When fuels are burned to produce energy, the materials do not simply disappear—after all, matter can neither be created nor destroyed—but rather are converted into other forms, which are called wastes. This is true whether we burn coal in chemical reactions or uranium in nuclear reactions, the two processes which represent our only present major options for making electricity. How much waste is produced by a typical plant of each type (assuming each generates the same amount of electricity), and what hazards does each create?

The principal waste from the burning of coal is carbon dioxide, produced at a rate of 500 pounds per second. This is not ordinarily a dangerous gas, but there is serious concern that the tremendous amounts of it now being discharged into the air may be changing the world’s climate and thereby creating hosts of severe ecological problems.

As for the really dangerous gases that are emitted when coal is burned, the most important are compounds of sulfur. A ton of these compounds is discharged every five minutes, and the annual effect from a single typical plant is to cause twenty-five fatalities, 60,000 cases of respiratory disease, and $25 million in property damage. Another type of gaseous pollutant from coal burning is nitrogen oxide, also the principal pollutant from automobiles and the reason why new cars must have expensive pollution-control equipment and must use lead-free gasoline. A single coal-burning power plant emits as much nitrogen oxide as 200,000 automobiles, and nothing is being done about it.

Then there is the smoke, consisting of tiny solid particles. According to a widespread impression, the smoke from coal burning has been essentially eliminated, but this is true only of the larger particles that are the most visible. The situation is much less favorable with regard to the very tiny particles that are more harmful because they easily enter our lungs; their effects are generally considered to be comparable to those of the sulfur compounds. Another class of pollutant released in the burning of coal is hundreds of different organic compounds, at least forty of which are known to cause cancer; perhaps the best known of these is benzpyrene, the principal cancer-causing agent in cigarette smoking. And finally there is the ash, the bulk solid material produced at a rate of 1,000 pounds per minute, which, while not dangerous, introduces some difficult environmental problems in its disposal.

What are the wastes from a typical nuclear power plant? They are made up of a number of radioactive elements. A few of these are released into the environment as gases or in contaminated water (where they may be causing an average of one fatality every fifty years), but the vastly greater part is in storage. It is the disposal of this “high-level waste” that has been attracting so much attention of late. How does this nuclear-waste material differ from the wastes produced from burning coal?

The most spectacular difference between the two is in the amount generated: the quantities of nuclear wastes are some five million times smaller by weight and billions of times smaller by volume. So small are the amounts involved, indeed, that the annual waste from one nuclear plant would fit under a typical dining-room table. Since, moreover, the electricity produced in creating it sells for about $200 million, we could afford to spend up to $2 million to dispose of this material without increasing the cost of electricity by as much as 1 per cent. Cost is therefore no consideration in the disposal problem.

The question of potential danger is more complicated. Both coal and nuclear wastes are toxic—although in terms of overall numbers coal wastes are potentially much more dangerous. Thus, if all the sulfur compounds released by one power plant were inhaled, 300 million people a day could die from them. This is 500 times more than the lethal potential of the nuclear wastes. Such an index of measurement, however, is obviously unrealistic, for it does not take into account the ways in which toxic material can be absorbed by human beings.

One complication is the issue of durability. The dangerous chemicals produced in coal burning generally last for only a few days, whereas nuclear wastes lose their toxicity very much more slowly. (Throughout this discussion, estimates include all the effects added up over time.) Yet the burning of coal may also produce harmful long-range effects. The climatic changes due to carbon dioxide, for example, may last for thousands or even millions of years, and there is evidence that sulfur compounds which eventually settle to the ground are recycled into the air by bacteria metabolism to redo their damage many times over. In addition, small amounts of arsenic, silenium, cadmium, mercury, and so forth are released in coal burning, and their toxicity lasts forever.

Another point: when considering the very long-term effects of nuclear waste, it is important to consider the fact that in using nuclear power we are burning up uranium, and uranium is responsible for a significant amount of natural radiation to which mankind has always been exposed. In burning up this uranium, we are saving future lives; it turns out that after 100,000 years or so, the danger averted by doing so exceeds that of the waste. People living then will experience less net radiation exposure as a result of our using nuclear power today.

The nuclear-waste disposal problem has been termed “unsolved,” but all this really means is that a method of disposal has not yet been decided upon. It would be relatively simple and cheap, for instance, to convert the nuclear wastes into glass rods and dump them in the ocean. The technology for conversion to glass is well established, and no one can claim that we do not know how to dump things in the ocean. Since the oceans are already full of radioactivity—principally from potassium, a naturally radioactive element which is an important component of salt—the radiation exposure to aquatic life would not be significantly increased. The principal danger here is that small additional amounts of radioactivity would get into fish which are ultimately eaten.

What would the fatality rate be from this method of disposal? Only one in ten billion atoms in the ocean gets into a human being somewhere in the world each year, and this might result in an average of one fatality every ten years (0.1 per year) due to the waste from one power plant. By comparison, the disposal procedures which until very recently have been followed for coal-burning wastes—simply releasing them into the atmosphere without any sophisticated treatment—have been causing twenty-five fatalities per year from sulfur compounds alone, 250 times more than the nuclear counterpart.

But perhaps the most meaningful comparison between coal-burning and nuclear wastes is in terms of the technology presently available for disposal in each case. For nuclear waste this involves converting the substance produced into rocklike form and burying it deep underground. Here again there need be no fear of large-scale contamination, for the ground is already full of radioactivity from uranium, thorium, potassium, and other naturally radioactive elements, and any radioactivity that might be added in this way would not appreciably increase the total. The danger is that the buried waste might come into contact with ground water, dissolve, and eventually be absorbed into food or water supplies. Such processes, however, take a rather long time physically—typically tens of thousands of years; during the few hundred years when the waste is still highly-toxic,¹ the protection afforded is excellent. With regard to long-term effects, consider the rate at which rock is eroded: in average rock at the depth of waste burial, less than one atom in two trillion escapes and gets into human food or drink each year. Thus, one year’s buried waste from a single nuclear power plant might eventually cause an average of .001 fatalities.

