its so fucking funny that nuclear waste is such a contentious topic. like yeah those damn nuclear advocates need to figure out somewhere reasonable to put that nuclear waste. for now we will be sticking with coal power because it puts its waste products safe and sound In Our Lungs, where they cannot hurt anybody,
coal byproducts also give people cancer en masse is the thing though. coal smoke is a carcinogen that contributes to lung cancer, and ash and other waste products can also contain significant amounts of uranium and thorium, so coal as a power source can totally expose people to ionizing radiation as well.
The thing is that for every hazard of nuclear waste, pretty much the worst case scenario is that it might do something that coal power is already doing. You could aerosolize nuclear waste and just spray it out of a chimney and it would have less environmental and health impacts than coal because you’d only be spraying like a gram of it for every billion tons of coal smoke for the same amount of power.
Im already pretty vocal about my advocation and belief in nuclear power and I have been for years, but I saw something a few weeks ago that just
It so perfectly sums up everything that’s wrong, but also it’s incredibly horrifying
So, basically, someone not very involved in nuclear science but still discussing it posed the question “could we retrofit coal power plants to be nuclear power plants?”. And on the face, this is a fairly good idea actually. Coal and nuclear power both generate electricity the same way (heated water turns to steam which turns a turbine) so you would only need to do some modifications, making new nuclear reactors much cheaper, and killing coal plants.
Well, someone actually involved in the nuclear industry (I think they were a researcher but I might be misremmebering) responded to the question with (paraphrased from memory)
“that’s something many of us have proposed in the past, and unfortunately we can’t do that, because coal plants currently have much higher radiation levels than the EPA allowed a nuclear plant to be operated at. And cleaning up the site would cost more than just building a new plant in an uncontaminated site.”
It’s fucking wild
Not only is coal so much more dangerous in so many other ways, but the very thing people worry about with nuclear power is higher because coal isn’t regulated at all.
