual radiation is very, very small. If it was large, it wouldn't last 10,000 years.

The way to make nuclear waste safe is not to concentrate it and bury it. It's to disperse it in such low concentrations that it doesn't make any difference.

That's too far the other way. Material that's safe in 10,000 years (which means the half-life is significantly less) is highly active and not something you want to hang out with unless it's shielded. The longer-lived stuff isn't all that great either when it gets inside you. Being near a bunch of uranium is fine, but breathing it in is considerably less fine.

Several countries tried your approach around the middle of the last century, pulverizing large amounts of radioactive material and dispersing it into the atmosphere. The results weren't catastrophic, but thousands did die from it.

We shouldn't be irrationally fearful of nuclear waste, but we shouldn't be completely blase about it either. The stuff is dangerous... just not dangerous on a level beyond anything else out there, the way many treat it.

There's also a considerable difference between the poisonous chemical properties of heavy metals, which will persist, and their radioactive danger.

..you also need to consider that we still have no proven way of handling high level waste, and that nuclear accidents can render huge areas completely unusable for decades, and that clean up of nuclear sites can consume utterly huge amounts of money. The same is not true of fossil fuels. Also don't discount the utterly huge amounts of energy required to construct, operate, and decommission nuclear plants. Nuclear industry apologists often conveniently exclude these from their analyses.

I don't see that you have refuted my point - you just have to look at the record (thousands of nuclear incidents worldwide over decades) to see that humanity apparently is not capable of safely using nuclear, and I'm sceptical that the benefits in terms of reduced exigencies are as great as is often claimed. And personally I'd far rather have the damage spread out over a wide area if it means we don't have to every now and then throw away all the milk in Wales for years and distribute iodine tablets to thousands..

If you look at the record, you see that fossil power is vastly more dangerous.

Do you really prefer killing a million people a year, every year, to "every now and then" throwing away all the milk in Wales, just because the million deaths are spread out? I can't fathom this.

By some analyses the C02 output of nuclear is on a par with fossil fuels once the whole cycle is taken into account. Let's not forget that uranium has to be dug out of the ground, processed etc., power plants built which generally uses a lot of concrete, big holes dug in the ground to put the waste into (since we have no good way of reprocessing much of this waste). None of this comes cheap in C02 terms. I get it, you love nuclear, but supporters of nuclear often conveniently ignore.

I don't think that's a fair comparison.

To me (and I suspect to many others), the huge difference lies in the indelibility of the damages of nuclear power.

Sure, coal might kill a million people a year, but the remnants of a nuclear incident will remain for thousands of years and affect hundreds of generations after that, in ways we don't even fully understand yet.

How long will the mercury, arsenic, and other nasty pollutants emitted by coal plants stick around? What strange effects will they cause on hundreds of future generations?

For example, children and pregnant women are warned to be careful about the fish they eat because of mercury contamination. A large part of that mercury contamination comes from burning coal. That's food from 70% of the planet rendered partially unfit for human consumption by coal.

There's nothing like that for nuclear. Yes, you should avoid food grown around Chernobyl, and there have been incidents where farmers had to dump milk for a while and things like that, but no nuclear accident has ever (nor could one ever conceivably) contaminate food from so much of the planet so badly.

What about when Japan dumps all the contaminated water into the ocean, what, do I just move to a different planet?

I'm in no ways a defender or a supporter of coal here; I think we should be moving to clean energies as fast as we can. Still, the damages from nuclear catastrophes are orders of magnitude bigger than those of coal, imo.

There are multiple nuclear reactors sunk into the ocean already. Japan could shove the entire Fukushima complex into the sea and it wouldn't come close to doing what coal has done to poison the oceans.

Note that even if you think radiation is particularly scary and vastly worse than chemical poisons, coal power plants emit many tons of uranium in addition to all the other nasty pollution.

What is your basis for that last statement? Coal: about a million deaths per year. Nuclear: about half a million ever, including weapons. Given that, how can you possibly say that damage from nuclear is orders of magnitude bigger?

Have you calculated the dose you experience from that and the impact on life expectancy vs. coal?

The remnants of the Chernobyl accident, far worse than any other, do not affect the surrounding area anymore. Pripyat could be built up again if there was any interest.

Why only compare it with fossils fuels?

Because that's what the parent comment did. Obviously a full analysis should include all forms of power generation, but that comment compared fossil favorably to nuclear on the basis that its failures aren't so spectacular.

When a coal plant fails, it just turns off. When a nuclear plant fails, you've got to get the best people on Earth and tens of billions to contain (not fix) the problem, in one of the most advanced nations on Earth. It made a huge mess that spread to Europe when Chernobyl failed. If nuclear is wide spread, what happens when human incompetence causes a plant failure in a place like Nigeria or Venezuela?

Edit: also, I frequently hear this argument about coal, but it's not a choice between nuclear and coal. Nuclear advocates promote investment in nuclear, but if we were to invest huge amounts into new energy infrastructure, we might as well invest in renewables, rather than another dirty hard to manage source.

Nuclear plants sometimes kill people when they fail. Coal plants kill vast numbers of people when they work. And the latter number is far, far larger than the former. Why is that an indictment of nuclear?

At least nuclear is possible to contain. It would cost vastly more than mere billions to contain the damage of coal. So no one even tries. And it has killed vastly more people.

But the news can't get flashy photos of areas destroyed by coal damage. It doesn't happen in big single events that the news likes to cover. So the damage seems basically invisible compared to nuclear. If the news reported on every death and environmental incident caused by coal et al, it would be banned within a year.

You're forgetting about coal mining, which is one of the most life expectancy reducing occupations there is.

Furthermore, coal plants can and do explode - aerosolised coal dust goes with a bang.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_accidents