4 ms·

Don't have a reference handy, but I've seen estimates that the amount of radioactive material emitted into the atmosphere each year by coal burning is about equ

• dredmorbius 10y ago
  On a per-plant basis, the level is all-but immaterial. Even Fukushima levels of radiation, spread over the globe, aren't too horrible. There are all kinds of reasons to reject coal-fired power. Radiation isn't one of them. See the xkcd radiation chart for relative measures. https://xkcd.com/radiation https://xkcd.com/radiation
  • sandworm101 10y ago
    It isnt a logical reason, but it is good to remind the "clean coal" crowd of such facts when they scream about radiation from nuke plants.
    • dredmorbius 10y ago
      A coal plant's regular radiation emissions are as bad as they get, and are orders of magnitude below the least possible clinically significant levels. A nuclear power plants regular radiations are below the level of a coal plant. But a worst-case scenario, of which we have multiple extant examples are unbelievably worse: 9 trillion times more radiation, using the xkcd reference I posted (adjusting the intervals for equivalence -- 1 year rather than 10 minutes as the Chernobyl core instance is given). And it's been non-engineering factors, for the most part (management and oversight) which are the failure modes driving these. Which is to say, the problems cannot be fixed by engineering around them. The fundamental error, though, is that this is a false dichotomy. There are alternatives to both coal and nuclear. And they bypass this problem entirely.