Nuclear plants release less radiation into environment than coal plants (2007)

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-radioactive-than-nuclear-waste/

by ch4s3 • 12 years ago

79 53 12 years ago

holy fuck, I am working in power plant.. what should i do? this is insane! Fly ash, bottom ash, coal ash every thing is here.

evanb• 12 years ago

The dose you receive is very likely negligible compared to your other routine activities.

http://xkcd.com/radiation/

ch4s33• 12 years ago

I love that chart, I always show it to people who are afraid of Nuclear power.

subdane• 12 years ago

Learn to code?

ams6110• 12 years ago

If you read the article, you would know that your exposure is a small fractional increment over normal backgroud radiation exposure.

m1• 12 years ago

Did you just read this on the Guardian too?

ch4s33• 12 years ago

No, I saw it on reddit, and though it might be HN worthy, despite the bad headline. I'm not sure how meaningful the dose of radiation is, but the comparison it super interesting.

personZ3• 12 years ago

Ignore the "waste" element of the title and understand that they're saying that if you're living in the shadow of a nuclear power plant, and everything operates ideally, you'll undergo less radiation than near a coal plant. Which is quite reasonable.

Yet the waste of nuclear plant isn't the harmless water vapours coming out of cooling towers -- which is what this article bizarrely focuses on -- but instead the used fuel that will need to be contained and managed for tens of thousands of years. Further the fear of the nuclear industry isn't ideal situations, which is manageable, but situations like Chernobyl and Fukushima Daiichi: The "super promise 100x never going to happen triple safeguard" sort. A single major incident suddenly undoes much of that good many times over.

hga4• 12 years ago

Well, civilian reactor "waste" is potentially very valuable stuff, but we're rather stupid in our approach towards it. And the "tens of thousands of years" is grossly overstated, at least if you apply the metric that after 600 years it'll be no more radioactive than the ore from which it was mined.

The Chernobyl RBMK design is criminal, and literally so in the US, where Edward Teller made sure reactors with positive void coefficients were outlawed (one reason we don't do CANDU, although the proposed Advanced CANDU reactor addresses this). The Japanese demonstrated long before Fukushima Daiichi that they don't have a nuclear safety culture at the level they should be allowed to run serious reactors, and that incident prompted me to look at boiling water reactor designs for the first time, and I don't like them at all.

Yeah, the above is in danger of the No True Scotsman fallacy, but we have heck of a lot of counter experiences, including the pressurized water reactor worst case incident at Three Mile Island which harmed no one and was never in serious danger of doing so.

As for what you poise as a bizarre focus, every coal plant in the world is pumping out a lot of nasty stuff, they're inherently dirty, and totally cleaning them up is not in the cards. As in, right now, every day one is running, it's potentially doing harm....

personZ3• 12 years ago

And the "tens of thousands of years" is grossly overstated, at least if you apply the metric that after 600 years it'll be no more radioactive than the ore from which it was mined.

http://www.ccnr.org/hlw_graph.html#gr

EDIT: Some have penalized me under the notion that hga's "apples and oranges" comment was a retort (despite the fact that the chart also has concentrated uranium near the bottom). It is not. HGA is apparently unaware that uranium tailings are effectively worse than uranium ore, containing 85%+ or the original radioactivity of the ore, but concentrated and exposed. If you had the choice between holding a handful of uranium ore or uranium tailings, you'd do better to choose the former.

There are a lot of grossly misleading claims from the pro-nuclear lobby, one of which is that if you only count the product of fission (and not the actinides), and you compare it against post-processed yellow-cake, it's all the same.

In no universe is it equivalent to naturally existing uranium after 600 years.

every coal plant in the world is pumping out a lot of nasty stuff, they're inherently dirty

But despite the ridiculous lead-in to the linked article (no, the common notions of nuclear power does not come from the Simpsons), everyone knows that coal is dirty. Most areas are phasing it out (here in Ontario we have effectively eliminated coal power, from it comprising 25% of our power not too many years ago). Is nuclear power the best alternative? That's dubious, not only because of "exceptional" events that yield enormous ecological damage, the waste product that we just push to future generations, and economics that seldom make sense over the life of the project.

cheeseprocedure• 12 years ago

The Chernobyl RBMK design is criminal

Indeed - it was considered so poor that the European Union required closure of RBMK-type reactors as a precondition for EU membership.

http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/Safety-and-Security/Safety...

notahacker• 12 years ago

If ever a headline deserved to be changed from the original statement on HN, it's this one. Not only is it linkbait, it's also a lie.

