Compared to France, which is so green due to high levels of nuclear, Germany has banned the building, and is compelling the decommissioning of all nuclear plants, with the last ones expected to be shut down in the next couple of years [2].
[1] https://www.electricitymap.org/?lang=en [2] https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/history-behind-ge...
Yes, the engineers and scientists all say those accidents can't ever happen. Then they do. And again. And again. Fukushima wasn't even "that bad" but terribly expensive and inconvenient.
Nuclear power, in its current form is not sustainable, both because of recurring accidents leading to political issues and because of the unsolved waste storage problem.
The bottom line: We want to go to mostly renewable energy sources, and the shortest path leads, unfortunately, through more fossil fuels. We need to increase energy production. We would also need to replace our old nuclear power plants with something. If we replace those with new nuclear power, we will eventually have to decommission and replace those (and deal with all the waste). Coal plants are easier and faster to ramp up and ramp down. I don't like it. But there it is.
But Coal is?
https://www.euractiv.com/section/air-pollution/news/german-c...
>German coal plant exposed as Europe’s single worst air polluter
There is a nice map of NO2 pollution, and just Paris is worse..the rest of france looks pretty clean.
>I'm too lazy to look up
Yeah maybe next time don't be that lazy before wrinting something?
And maybe of some interest:
Point is: Air quality in Germany isn't really that much of an issue, certainly there is no significant difference to France, while Germany has more industry and a higher GDP.
34000 death/year in europe, not even Chernobyl had like 4000 over all? But hey Air quality i not a issue in Germany.
https://energytransition.org/2013/05/coal-power-causes-3000-...
3000 death/year alone in germany
https://www.euractiv.com/section/health-consumers/news/repor...
>>Only 50 premature deaths in France in 2013 could be traced to domestic coal-fired plants. The remaining 1,330 were cross-border, the majority from German plants.
But hey too lazy to look it up, right?
And those lazy comparisons somehow imply you could replace all that pollution with nuclear power, over night, or even at all. You can't. Some industries depend on burning coal, so are even harder to switch. Transportation is nearly all fossil fueled, so that would take a decade or two to electrify. All that takes extra energy investment (burning CO2 etc) to realize. And then you need to ramp up nuclear power. With all the problems that come with it. Probably have to relax some safety regulations to encourage the industry to grow quickly enough.
Germany is a free, democratically run country. Nobody wants to have a nuclear facility in their vicinity, much less a long term storage. People aren't stupid, they know accidents are extremely rare, but if they do happen, they pay the full price. And even long before, their property prices plummet. And after several "this will never happen accidents" actually happened, "there will be no accidents" doesn't hold all that much weight with the people. All that alone makes it virtually impossible to start new projects.
Attributed to coal-fired-plants alone, please read.
>And those lazy comparisons somehow imply you could replace all that pollution with nuclear power
Lacy reading i the bigger problem on your side, and yes replace coal-fired-plant with modern nuclear power (or anything else) would ZERO those 3000 death ATTRIBUTED TO COAL-FIRED-PLANTS.
>Germany is a free, democratically run country. Nobody wants to have a nuclear facility in their vicinity.
As a Swiss i see the "free" and "democratically" thing a bit different than Germany, how much can your citizens influence European made law?
And Nobody wants to have a coal-fired-plant in their vicinity too....i hope, the difference of objective and subjective danger. Nuclear power is objective danger but in reality negligible, coal power is subjective, you think oh that's not dangerous yet with every breath you suck it in.
Let alone destroying vast forests to dig out more coal and make that coal then artificially cheap. Here's your brown-coal proudly sponsored by your government ;)
BTW: Death from air-pollution (over all, NOT just from coal-fired-plants) in Germany is a "little" bit higher (~71000 in germany, 403'000 in Europe):
https://www.eea.europa.eu/media/newsreleases/many-europeans-...
If a majority of voters think this small risk of gigantic damage is not worth taking, you eventually have to accept that. Coal is not the future, it is a stop gap measure.
No one ever said that, however it's still tumbling around in you head for whatever reason.
>And nuclear contamination is still worse than any coal contamination if it ever occurs.
Future generation would probably say that a CO2 saturated atmosphere is worse...Earth is the new Venus.
>If a majority of voters think this small risk of gigantic damage is not worth taking, you eventually have to accept that.
And if china builds Nuclear and Coal power plants you have to accept that too, and if N.Korea trows a ICBM into your country you have to accept that too, but i think thats not the discussion, the fact that Germany believes it's green when in fact they are brow (from the coal) is just laughable, and even sell that power to other country's, coal plants are there to make money and not as a "stop gap" and you get the "fresh" air.
>Coal is not the future, it is a stop gap measure.
Exactly wrong, "old" Nuclear power was the intelligent stop gap.
I wouldn't care about Germany's problem if German politicians weren't trying to export it to their neighbours, whether by lobbying for energy transition credits not to be usable for nuclear, or by fucking up the spot power exchange.
