No, coal is barely radioactive at all. The small traces of Thorium and Uranium are completely negligible. An old study from 1978 has estimated that nuclear reactors emit somewhat more radiation than coal power plants, but the levels are overall insignificant [1].
This is only about emissions though. The radioactive waste produced by nuclear power plants has many many orders of magnitude more activity than the emissions.
> This is only about emissions though. The radioactive waste produced by nuclear power plants has many many orders of magnitude more activity than the emissions.
yes I should have probably said "emission" not waste
> No, coal is barely radioactive at all.
but you need to burn orders of magnitude more of it, producing literal mountains of coal ash and exhaust emissions
whereas for nuclear the waste is an extremely small volume, of which almost 100% of is captured
scrubbing technologies have also improved since 1978, and scrubbing not-very-much thoroughly is a much easier than scrubbing vast amounts not-very-well
The radioactivity mobilized by U mining for LWRs is about an order of magnitude more than that mobilized by coal combustion, per unit of work produced.
Also: "it's better than coal!"...no kidding. It's not better than wind and solar. Not in terms of price, time to install, time for carbon payback, waste issues, or safety.
That's why grid operators are shutting down both coal and nuclear in the US, and replacing it with solar and wind (the US has in recent years installed 6x more renewables-based capacity than nuclear capacity that has been shut down)
those articles are pretty anti-scientific (especially the second one)
1.5 million litres of radioactive water (tritiated water) sounds scary, but they don't report the concentration, so it's meaningless
if it was 1.5 billion litres with the same radiological content it would be less dangerous
a load of coal ash getting into a river is likely worse radiologically and chemically than some tritiated water escaping
> Also: "it's better than coal!"...no kidding. It's not better than wind and solar. Not in terms of price, time to install, time for carbon payback, waste issues, or safety.
reliability
if you want the lights to stay on at night when the wind drops then you need nuclear
Look for the Tricastin plant
I don't know enough to answer precisely but it has leaked recently and a few years ago. Of course it doesn't leak uranium, but other byproducts, which not a sign of a well managed plant.
Some were stopped not just maintenance but the discovery of micro-breaches caused by maintenance decades ago.
That's actually a sign of proper management, but a counter-argument to reliability.
Even the old PWRs can be operationally unproblematic if you do it right. The German Pre-Konvoi and Konvoi fleet had pretty good stats. I'm not sure if Grohnde (shut down in 2021) is still the NPP block with the highest total production (500 TWhr) or if another block managed to lap it. Overall capacity factor of these was around 90 %. The US fleet is similar iirc.
The French fleet has been running around 65-70 % CF for years, pretty bad, but clearly not root caused by the tech branch.
- "one of the plant regularly leaks radioactive material"
- "Look for the Tricastin plant I don't know enough to answer precisely but it has leaked recently and a few years ago. Of course it doesn't leak uranium"
So, your original statement was an untruth. Or "alternative facts"
> of micro-breaches caused by maintenance decades ago. That's actually a sign of proper management, but a counter-argument to reliability.
So you mean microbreaches were made decades ago, the plant has operated for decades with no issues, and you call that unreliable?
This thread is a great example of how the meanings of words can be taken differently by different people. "Unreliable" is less of a description and more of a flag. Either it is or isn't. But the original commenter's threshold for unreliable = true is much much lower than most people's as illuminated in this discussion.
It seems like this is a daily occurrence online and in person.
I'm guessing "micro breaches" refers to hydrogen-induced cracks. Media likes to talk about it in bigly, threatening terms such as "THOUSANDS OF CRACKS FOUND IN REACTOR VESSEL" - of course anyone with half a brain starts to wonder "aren't these PWRs?". Much like people like to write headlines such as "HUNDREDS OF NUCLEAR INCIDENTS AT NPP XYZ", where "nuclear incident" means "reported event", which includes such dramatic incidents as "a backup valve in some secondary circuit had to be replaced because it was stuck" or "a bird flew into the transformer, tripping protection and taking a block offline".
Reminds me of the hysteria surrounding microplastics. I saw an article that once that said there are X many thousands of microplastic particles in a cubic meter of seawater at certain locations. They were actually counting individual particles! Why? because expressing plastics as a % of total mass or volume makes it so negligible as to not be a headline.