Even the footnote introduced by the publisher admits the headline is, at best, misleading. Sure, it's true, in a trivial sense, that nuclear waste when stored in a manner that effectively shields it from emitting radiation into the surrounding environment emits less radiation into the surrounding environment than a relatively benign substance emitted indiscriminately into the surrounding environment. If the article were trying to claim that coal dust in itself was particularly harmful that might still be an interesting comparison. But as it is, for those of us that know that properly-functioning nuclear plants don't pump nuclear waste into the surrounding atmosphere but do create storage hazards, it's about as insulting to the intelligence as a headline claiming that shandy[1] is more likely to cause alcohol poisoning than absinthe[2]

[1]ingested [2]not ingested.

ch4s33• 12 years ago

I totally agree, but didn't feel confident in picking a different title.

dang3• 12 years ago

Yes. The HN guidelines call for changing the titles when they are linkbait or misleading, and this one is both.

All: what is a better title? I'll take a crack at it, but please suggest improvements.

personZ3• 12 years ago

This title is better but still makes the error of assuming the linked story relates to nuclear waste. It doesn't, but instead compares the environmental radioactivity surrounding both types of power plants.

blablabla123• 12 years ago

I think the level of density/concentration is an issue hardly ever discussed. But at the end of the day concentration is the only thing that counts. If you can successfully lower the radioactive concentration below the natural radiation, things are actually pretty safe. If you store nuclear waste in a salt deposit, usually a lot of ground water gets into the deposit. (Asse II is an extreme case) It gets contaminated and the question is: is the water much more radioactive than the water elsewhere? If not, it is actually relatively safe to live in proximity and do farming. According to this article it might be even safer than doing farming near a coal plant.

Actually another thing hardly ever discussed outside of Physics courses is the difference between solid radioactive objects and radioactive gas. The latter is actually a much more dangerous than the former. Not only because solid objects are easier to handle. The lungs are much more sensitive to radioactivity. Moreover gas particles can land on food, thus also getting directly into the body. Once "harmless" radioactive particles are inside the body, they radiate from within...

In Southern Germany there are areas with a lot of mountains. There people often have the radioactive gas Radon in problematic concentrations in the cellars. It is emitted by stones and when breathed cancerous and one of the top reasons for lung cancer. (Besides smoking)

hga4• 12 years ago

When I last looked at it, and this was long ago, '80s I think, radon appeared to only be a serious danger to smokers; the original studies were of uranium miners, who of course smoked a lot back then.

Which, given that "X and smoking is very bad" is true for a host of things, suggests to me the focus on radon might be misplaced.

As for your general starting point, I sure wish more would use the toxicologist's maxim "The dose makes the poison" vs. the clearly bogus linear no-threshold model: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_no-threshold_model

Heck, even the banana equivalent dose (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banana_equivalent_dose) would be more fruitful, you might say ^_^. Most of that is from potassium-40 in it, and Edward Teller had a favorite statistic based on sleeping with two other people based on the dosage you'd get from that isotope in them.

And that also addresses to an extent your inhalation/injection concern. We live in a sea of radioactivity, from isotopes inside us to cosmic rays which also flip DRAM bits. Anyone petrified of radioactive threats should never be told about the consequences of normal altitude commercial jet flying, unless they're planning on making a career of it.

erichurkman• 12 years ago

Radon is a serious issue everywhere, not just Germany, and not just near mountains. Testing and mitigating radon in homes is one of the easiest and least expensive ways to reduce cancer risks.

The EPA has a good guide on radon and homes [1]. Even if you do not have a radon detector, it's very inexpensive to get periodic tests done (you can do them at home with a test kit). IIRC they are around $15-20 retail, although some fire departments or cities may provide them for free.

The only way to be sure your home does not have a radon issue is to test it yourself.

[1] http://www.epa.gov/radon/pubs/citguide.html

ars• 12 years ago

in a trivial sense, that nuclear waste when stored in a manner that effectively shields it from emitting radiation into the surrounding environment

Why is that trivial? It's how it's actually done. I couldn't care less about the theoretical this or that (that will never actually be done).

