No. Coal danger is always marginal and diffuse if you can’t detect the pollution with your senses. Not so with radiation.

If you're exposed to enough radiation for the effects not to be "marginal and diffuse" then you can detect it with your senses. High dose radiation will literally burn you.

People misunderstand the risk. The amount of radiation you need to be exposed to for a 50% chance of getting cancer would be a fatal dose from radiation poisoning. The way people end up with cancer isn't by one person getting a large dose, it's by a million people each getting a small dose, so that they each have a one in ten thousand chance of getting cancer and then a hundred of them do.

Which is exactly the same thing that happens with coal -- not least because coal is radioactive and burning it puts the radioactive materials into the air.

Except that coal does it as a consequence of normal operation rather than only in the event of a catastrophic failure.

I'm not so sure about that. Gamma radiation is one thing, getting a bunch of alpha and beta emitters more or less permanently stuck in your body, is another.

> I'm not so sure about that. Gamma radiation is one thing, getting a bunch of alpha and beta emitters more or less permanently stuck in your body, is another.

About the only practical way to do that is to eat them, at which point you're in the same category as any other adulterated food. How is caesium any scarier than prions or mercury or various pesticides or a thousand different chemical carcinogens?

Or getting fallout raining on you? Or eating stuff that's been growing in fallout rain. Or eating meat from livestock grazing on polluted areas. I don't know, but I thought Chernobyl was pretty damn scary when it happened. Iodine supplemented in table salt as a prophylactic. Pretty grim stuff when you think about it and lived in the Cold War. It scared me.