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Whats even more stupider, burning coal emits more radioactivity into the atmosphere than all nuclear accidents ever have...
by awaythrow98765 3y ago
Whats even more stupider, burning coal emits more radioactivity into the atmosphere than all nuclear accidents ever have...
- cinntaile 3y agoYou'll have to properly frame your statement for it to make sense. Are you talking about one plant over its lifetime? How long is the lifetime? What kind of coal is burned in that plant? How big is the plant? Also we don't know about all the nuclear accidents, do you mean all known civilian nuclear power plant accidents?
- HyperSane 3y agoCoal contains between 1 to 10 ppm of uranium. Globally about 8 billion tonnes of coal is burned every year to generate electricity. Thus between 8 thousand and 80 thousand tonnes of Uranium is emitted into the atmosphere every year.
- Filligree 3y agoWhich… I’m not sure, but that might be more uranium than would be needed in the first place to run our entire civilisation on nuclear power? Certainly it’s in the ballpark.
- p_l 3y agoJust current reserves, with breeder fuel cycles, would allow us at least a century, long enough to start building in space...
- cinntaile 3y agoIt's not a a useful measure, since no one would collect uranium in this way but assuming someone would. Some napkin math... 27 tonnes per 1GW reactor/year is used and there are about 440 reactors so about 12kton.
- Filligree 3y agoMW by MW, coal plants emit more radiation than nuclear on average. This is true even when taking accidents into account, and not by a small factor. We’d genuinely be better off ignoring most accidents and just using nuclear. Not to mention that coal ashes and emissions are chemically carcinogenic as well.