> I'm too lazy to look up
Too lazy to look up actual figures, but not lazy enough not to post about it :(
When do "these accidents" happen again and again? France hasn't had a single nuclear disaster in 50 years of operation
Fukushima is a pretty good demonstration that even when everything goes wrong, the consequences aren't that bad.
no? why would they?
> And what about the trash
The whole of France produces less than 10 tons of long-term radioactive material. Hardly a big issue finding somewhere to safely bury that.
> I don't think it's greener energy than coal
? of course it is, coal is insanely dangerous, germany burning coal is killing people every day. And then there's the impact on global warming
Based on the orano group marketing site: https://www.orano.group/en/unpacking-nuclear/all-about-radio...
it's 200 grams per inhabitant in France, which is 67 million. 200 grams * population of france in metric tons is 13.4 t
That's quite good, even if it isn't 10 tons. Of course you still need a location for the short-lived (~300 year) nuclear waste.
And Germany does have plans to move to more renewable energy. It is a lot easier to get rid of coal plants than it is to get rid of nuclear plants...
Of course there are no hard numbers, but according to estimates over 30k people in Euorope & the US die because of coal (800k) globally. By comparison Chernobyl caused 4000–16000 deaths over several decades.
It's a very weak argument to just wave your hand over how to multiply nuclear energy by one or two orders of magnitude, without major incidents, without nuclear pollution, and without the nuclear waste problem getting more out of hand than it already has.
I mean, you can think what you want but you’re objectively wrong on literally every metric except initial building costs and lining the pockets of private companies and investors, and it’s really not hard to find that out.
Nuclear power is somewhat greener than coal, but not that much and has different problems.
Coal mining, owing to the volumes involved, is significantly more damaging (entire regions remain visibly devastated despite not having had any coal in a century).
Storing the waste has only ever been a NIMBY issue, the volumes are basically non-existent — unlike the tailings and terrils from coal mining.
Decommissioning old plants is also pretty much a joke.
> Nuclear power is somewhat greener than coal, but not that much and has different problems.
Nuclear power is orders of magnitude greener and safer than coal, and we now know that in the worst case scenario it gets greener because turns out human activity is observably worse for wildlife than increased background radiation.
The potential for an extraordinary damage is there in the old nuclear plants, yes. However, closing them down with no plans to build newer ones (with evolved designes) is just giving in to scare tactics.
At this point, we need all the low emission tech we have. That includes nuclear.
At the moment, nuclear power is an incalculable credit card. We can reduce emissions by building more nuclear power, but the bill will eventually come due because it is so hard to get rid of it.
I'd be for new nuclear power technologies that produce less waste. But the current technologies really aren't sustainable. Coal isn't sustainable either, but at least you can stop it more quickly.
However I would rather take the uncertain potential damage in the future, rather than the certain quantifiable damage today.
There are (and have existed since even before the first commercial plants were ever built) plans and designs for reactors which work on different principals than those we have built in the last 70 years (for example liquid salt reactors).
Some of these are currently being prototyped further today.
There is also the potential for the stored up waste from the last 70 years of nuclear power production to be used in so called breeder reactors.
All of these options however are not without flaws, and do produce toxic waste products (just with much shorter and manageable half lives).
Nuclear power does though require long term planning by politicians (and a bit of a backbone), which given the current fear of this technology is sadly unlikely to materialize in time.
And to address the point about coal being easier to move away from; how exactly would you suggest we do that?
While fantastic, wind and solar energy is not as reliably as coal or nuclear. Hydro is very selectively available, and geothermal is relatively in its infancy.
Even the giant solar panel project that Malaysia is planning to build in Australia (one of the most solar irradiated place on the planet) and which will be one of the largest in the world, is only expected to supply around 20% of their energy needs.
However much one may disslike it, the fact is that there simply is at current no drop in replacement for coal & natural gas burning other than nuclear.
All the reactors built today will have a lifetime of the old problems - incidents, storage, etc - for decades to come.
The uncertainty of wind and solar energy is overblown. There are ways to mitigate those problems.
Major polluters are in developing countries and those with poor regulatory regimes. Even ramping up nuclear production in relatively "clean" industrialized democracies is a risking "slippage" in terms of accidents, nuclear material getting in the wrong hands, getting disposed of improperly or being abused. Nuclear material in the ground water anywhere would be a catastrophe. There is currently an iron fist around the nuclear industry to prevent such things, and that is incompatible with replacing all or most of the fossil fuel production in the world...
That is not an argument against doing so.
No one is saying solar and wind shouldn't be developed, but leaving all nuclear off the table would be short-sighted.
The current alternative is losing large parts of the whole planet due to climate change. Even if we don't factor the extreme events it creates, air pollution from coal kills more each year than all nuclear events related to power generation ever.
I mean, sure, there are significant drawbacks to nuclear power, but that's like talking about lead paint issues in a burning house.
