Exposure to Carcinogens from Coal-Fired Power Plants

The nuclear debate is too complicated for me. The crisis in Japan seems to have stopped in its tracks the renaissance of the nuclear industry. Much of the crisis in Japan arises from storing spent nuclear rods on-site... not very clever if the power plant is in an earthquake-prone region. Another issue seems to be the age of the plants and the brittle nature of old steel and old concrete casings of nuclear material. There appears to be valuable learnings to take from the extreme conditions applied to the Japanese plants. 


How do you measure the risks of extreme conditions applied to both nuclear and coal-fired power plants? Below are comments from a contributor named 'gunslinger' to an article published in Scientific America entitled 'Should Japan's Reactor Crisis Kill the Nuclear Renaissance?'
I cannot vouch for the accuracy of his/her assertions... but some interesting issues are raised.


I honestly question which would be an immediately worse disaster, a nuclear meltdown or a terrorist attach on coal site. Nuclear meltdown has the potential to expose plant personal to unhealthy levels of radiation, possibly leading to cancer. It also has the potential to send a radioactive cloud a few 10s of miles away from the plant (remember, exposer time in the cloud will be short since the cloud travels with wind), the danger is really when the cloud settles on houses cars and people clothing. Realistically, under a worst case senario, people within a 30 mile radious could potentially be exposed to unhealthy levevls. Conversely, at a coal site, if a terrorist were to explode the ammonia tanks, a cloud of ammonia could form and travel roughly the same distance i suspect. The difference is that when the people breath in ammonia gas, it pretty much melts your lungs.

Carcinogens are what we are afraid of, rightfully. radiation and pollution are both carcinogens. Extremely high doses of radiation are more dangerious than pollution, but to see immediately acute effects from radiation, you need to be handling weapons grade plutonium, not the stuff in reactors. When you really sit down and determine which is worse, coal is worse. Just imagin the mass of coal used by these facilities.

Lets just do the math real quick and dirty. One site I was at using 3 TONS of coal per SECOND! .02% of the wieght of this coal is uranium, plutonium and other radio activit materials. So thats, .06 tons of radio active material spewed directly into the air every second (not to mention the carcinogenic combustion byproducts), though that sounds a little, it isnt that far off.

A typical nuclear site uses about 1500 tons of uranium in the reactor core. Doing the math using the values from the previous paragraph, every 8 hours, this coal site puts as much radio active material directly into the air we breath as a nuclear plant uses and stores in 2 YEARS... every 8 hours!! Granted, the coal uranium isn't as radio active, but remember, what important is amplitude, type and TIME OF EXPOSER. We are in contact with coal byproducts 24 hours a day. I do question which is worse.