This isn't true in any reasonable sense, and SA retract the claim in a footnote. But nuclear plants produce so much less waste than coal plants that overall, they release less radiation joule for joule.
> overall, they release less radiation joule for joule.
How is that not a "reasonable sense"? Less radiation joule per joule seems to me like a reasonable measure as "less radioactive overall"
"Well, if you pick just one ton of waste from either plant it's the same waste!" is technically true, but it's neither here nor there.
(Of course in case of nuclear vs. coal it's a bit more complicated because the waste products are not the same, but I still think we can reasonably compare waste per energy.)
I don't know why this isn't being pushed harder if it's safer and cleans up some of this waste.
CANDU reactors are Canadian, they use heavy water. They've been around for 50 years, people don't use them because they can't be used to make nuclear weapons. All the reators in Canada are these style.
CANDU is a thermal water moderated reactor, albeit moderated with heavy water rather than light water, allowing it to use natural uranium instead of enriched (as Canada didn't have enrichment capability and didn't want to depend on other nations). And it's a pressure tube design, meaning the high pressure water is kept in a bunch of tubes rather than having one big pressure vessel like most light water reactors (again, because Canada didn't have heavy forges required to produce traditional reactor vessels).
What Bill Gates funded is a company called Terrapower that is making a sodium cooled fast breeder. Very different from CANDU. Fast breeders are a pretty cool concept, but they and the reprocessing technology for closing the fuel cycle isn't as mature as light water reactors.
Uranium 238 is extremely stable with a half life of 4.468 billion years, and the more active uranium 235 still has a half life of 0.7 billion years. Which is why they survived geologic timescales from earths formation.
Strontium-90 by comparison is produced in a nuclear reactor and has a half life of 28.8 years making it vastly more nasty. Further, while nuclear waste is incredibly nasty stuff, high neutron fluxes also turn the walls etc radioactive though to a less extreme extent.
According to the following article (and a couple I'm not citing), coal fly ash counts are on the order of 250-1000 Bq/kg. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10967-006-6966-1
Specifically, concentrated (fly ash) measures:
"263 to 950 Bq·kg−1 for 238U, from 142 to 605 Bq·kg−1 for 226Ra, from 133 to 428 Bq·kg−1 for 210Pb, from 27 to 68 Bq·kg−1 for 228Ra and from 204 to 382 Bq·kg−1 for 40K"
Anyone who cares to is welcome to cite the Bq/kg numbers for waste from nuclear plants. Go ahead, pick some. I think you'll find they are higher. And most coal doesn't contain any Pu.
The WHO guidelines on alpha emitters (all elements you cite that are contained in fly ash) is 1 Bq/l in drinking water. So depending on how and where this ash goes to, you can definitely cause some significant damage with it.
can't argue with that
> nuclear waste is stored in a safe location
so, that's part of the reason many people i know are still very suspicious about nuclear power even though they know _intellectually_ that it's (supposed to be) safer than some of the alternatives.
nuclear waste used to be dumped into the ocean, because back then we thought that would be safe. now it's stored in places that are deemed (earthquake-) safe until an earthquake (or a tsunami) hits. next we outsource the storage to private companies as those are cheaper and act suprised when we learn that they were skimping on manpower, maintenance and safety protocols when trying to cut costs and containers are leaking into the ground water.
it's the same as nuclear power plants. they're always perfectly secure until something unforseen happens or they've been secure for so long people get neglient.
Even that isn't quite accurate. Reactors release more radiation, but mostly in the form of elements that don't bioconcentrate into the food supply, so that the effective exposure of the human population is lower.
I wrote a long comment a couple of years ago discussing the original article that Scientific American paraphrased for this report: