alt Hacker News> A missile hitting a coal power plant will also be pretty bad, and there's not a giant shield around it.
Probably not even the same order of magnitude. A blown-up nuclear reactor would be WAY worse in short- and long-term effects (and cleanup costs) than a blown-up coal power plant producing comparable MW.
(See: Fukushima and Chernobyl.)
Replies
leonidasrup • yesterday at 8:45 PM
I think it's an error that International Atomic Energy Agency classified both Fukushima nuclear accident and Chernobyl nuclear accident on International Nuclear Event Scale Level 7 (major accident).
In both the amount of released radionuclides and health effects of the accidents, Chernobyl accident was much, much bigger than Fukushima.
Coal is shockingly nasty. Combustion concentrates heavy radioactive elements that are present in the coal. Coal and nuclear plants can't be built too close together or the exhaust from the coal plant will set off the radiation alarm at the nuclear plant.
It also does the same thing to heavy metals in the coal like arsenic, lead, cadmium and mercury. More than 90% of coal is carbon and therefore becomes CO2, but because of the huge difference in energy density, the coal plant has to burn millions of times more coal than nuclear reactors consume uranium, and thereby generates tens of thousands of times more toxic and radioactive coal ash than the nuclear plant generates nuclear waste.
Then they put the stuff into "wet surface impoundments" which is industry for dumping the toxic sludge into a lake. Those things frequently poison entire towns without any kind of terrorist attack.