Auto-SummaryThe author argues that nuclear waste is often overestimated in its dangers compared to coal and other combustion-based energy sources. They highlight that coal plants release significantly more hazardous substances, including carbon dioxide (15 tons per minute), sulfur dioxide (a ton every 5 minutes), nitrogen oxides (equivalent to emissions from 200,000 cars), particulates, ash, and thousands of carcinogenic compounds. In contrast, nuclear waste is minuscule in quantity and volume, weighing only 1/5 million tons annually and fitting under a card table. While nuclear waste is radioactive, the health risks are far less severe than those posed by chemical pollutants from coal. The author suggests that converting nuclear waste into glass for disposal is feasible and would result in minimal health impact, with only 0.6 fatalities over a century. In comparison, coal waste causes around 75 deaths per year from air pollution. The author concludes that on the basis of disposal simplicity and health impact, nuclear waste is 120 times less dangerous than coal waste.
The hazards of nuclear waste are generally exaggerated. And pale especially when you compare them to the hazards of coal and other combustion based sources of power. Even in terms of radioactivity, the amount released from coal plants exceeds the amount released from nuclear.
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A FIRST PERSPECTIVE
What is this material that is so controversial? As we know from elementary physical science courses, matter can be neither created nor destroyed. When fuel is burned to liberate energy, the fuel doesn't simply disappear. It is converted into another form, which we refer to as "waste." This is true whether we burn uranium or coal or anything else. For nuclear fuels, this residue, called "high-level waste," has been the principal source of concern to the public.
As an initial perspective, it is interesting to compare nuclear waste with the analogous waste from a single large coal-burning power plant. The largest component of the coal-burning waste is carbon dioxide gas, produced at a rate of 500 pounds every second, 15 tons every minute. It is not a particularly dangerous gas, but it is the principal contributor to the "greenhouse effect" discussed at some length in Chapter 3. The other wastes from coal burning were also discussed in Chapter 3, but let's review them briefly. First and probably foremost is sulfur dioxide, the principal cause of acid rain and perhaps the main source of air pollution's health effects, released at a rate of a ton every 5 minutes. Then there are nitrogen oxides, the second leading cause of acid rain and perhaps also of air pollution. Nitrogen oxides are best known as the principal pollutant from automobiles and are the reason why cars need expensive pollution control equipment which requires them to use lead-free gasoline; a single large coal-burning plant emits as much nitrogen oxide as 200,000 automobiles. The third major coal burning waste is particulates including smoke, another important culprit in the negative health effects of air pollution. Particulates are released at a rate of several pounds per second. And next comes the ash, the solid material produced at a rate of 1,000 pounds per minute, which is left behind to cause serious environmental problems and long-term damage to our health. Coal-burning plants also emit thousands of different organic compounds, many of which are known carcinogens. Each plant releases enough of these compounds to cause two or three cancer deaths per year.1 And then there are heavy metals like lead, cadmium, and many others that are known or suspected of causing cancer, plus a myriad of other health impacts. Finally there is uranium, thorium, and radium, radioactive wastes released from coal burning that serve as a source of radon gas. The impact of this radioactive radon gas from coal burning on the public's health far exceeds the effects of all the radioactive waste released from nuclear plants (see Chapter 12).
The waste produced from a nuclear plant is different from coal-burning wastes in two very spectacular ways. The first is in the quantities involved: the nuclear waste is 5 million times smaller by weight and billions of times smaller by volume. The nuclear waste from 1 year of operation weighs about 1� tons2 and would occupy a volume of half a cubic yard, which means that it would fit under an ordinary card table with room to spare. Since the quantity is so small, it can be handled with a care and sophistication that is completely out of the question for the millions of tons of waste spewed out annually from our analogous coal-burning plant.
The second pronounced difference is that the nuclear wastes are radioactive, providing a health threat by the radiation they emit, whereas the principal dangers to health from coal wastes arise from their chemical activity. This does not mean that the nuclear wastes are more hazardous; on nearly any comparison basis the opposite is true. For example, if all the air pollution emitted from a coal plant in one day were inhaled by people, 1� million people could die from it,3 which is 10 times the number that could be killed by ingesting or inhaling the waste produced in one day by a nuclear plant.4
This is obviously an unrealistic comparison since there is no way in which all of either waste could get into people. A more realistic comparison might be on the basis of simple, cheap, and easy disposal techniques. For coal burning this would be to use no air pollution control measures and simply release the wastes without inhibition. This is not much worse than what we are doing now since the smoke abatement techniques, which are the principal pollution control on most coal-burning plants, contribute little to health protection. We have seen in Chapter 3 that air pollution causes about 75 deaths per year from each plant. Some other comparably serious consequences will be considered later in this chapter.
For nuclear waste, a simple, quick, and easy disposal method would be to convert the waste into a glass — a technology that is well in hand — and simply drop it into the ocean at random locations.5 No one can claim that we don't know how to do that! With this disposal, the waste produced by one power plant in one year would eventually cause an average total of 0.6 fatalities, spread out over many millions of years, by contaminating seafood. Incidentally, this disposal technique would do no harm to ocean ecology. In fact, if all the world's electricity were produced by nuclear power and all the waste generated for the next hundred years were dumped in the ocean, the radiation dose to sea animals would never be increased by as much as 1% above its present level from natural radioactivity.
We thus see that if we compare the nuclear and coal wastes on the basis of cheap, simple, and easy disposal techniques, the coal wastes are (7.5 / 0.06 =) 120 times more harmful to human health than nuclear waste. This treatment ignores some of the long-term health effects of coal burning to be discussed later.
Another, and very different, way of comparing the dangers of nuclear and coal waste is on the basis of how much they are changing our exposures to toxic agents. The typical level of sulfur dioxide in the air of American cities is 10 times higher than natural levels, and the same is true for the principal nitrogen oxides.6 For cancer-causing chemicals the ratio is much higher.7 These are matters that might be of considerable concern in view of the fact that we really do not understand the health effects of these agents very well. For radioactive waste from a flourishing nuclear industry, on the other hand, radiation exposures would be increased by only a tiny fraction of 1% above natural levels.8
Another basis for comparison between the wastes from nuclear and coal burning is the "margin of safety," or how close average exposure is to the point where there is direct evidence for harm to human health. There have been several air pollution episodes in which there were hundreds of excess deaths, with sulfur dioxide levels about 1,000 micrograms per cubic meter,1 whereas levels around 100 micrograms per cubic meter, just 10 times less, are quite common in American cities. For radiation, on the other hand, exposures expected from hypothetical problems with nuclear waste are in the range of 1 mrem or less, tens of thousands of times below those for which there is direct evidence for harm to human health.
All of these comparisons have been intended as an introduction to the subject. Now, let us look into the problem in some detail.
http://www.phyast.pitt.edu/~blc/book/chapter11.html
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"Both liberty and equality are among the primary goals pursued by human beings through many centuries; but total liberty for wolves is death to the lambs" -- Isaiah Berlin
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