Radioactivity and coal burning plants

[Lairiodd]

see: http://www.ornl.gov/info/ornlreview/rev ... lmain.html

Basically, nuclear power plants release alot less radioactive materials than coal burning plans, for the same amount of power produced.

490 person-rem/year for coal plants and 4.8 person-rem/year for nuclear plants. Thus, the population effective dose equivalent from coal plants is 100 times that from nuclear plants. For the complete nuclear fuel cycle, from mining to reactor operation to waste disposal, the radiation dose is cited as 136 person-rem/year; the equivalent dose for coal use, from mining to power plant operation to waste disposal, is not listed in this report and is probably unknown.

So basically for 1000MW produced,

fission causes:

4.8 person-rems per year of radiation damage

while coal burning causes:

490 person-rems per year of radiation damage

Now they do say when you take into account mining of the uranium, the fission rises to 136 person-rems per year, so not quite 100 - 1 in favor of fission, but still in fission's favor by a factor of 3.6. Also mining the coal would add some to coal's "score"

This number represents the total exposure caused by the plant. For example, if one person took all of the radiation from the coal plant, they would be hit with 490. In practice, the damage is spread over all the surrounding people (say 100k) so they would be hit with 0.049 rems per year from coal burning (just an estimate ).

As a comparison, some values for rems (assuming one person gets the entire dose of radiation):

5 rems per year: Safety limit for working

Once off exposures

up to 10 rems: to protect major property
up to 25 rems: to save a life or protection of large populations
up to 75 rems: to save a life ot protection of large populations, voluntary after being told the risks

250-450 rems: you have a 50% chance of being dead in 30 days

[Xest]

Nuclear power is pretty clean, what bothers most is disposal of the waste and the possible consequences of a plant meltdown (Chernobyl).

Personally I don't give a shit where my power comes from as long as I get to keep my internet access and PCs running

[Lairiodd]

Tbh, waste disposal is easy ... find a cave and leave it there. If in 100 years we can't easily figure out what to do with it, then civilisation has probably fallen anyway, so we have bigger problems that if a few people finds the cave.

Burying it is worse though, it should be accessable as a probable fuel source for future reactors (even if they are only to reprocess it, they will still generate energy doing it).

Meltdowns are an issue, but you never see actual info on the risks. Like if you were standing say 50km from chernobyl, would radiation be 1000* normal radiation levels or is it slightly above background (presumably its somewhere between the 2). There is an issue that as time passes people tend to bypass/disable safety features, so reactors would have to be built to fall safe.

[Lieva]

ive never heard of coal mutating people tho...

thats an interesting thought though.
The so called 'safer' plants actually being more deadly than the nuclear ones..

[Xest]

They are safer, they're just not as clean

It depends what type of mutations you mean too Banana, cancer is a mutation and cancer rates have increased crazy amounts in the last 100 years.