I disagree with most things NIMBY, but can you really fault people for not wanting a coal-burning power plant in their backyard given the sheer volume of pollutants released from them? It seems like a great thing that California hasn't approved a new one in 40 years.
Fun fact: coal is produces more pollution of all types ranging from radioactivity to CO2 to metals to acid rain generators (SOx/NOx) to ozone (NOx again) to black carbon aerosols (or even black carbon on snow!). Coal extraction is bad for workers and the environment, and it's often dangerous to mine. It is the worst energy technology period.
We're playing stage 3 of Power Grid, and coal is already getting more expensive. Let's just stop burning it now please.
Also we should leave some coal around just in case we destroy society and our descendants need to bootstrap a civilization again. It's hard to do that without an easily accessible fossil fuel.
Coal involves burning tons of minerals, concentrating the non-carbon elements of those minerals into coal ash and exhaust. A lot of those other minerals are radioactive or otherwise toxic.
However, to make a fair comparison you should also consider the toxic byproducts of uranium extraction and purification. Coal is not refined in anywhere near the same degree as reactor-grade uranium.
If you're going to consider those for uranium you also need to consider them for coal.
The energy density of uranium makes it a non-issue. A 1GW reactor fissions about 1 ton of enriched uranium per year. You need about 10x as much raw material, so we're talking about 10 tons of uranium per year.
If you can't reprocess, then you lose about 95% of the fissionable material in the uranium. So you use up 20 tons of material per year, and you need to mine about 200 tons.
In comparison, a 1GW coal plant uses about 3 million tons of coal per year. And be real, coal isn't particularly clean to mine either. You need to wash it, and that water ends up just as polluted with heavy metals as the fly ash. Not to mention the human toll - black lung disease still killed about 25k people in the year 2013, and incidence rates (in the active miner population) have actually been rising since the 1990s.
It's the difference between a small-scale mining operation and large-scale strip mining.
> However, to make a fair comparison you should also consider the toxic byproducts of uranium extraction and purification. Coal is not refined in anywhere near the same degree as reactor-grade uranium.
If I understand correctly, these waste products are liquid or solid that can be stored, rather than dispersed into the atmosphere like coal byproducts. (Of course, storage poses its own technical challenges, like warning people in fifty thousand years not to mess with them, and the Hanford site's current leakage problems.)
Fission by-products include irradiated water, radiactive xenon (a problem as that turns out to be a neutron-absorbant and resulted in unexplained power-loss on early nuclear reactors), and other gasses.
My understanding is that this is from the radioactive carbon-14 isotope which is in the CO2 emitted, at something like one part per trillion. So it should apply to any non-CCS powerplant.
But it's still misleading, since essentially all of that CO2 will remain in the atmosphere, while radioactivity in the form of uranium, plutonium etc. will all rain down to the ground quickly (i.e. "fallout").
Edit: I remembered wrong, carbon-14 isn't the problem. It's uranium etc. in the ash from coal powerplants. Disregard this post.
That's grossly misleading. The first problem with it, is it assume that coal fired plants release their fly ash up the stocks, they don't, not anymore.
The second problem with it is the radio isotopes are Uranium and Thorium which as far as these things go are a nothing burger. AKA they are very weakly radioactive and they don't bio-accumulate.
Third problem with it is fly ash is about as radio-active as plain dirt. Because dirt also has similar levels of thorium and uranium in it.
At the end of the day, the average person would be more exposed to radioactivity from walking by fly ash (in a pond, in a pile, in the air, wherever it is) than from shielded waste. "[...] fly ash most definitely is not more radioactive than nuclear waste. Instead, I think he is saying that if you stood next to a pile of fly ash you’d probably get a bigger radiation dose than if you stood next to radioactive waste that is adequately shielded." [0]
Also statistics helps frame an accurate picture when looking at it in terms of energy, not mass: "'In fact, the fly ash emitted by a power plant—a by-product from burning coal for electricity—carries into the surrounding environment 100 times more radiation than a nuclear power plant producing the same amount of energy.' Our source for this statistic is Dana Christensen, an associate lab director for energy and engineering at Oak Ridge National Laboratory as well as 1978 paper in Science authored by J. P. McBride and colleagues, also of ORNL." [1]
> the average person would be more exposed to radioactivity from walking by fly ash (in a pond, in a pile, in the air, wherever it is) than from shielded waste.
This is wrong because your shielding is radioactive. Concrete is radio active, dirt is radio active, fly ash is radio active. Your granite counter top is radio active.
Fly ash sitting in a landfill has zero radio-logical hazard. Because there isn't anything about it that will increase the local back ground radiation level. And because the radio-isotopes have a zero risk profile.
That same cannot be said for nuclear waste.
That is why the original statement is grossly misleading. And why it pops up again and again like bad penny.
There's a Scientific American article from a few years back which points out that coal ash is radioactive. It turns out that, yes, it is, rather mildly. But it's still thousands of times below the the lowest clinical significant level.
The problem with nuclear arises, say, should a core failure occur the radiation exposure received in a few minutes would exceed that of a very long time (I believe it was millions of years) of fly-ash exposure.
Or, when in normal operation of a nuclear power plant you are creating waste products, including the plant structure itself which are deadly for tens of thousands of years. Far longer than any human institutions or even extant languages.
Of the various noxious consequences of coal-fired power generation (and there are many), radioactive emissions are simply not a concern.
> Or, when in normal operation of a nuclear power plant you are creating waste products, including the plant structure itself which are deadly for tens of thousands of years. Far longer than any human institutions or even extant languages.
So pulverize the nuclear waste product, including the "deadly" plant structure itself, mix with other stuff, and spread it evenly in a large landfill. Or even better, make fine powder and throw it into the atmosphere. With a bit of wind, everything will be well below "lowest clinical significant level."
Sounds horrible? But that's exactly what coal plants do!
Chemist James Lovelock, one of the authors of the Gaia hypothesis, suggested dispersing nuclear waste throughout nature preserves. Animals can adapt to the radiation pretty quickly at low levels and it would discourage humans from developing the preserves.
Small amounts of highly radioactive waste are easier to deal with than large amounts of low-level waste. There's also the problem that the ecosystem may concentrate heavy metals, much as aquatic ecosystems do. As you move up the food chain in fish, mercury concentration increases, to the point that swordfish now have a warning.
You disagree with most things NIMBY because it is generally used as a pejorative. However, the basics of the term is pretty benign.
E.g., people who are pro urban density tend to be NIMBY on things that expand car usage. Then they label anti-density people as "NIMBY", as if that really means anything. The fact is that they're both NIMBY, just on different issues.
It's not a great thing to deny new permits and then import the power from out-of-state. It's less efficient because you have transmission losses.
Modern society is pretty cool, but it does have some costs. I have little patience for people who want all the benefits of modern society but none of the costs.
