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Revealed: three tonnes of uranium legally dumped in protected English estuary in nine years
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 22 May 2025
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This is the problem. A single nuclear fuck up results in damage that lasts on a geologic scale. It takes other energy sources way more time to fuck the planet (see: fossil fuels). The concern is because weve watched how fossil fuel companies have fucked the planet. Why in the hell would we give more companies the ability to do worse? It's not like fossil fuel companies have been reined in.
Preferable to who? I would love to see some data on this, because I absolutely do not believe that to be the case.
Even accounting for disasters, coal power puts more radionuclides into the environment into the environment than nuclear for the same amount of energy. If you dig lots of stuff up and spew it all into the air, the small amount of radioactive material that's in coal and the rocks around it is much bigger than the tiny amounts of nuclear fuel a nuclear power plant gets through. If the only concern is radiation that persists on geological timescales, then swapping all coal for nuclear is an improvement. Other things that release surprising amounts of radiation include making things out of granite (it's usually got uranium in) and importing bananas and Brazil nuts.
If it's changes on a geological timescale in general, then as fossil fuels form on a geological timescale (the clue's in the name), digging them up is going to take unfathomable amounts of time to undo. It won't even be as quick as the first time around, as most coal formed before ligninase evolved, so trees fell over and didn't rot and usually became coal, buy they're biodegradable now so need specific fossilisation-friendly conditions to become coal.