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A comment on Nuclear Power Is the Answer to Global and Environmental Energy Woes. Parent comment

Re:Nuclear Power Is the Answer to Global and Environmental E... by fsh on Friday April 21, 2023 @04:24PM (#35659558)
No, coal is barely radioactive at all. The small traces of Thorium and Uranium are completely negligible. An old study from 1978 has estimated that nuclear reactors emit somewhat more radiation than coal power plants, but the levels are overall insignificant [1].

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...

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Re:Nuclear Power Is the Answer to Global and Environmental E... by blibble on Friday April 21, 2023 @04:31PM (#35659654)
> 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.

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

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Re:Nuclear Power Is the Answer to Global and Environmental E... by pfdietz on Friday April 21, 2023 @07:54PM (#35661812)
The radioactivity mobilized by U mining for LWRs is about an order of magnitude more than that mobilized by coal combustion, per unit of work produced.
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