Actually, as someone who has worked for nearly forty years in the nuclear power industry, I have found that there is a massive amount of ignorance on this topic, as demonstrated in this forum. If you are really interested in making a meaningful contribution to this discussion, I suggest you better educate yourself before making silly uninformed remarks.
Yes, I did Science at Uni and back in my Uni days Australia was debating weather we should open our second Uranium mine and even look at Nuclear energy.
Thousands took to the streets in protest.
All of them were humanities students who had not done any science since they were 12.
So we decided to ship Uranium as Yellow Cake which is both toxic & water soluable .
I piss myself laughing whenever I start to recall all the bull **** debates that raged through the media at the time .
And usually it was from people whose only knowledge of Nuclear energy came from a Mickey Mouse cartoon.
Spent Uranium fuel rods are not a problem.
They decay at the same rate as naturally occuring uranium decays and short of grinding them up to a dust & either breathing them in or swallowing them they pose little actual problems.
Our first uranium mine was in an area called the " Rum Jungle "
It was called that because it litterally glowed in the dark and in all sorts of funny colours & patterns.
When people reported this they were considered to have drunk too much rum.
The indiginous people have been living in this area for 40,000 years and AFAIK none of them have grown 3 heads or 10' long penises.
OTOH I had an isotope lisence for around 20 years .
Used mainly Co 60 & Na 24.
The Na24 has a 1/2 life of 14 hours so you had to order it a month ahead of time & use it the second it was available for pick up as after 2 days it was 99% decayed to Mg.
You can use Na 24 to take X ray images through 4' thick iron castings ( which is what I used it for ) or through 100' of earth which is what the pipeline authority used it for.
Cobalt was plain lead weave gloves & usual radiology gear.
Sodium was pressurised full air suit behind screens using remote handleing gear whenever the isotope was out of the camera
Uranium is fine , I would happily live in a fuel dump.
As for coal, it would be fine if coal was just Carbon, but it is not.
There is more radiation leaked out of a coal fires boiler in a day than from a Nuclear Power plant in a year due to the fact that most black coals are radio active themselves C 14
Now while the amount of C 14 in coal is very small, a very small percentage of a very large tonnage is a lot and radioactive C 14 is the C used in radio carbon dating. The Radio bit is radioactive.
Then there is Thorium, Ceasium, Strontinum , all in coal.
Then we have the toxic stuff like Tellurium, Sellium etc,
In fact so much toxic material is in the ash left over it is not allowed to be used anywhere that it will come into contact with food plants, including cattle feed.
The flue gasses are also toxic in themselves and then you also get , Sulphuric acid, Phosphoric acid, Fluroboric acid and Nitric acid, all in the flue gasses.
And with Powder River coals, Mercury and I suppose the reason why so may Americans are as "mad as hatters" is all the mercury they have been breathing in or eating as mercury bioaccumulates in both plants & animals.
Most of the "carbon footprint" stuff is trash science at it's worst. Foistered upon the general pubic by the self richious to make them feel even more better than every one else.
The amount of carbon produced in mining, transporting then generating the electricity used to recharge a battery trimmer is about 4 times more than what would have been created by using a petrol powered trimmer in the first place.
If you really want to reduce your carbon footprint then get one of the specialist companies to come & do a full thermal image of the the complete exteriour of your house on a hot summer day when you have the air con on and mid winter when you have the heater running flat chat.
Using this information plug all of the thermal leaks in your house.
Not only will you save the planet, you will also save yourself a lot of money
Set the air con to 20 C in summer or better still re-engineer your house to be solar active and thus turn off the heater & air con except in extreme days,
Home care equipment make almost zero impact because they are small engines that get used for small hours a year.
We worked out that is every house in Australia ( 10,000,000 or so ) ran ran a "dirty" 160cc 2 stroke Victa lawn mowers all day they would consume the same amount of fuel as 1 jumbo jet taking off.
At that time Sydney airport was running around 150 planes a day, yet to reduce pollution we were banning 2 stroke mowers and working out how to bump the airport up to 200 flights a day.
