This is only about emissions though. The radioactive waste produced by nuclear power plants has many many orders of magnitude more activity than the emissions.
[1] https://www.science.org/doi/abs/10.1126/science.202.4372.104...
yes I should have probably said "emission" not waste
> No, coal is barely radioactive at all.
but you need to burn orders of magnitude more of it, producing literal mountains of coal ash and exhaust emissions
whereas for nuclear the waste is an extremely small volume, of which almost 100% of is captured
scrubbing technologies have also improved since 1978, and scrubbing not-very-much thoroughly is a much easier than scrubbing vast amounts not-very-well
https://www.ap.org/press-releases/2012/part-ii-ap-impact-tri...
45 out of 65 sites had significant tritium leaks, some were migrating off site, some were starting to contaminate public drinking water.
The nuclear industry is so loosely regulated that a half million gallon leak of radioactive water recently apparently didn't require them to notify anyone https://apnews.com/article/xcel-energy-nuclear-leak-tritium-...
Also: "it's better than coal!"...no kidding. It's not better than wind and solar. Not in terms of price, time to install, time for carbon payback, waste issues, or safety.
That's why grid operators are shutting down both coal and nuclear in the US, and replacing it with solar and wind (the US has in recent years installed 6x more renewables-based capacity than nuclear capacity that has been shut down)
1.5 million litres of radioactive water (triated water) sounds scary, but they don't report the concentration, so it's meaningless
if it was 1.5 billion litres with the same radiological content it would be less dangerous
a load of coal ash getting into a river is likely worse radiologically and chemically than some triated water escaping
mostly tritium and triated water that has been activated in the coolant circuits (practically impossible to separate)
but some other isotopes (carbon-14, caesium-137)
here's the environmental permit for the UK's most modern power station: https://consult.environment-agency.gov.uk/nuclear/consultati...
solid radwaste is kept under lock and key though
and the total volume of radioactive waste produced is WAY WAY WAY less than that produced burning fossil fuels
(turns out coal is reasonably radioactive)