“My personal opinion is that waste disposal is not a technical problem,” says Livens. So you may only have a few hundred tonnes, but you really have to look after it carefully.” That said, as Livens points out, “The volume of waste is tiny, but it’s really nasty. Francis Livens, a professor of radiochemistry at the University of Manchester’s Dalton Nuclear Institute, says: “The amount of spent fuel coming out of a reactor is tiny compared to the millions of tonnes of fly ash that came out of coal-fired stations, or the carbon dioxide that comes out of gas plants.” Understandably, that makes people nervous. And that waste remains dangerous for a long time, especially the high-level waste like spent fuels. The spent fuel is still radioactive, and the materials used to cool the reactor become radioactive from exposure. When nuclear power plants run, they make waste. There are also concerns over nuclear waste, and – of course – accidents. “The idea that there’s any potential danger from a nuclear plant in normal operation is complete rubbish,” says Thomas, robustly.īut it’s not just the normal running of a reactor that people worry about. “Nowadays your average nuclear worker is probably getting less radiation than the average intercontinental pilot, with the cosmic rays,” says Richard Wakeford, a professor of epidemiology specialising in ionising radiation at the University of Manchester. We live on a radioactive planet: the amount of extra radiation you’ll get from proximity to a modern nuclear power plant in normal operation is undetectably low, even if you work at one. By comparison, a 1978 study found that living near a coal plant exposes you to about 0.019 millisieverts, and a nuclear plant much less than that. People are also exposed to radiation – perhaps 6 millisieverts, at least in the United States – from other sources, like medical scans, and radon in building materials. If you live in Cornwall, where the granite rocks contain tiny amounts of uranium, you’ll receive far more: perhaps seven millisieverts. The average person on the Earth’s surface is exposed to about 0.27 millisieverts a year from cosmic rays, and a roughly similar amount from radioactivity in ground rocks. Radiation exposure is measured in “Sieverts”. It should be said that the radiation even from a coal plant is trivial, anyway. “If you live near a coal-fired plant,” says Geraldine Thomas, a professor of oncology at Imperial College London who specialises in radiation-induced cancers, “you’re subject to three times more radiation than if you live near a nuclear plant.” Fly ash, the partially combusted carbon left over from the burning coal, carries those radioactive elements into the atmosphere.

Coal contains trace amounts of uranium and thorium – about one to two parts per million of each, on average, in the US. Inevitably enough, I’m talking about coal plants.

Safe embrace