Fly ash emitted by a power plant—a by-product from burning coal for electricity—carries into the surrounding environment 100 times more radiation than a nuclear power plant producing the same amount of energy. This happens when the fly ash is burned and the uranium and thorium contained in the original lumps are concentrated up to 10X in the fly ash and out the smokestack it goes.
I really don’t know how much fly ash gets released...but I know alot of it is caught by electrostatic scrubbers, which have shakers to drop it into bins.
We put this fly ash in road subgrade and concrete mixes.
So, we are essentially putting it everywhere. That’s right - are you sitting in a relatively new office building? Then you’re surrounded by flyash. That new road you drove on today? There’s flyash under it, and the concrete curbs are loaded with it.
A quick search led me to a Scientific American article...if you live next to the plant, you get 18 millirem a year...which is fairly small. I don’t think radiation is a big problem with coal. The fact that it is so much worse than nuke power just illustrates how much safer nuke power is....but there is no real radiation danger at all from coal.
If you are using this as an argument to use nuclear power, I would quit doing that. Both types of plant have pros and cons, and reasonable people can understand them, without hyperbole.