It's how it's actually used that matters. And as used today, in the real world, coal produces more radiation than nuclear power.

mcv4• 12 years ago

Yes, in practice (ignoring disasters), coal plants release more radioactivity into the environment than nuclear plants. But that doesn't change the fact that the original title of the article, and the article itself, are phrased in a wildly misleading way. It suggests that the coal ash is more radioactive than the actual nuclear waste itself, and that's totally not true.

midas0073• 12 years ago

I've worked in this industry for a consulting shop in the US. There's a world of difference between diffused emissions that never reach significant levels and concentrations of radioactive material that have to potential to cause grave regional problems (Fukushima).

slashnull• 12 years ago

"Coal-fired plants emit more radiation in their immediate environment than their nuclear equivalents".

There.

I once tried to find other facts that could support this dumb-ass title, and I was unable to. Coal mining produces a tiny tiny amount of radioactive contamination, and the amount of radiation in fly ash seems to dwarf the amount of radioactive stuff we lose in the nature because of accidents and nuclear waste storage and that kind of stuff.

Even if you state that premise as "coal power has some radioactive waste issues", it's still a lie.

afterburner8• 12 years ago

False dichotomy, it's not a choice between nuclear and coal. Cheap solar is here, yes, cheaper than coal even:

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/04/15/rising-sun

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/18/opinion/krugman-salvation-...

Not to mention any number of other renewables (wind, wave, tidal, thermal, etc...)

TeMPOraL• 12 years ago

Cheap solar is here, but it's enough only for a small part of our energy needs.

http://www.withouthotair.com/c18/page_103.shtml

afterburner8• 12 years ago

That book was written in 2009. Since 2008, the cost of solar energy has dropped 75%.

001sky5• 12 years ago

Not to mention the damage all of this does to the environment. The amount of square footage required to be destroyed for wind-farms and solar arrays (at any scale) is undenialy an ecological disaster, not to mention the duplication of power-transfer infrastructure required to geographically disparate generation stations into major human cities.

[If you need citations for this, try hiking/walking through one of the many wind-farms in the SoCal Desert. Particulalry, the 2012 generation windfarms in th Mojave which are ~double the scale of earlier generations. Then imaging living next to something like this on a global scale. see also> http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/20/magazine/its-the-end-of-th...]

mcv4• 12 years ago

Absolutely. To me, fighting over whether coal or nuclear is worse, is like fighting over whether Hitler or Stalin was worse. We need to get rid of both, although coal is definitely a lot more urgent.

rbanffy2• 12 years ago

Also, not all nuclear reactors must be of the currently most common (obsolete) design. We should invest more in MSR reactors that could generate power from the waste BWRs and PWRs leave.

Thorium, while no panacea, also should have a larger role in power generation.

midas0073• 12 years ago

Yes. BWRs and PWRs waste is one the most significant issues where MSRs have an advantage.

I really hope MSRs and more wind farm deployments are used more as stepping-stones to realizing fusion.

afterburner8• 12 years ago

The technologies you mentioned are not ready for prime time. A strong political push for nuclear power now will simply result in more of what you consider obsolete designs.

Meanwhile, renewable energy, already quite cheap, will continue to improve by leaps and bounds. Wasting a ton of money on nuclear now would slow the pace of this progress.

But since renewables are getting cheaper every year, market forces will probably make the proper choice anyways, unless lobbying gets out of hand.

hernan604• 12 years ago

that article is from 2007. Nowadays everyone knows NPP are the worst technology human has invented and doesnt knows how to use and decomission. See whats happening at fukushima, its killing the pacific ocean. And making a lot of seals sick in california. If you heard about it you know the details. And its only the begining because man made radiation does not go away, it stays and its bleeding radiatiation as i type.. that means years from now, it will be more acumulated.

Cesium is a fission product that emits radiation. Has a half life of 30yrs and when you consume it, you body thinks its Potassium because of similarities in structure. Therefore accumulates on the muscles, specially the heart and emits radiation on closeby cells.

Strontium, another fission product that emits radiation is similar to Calcium. Once consumed is transfered into the bones.

Sites like enenews.com can tell better news about NPP.

Nuclear plants release less radiation into environment than coal plants (2007)

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