For coal-burning plants, the best available or near-future technology might be capable of removing 90 per cent of the sulfur emissions, which would then reduce the effects to 2.5 fatalities per year. At this level, nitrogen oxides and smoke would make similar contributions, and, of course, the cancer-causing chemicals would still be unhampered. Altogether, then, it would probably be unrealistic to hope to get the fatality rate below five per year, 5,000 times higher than for the nuclear case.

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In summary, nuclear wastes are far less dangerous than coal-burning wastes on every count. They are far less hazardous to dispose of, whether one thinks in terms of traditionally simple and cheap disposal methods or the more sophisticated methods made possible by present and near-future technology. Why, then, have the press, the public, and our political establishment alike come to view the nuclear-waste problem as so difficult and dangerous, so that official government policy is to promote the use of coal wherever possible and use nuclear energy only as a “last resort”?

One possible explanation is the difference in the type of danger posed by these two wastes. Coal-burning wastes do their damage through chemical reactions, whereas nuclear wastes do theirs through the radiation they emit. Harmful though they may be, chemical poisons are at least familiar, while radiation is viewed by the public as something both new and mysterious, hence more to be feared.

Yet there is nothing whatsoever new about radiation. Mankind has always been bombarded by radiation—from above in the form of cosmic rays from outer space; from below due to the natural radioactivity in rock and soil; from all sides due to this same natural radioactivity in the bricks and stones of our building materials; from within due to the natural radioactivity of potassium in our bodies; and from the very air we breathe due to the omnipresence of radon, a naturally radioactive gas. Yet little attention is paid to any of this natural radiation, which could in fact be cut down considerably, and only slightly more is paid to the problem of medical x-rays, the new form of radiation-exposure introduced in our century, which could be drastically reduced without compromising medical effectiveness. It is only in the matter of nuclear wastes that the alarm is sounded, though each of the other sources involves hundreds of times more radiation exposure than do these, and though nuclear wastes can never increase our radiation exposure by more than a tiny fraction of 1 per cent, whereas coal-burning wastes have increased our exposure to sulfur compounds a hundredfold.

If there is nothing new about radiation, there is also nothing mysterious about it. It is a far simpler phenomenon than air pollution from coal burning, for instance; it is much more easily detected and measured; it has been the subject of far more scientific research; and it is far better understood. Radiation effects are under constant study by several international and national commissions, a special United Nations scientific committee, and a committee of the National Academy of Sciences. According to statements by all of these groups, the figures cited for fatalities due to radiation are based on highly conservative procedures; hence they are likely to be over- rather than under-estimated.

The figures cited for fatalities from coal-burning wastes, on the other hand, represent an average of some very crude guesses. According to one well known and never refuted paper in the scientific literature (“Air Pollution and Human Health,” by L. B. Lave and E. P. Seskin, Science, August 21, 1970), there is good evidence that coal-burning effects may actually be ten times worse than these estimates suggest. Most of the chemical compounds produced in coal burning have never been investigated for toxicity; at least a hundred are suspected of being carcinogens. Nor, as I have already pointed out, do we understand the effects of the huge quantities of carbon dioxide now being discharged into the atmosphere, or know what eventually happens to the sulfur that has been released. Coal-burning wastes are much more mysterious than nuclear ones.

Finally, it is no doubt the association with the atom bomb that has caused the discussion of nuclear wastes to be surrounded by an atmosphere of fear. Closely involved with this is the special apprehension over the role played by radiation in causing genetic mutations. But in fact the genetic effects of radiation are quite mild. Horrifying though the impact was on their lives, there is no evidence of genetic effects among the survivors of the World War II atomic-bomb attacks on Japan, even though they included 25,000 who received millions of times more radiation than could be expected to result from nuclear-waste products. On the other hand, coal-burning wastes include chemicals that are likewise capable of inducing genetic mutations, though so little is known about the subject that it is seldom discussed. About 6 per cent of all live births involve genetic defects, and no one believes that more than a tiny fraction of them are due to radiation.

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The more we delve into this tale of two wastes, the more illogical the story becomes. We have yet to find a single area in which nuclear wastes can be shown to be as dangerous as coal wastes. True, there are studies concluding that a given disposal method for nuclear waste is not perfect, that permanent isolation cannot be guaranteed, etc., etc. But these studies miss the point; the wastes from coal-burning are not isolated either, but rather are deliberately dispersed throughout our environment.

It is said about nuclear eneregy that we enjoy the energy today while our progeny must bear the burden of living with our waste. This may seem unfair to them, but actually we place an infinitely heavier burden on our progeny by consuming all the earth’s resources of coal (as well as oil and gas). These materials are exceedingly valuable as feedstock for making plastics, chemicals, and medicines, and will therefore be sorely needed in the future, especially since we are also consuming most of the world’s other mineral resources. It would be far better for our progeny if we used nuclear power than if we burned up the earth’s coal.

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We suffer 100,000 fatalities each year in the United States from accidents of various sorts, plus ten million disabling injuries, but there has never been a fatality or disabling injury due to nuclear wastes, and there very probably never will be. Yet we are told from all sides that what we should worry about are the dangers of nuclear waste. In the process, we are being deprived of a cheap and abundant source of energy at a time when our nation sorely needs it, and when the consequences of such deprivation may well prove tragic.

¹ The waste loses 99.98 per cent of its toxicity after 500 years. By this time a lethal dose is about a quarter of a pound, making it less toxic than some natural rocks.