Just for grins I looked up how much ash a coal plant puts out on average per megawatt hour...
“Coal ash is the solid byproduct left over after coal is burned. Every megawatt hour generated in a coal plant leaves behind 185 pounds of ash.”
The average American uses 12,000kWh per year in electricity that’s 2,220lbs per year or 170,940lbs over a 77 year lifetime. Compare that to 2.281kg = 5.02lbs of spent fuel which is still 96% useable fuel. 170,940lbs vs 5 the choice for a modern civilization could not be more clear. Remember coal ash is chemically toxic, full of heavy metals including radioactive uranium and thorium so.much so that the coal plant releases 10,000 times more radiation into the environment via it’s ash and stack gasses than a nuclear power plant does on a megawatt to megawatt basis. It should be a crime against humanity to burn coal in the open air while denying nuclear power building permits.
Coal ash must also be entombed for all of eternity it’s chemical toxicity never wanes and it’s radioactivity is all long lived heavy metal isotopes with very long half life’s but they are gamma emitters so once inside the body they bioaccumulate and keep emitting gamma rays damaging DNA for the life of the person.
Coal should be put in the dust bin of history at least for open air burn to the sky uses. Underground coal gasification is a entirely different animal and keeps the ash,toxic metals and radioactive metals right where they belong thousands of feet underground while allowing the extraction of 85% of the coals energy. Bonus of UCG is only 1/6 of the world’s coals are mineable UCG opens up six times more resources. These include Coal to deep to mine, offshore coals on the continental shelf, thin seam coals, steeply inclined bed coals the number is staggering over ten trillion metric tonnes worth. Other than methane hydrates which dwarfs all other hydrocarbons coal is second oil is far far behind both. Thousands of years worth of each where as light crude oils have 47 years left at 2021 consumption levels. We need nuclear with fast reactors and UCG plus Arctic/offshore methane hydrates post haste.
https://www.freeingenergy.com/environmental-impact-coal-water-co2-so2-mercury-pollution/
That may all be true, but I suspect it’s because we haven’t figured out how to turn it into a resource. Once we do that, it becomes an asset.