Yes, Coal is Radioactive

 On my everlasting quest to show that nuclear power is more feared than it should be, I found an interesting article this week that was published in Scientific American.  I loved this article because it put everything in an interesting perspective!

As children, we used to laugh at my father's stories of living near a nuclear power plant.  He used to talk of three eyed fish and all the weird things that people associate with radioactivity from nuclear power.  My dad, of course, only told these stories for the humor in them, but I fear that there are many people out there that believe surrounding areas of nuclear power plants receive large amounts of radiation dose.  Well, try this view of things to put the situation in perspective.

I have mentioned in earlier posts that nuclear materials exist in much of the Earth's crust.  Uranium is found everywhere in Colorado, and isotopes of uranium, thorium, and even plutonium are found naturally in many rocks all over the world.  This, as it should be no surprise, does not exclude coal.  Both uranium and thorium are naturally found in coal, though their concentrations are not really high enough to have an effect on us.  That is, until we find a way to concentrate them.

 How would this happen?  Well, we burn hundreds of thousands of tons of coal each day in coal-fired power plants.  We burn off the carbon in the coal but the other elements remain, including the uranium and the thorium!  When the carbon is burned off, the uranium and thorium reach concentration levels ten times of what naturally occurs.  This can start to cause an effect on the surrounding area.

Coal-fired power plants are allowed to release the "fly ash" as it is known straight into the environment.  This means that coal-fired plants are exposing the population surrounding the plant to radiation.  How much exactly?  Well, studies on the bones of people that have lived near coal-fired plants show radiation doses of about 18 millirem.  This is a unit of dose used in radiological assessment, which you don't need to be familiar with now to understand my point.  To put it in context, people living around nuclear power plants only show doses of about 3 millirem, six times less than near coal-fired plants!  If farming is occurring near the coal-fired plants and growth is occurring in ash rich soil, people consuming the produce could be exposed anywhere from 50 to 200 times more than a person just living near a nuclear plant.

This sounds bad, but it really is not.  The average annual dose measured for people near the coal plant seems to be about 1.9 millirem per year.  The background dose alone for the normal person - meaning the dose you receive from the sun, bananas, and anything else you might come in contact with - measures about 360 millirem per year.  Thus, the dose from living near a coal-fired power plant is not that large.  On the other hand, it just makes a strong statement about how little the dose is from nuclear power plants.

I know that people are afraid of having nuclear power plants in their backyard, but I think this is just left over hysteria from the past.  The facts say that life near a nuclear power plant does not involve mutant babies or glowing three eyed fish.  It is actually quite safe!  Just as an extra little tidbit, the crew on board a nuclear power submarine is exposed to less radiation than the average person living on land gets from the sun.  This is despite the fact that they are living within close quarters to a nuclear reactor for months at a time.  I don't know about you, but I am really not that worried about it.