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There's a lot. A lot more than I imagined according to a DOE seminar I sat through. It's interesting because an incredibly small fraction of coal (coal varies

There's a lot. A lot more than I imagined according to a DOE seminar I sat through. It's interesting because an incredibly small fraction of coal (coal varies a reasonable amount in composition across geological regions) contains various radioactive isotopes with long high-lifes. When you burn/combust coal, especially without care and consideration in the process, a lot of these small components are released in the air as particulates. Now at first thought, it doesn't seem like much (were talking 1ppm/1ppb or less levels in some cases depending on the coal type/geological area), but when you consider the entire volume of coal combusted worldwide, that small fraction turns out to be more radioactive waste than is produced by all controlled nuclear energy in the world at the time (about 8-10 years ago). I wish I still had the slide set with all the reference material and derivations.

jandrewrogers 7y ago
Coal ash is a thorium and uranium concentrate, and as you say the Department of Energy publishes the release statistics. They aren't too difficult to find. Each year in the US, we release more than a thousand tons of thorium and uranium into the environment via coal ash dumping, with limited controls. There have also been population health studies in communities that live adjacent to where coal ash is dumped in the US. As I recall, it is correlated with a small but detectable (around 1% IIRC) increase in cancer incidence rates relative to local control populations, and largely attributed to the thorium component of the waste.