The TLDR is: 7 million people die anually from air pollution. Fukushima and Chernobil combined don't even put a dent on that. And solar+wind alone is not enough.
And increasing nuclear fuel and waste production to anywhere near the necessary levels should give any environmentalist nightmares. Things do go wrong, and it's ridiculous to believe the required scale up would be possible with the current high regulatory standards. Especially with some of the major polluters not being known for their absence of corruption...
It can replace most of coal-based electricity generators. It cannot replace everything. It needs solar, wind, and whatever else we can come up with (recycling, increases in efficiency, etc.)
> And increasing nuclear fuel and waste production to anywhere near the necessary levels should give any environmentalist nightmares
Waste is also discussed on the video, near the end. Coal's waste goes directly into the atmosphere, where it does harm and cannot be easily captured back. Things are already "going wrong" with that. When solar panels end in landfills, they bring a lot of heavy metals (like cadmium). If "things go wrong" those also are a nightmare.
So, yeah: we are already on an environmentalist nightmare. The question is what do we do from here.
And your argument assumes replacing all fossil fuel with nuclear power, which means all the developing countries, all the dictatorships etc handling lots of radioactive material. I'm sure they'll all be responsible with it and not let anything spill over to other countries, right? And that's even assuming best intentions.
I'm not a fan of fossil fuels. I'm grudgingly on board with my countries plan because nuclear power is no sustainable option for us. Both politically and technologically. We can get rid of coal plants a lot faster than we can decommission nuclear plants and store the waste...
Nuclear power was mostly interesting when it had weapon grade materials as a side product. It also explains why that horribly expensive mess has been subsidized the way it has been. "A simple power source" would have had to face competition by other power sources, but these others can't help equip nukes, so nukes-making nuclear power plants have been the focus.
Completely untrue BS, please get informed better:
https://theconversation.com/debunking-myths-on-nuclear-power...
>>Historically, if a country wants to produce a nuclear bomb, they build reactors especially for the job of making plutonium, and ignore civilian power stations.
B Reactor:
Why was Iran's "civilian" nuclear program always seen as nothing more than smokescreen?
It's a bit more complicated, especially since trump ended the contract (which included to control Iran's program)
https://www.npr.org/sections/parallels/2015/09/18/440567960/...
It was killed by the massive costs, also fueled by failed experiments in "next generation" reactors that are still further away from feasibility than fusion power. And, to a lesser degree, nimbyism.
It was killed as an easy boon for idiotic environmentalist groups (the german green party is one of the few which at times reached relevant levels of representation), which have done more against the environment than for it. It which was also supported by local trade groups as Germany has huge deposits of lignite (whuch is basically the worst coal available).
In no small part following greenpeace’s nonsensical switch from military to civilian nukes in a bid for relevance most environmentalist groups and green parties hate nukes with a passion.
Decommissioning plants you could keep in running order is financially idiotic since you’ve already performed the vast majority of the investment.
It's crazy to think that a purported environmental organisation will be the main culprits for tens of thousands of avoidable cancers in Germany :(
EDIT: also if you look at the fuel prices link, notice the production cost of gasoline is generally lower than that of diesel in most countries, but after taxes diesel is cheaper.
[0] https://www.fuelseurope.eu/knowledge/refining-in-europe/econ...
[1] https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Vehicles_emissions...
They had the choice of achieving an exit from nuclear power or from coal power. They chose the former when they pushed through the Atomkonsens in 2002 when they were, in fact, a governing party.
Now Germany has lost pretty much exactly as much power generation from early shutdown of nuclear plants as they are running in terms of coal power generation.
> Now Germany has lost pretty much exactly as much power generation from early shutdown of nuclear plants as they are running in terms of coal power generation.
And exactly that is not because of the green party. The green parties program from 2005 outlined the end of coal subventions for 2012. The status quo is 2038.
Subsidized gas and oil under the umbrella term "Reserve energy plan".
Import energy from coal, gas an oil power plants from neighboring countries and expand the capacity to import more during periods of high demand.
It only been months since the last public debate between the green party spoke person and the opposition, and in that they reiterated that the plan for the future is to use fossil fuels as the only economical viable option compared to nuclear for periods of non-optimal weather conditions. Nuclear is too expensive compared to fossil fuels. In some later debate articles they further expanded that the plan is to use fossil fuels until the technology to create green hydrogen has been made cheap enough to be economical viable (date undetermined). If I remember right they cited the German green party as inspiration, through I could be wrong on that part.
There are limited sources of variable energy like some hydro, biomass, storage or ... (some) fossils. Nuclear is very bad as a variable energy source and therefore, aside for nuclear carriers, nowhere the only source of power. It would be nice if it were, but it is not.
Nukes are baseload, you don't vary those plants' output when you don't have to, especially when you can use the consumption downtime to refill the pumped hydro.
However french nukes are built for load following, and they can absolutely shed and recover quickly when that's useful: https://energy-charts.info/charts/power/chart.htm?l=en&c=FR&... https://energy-charts.info/charts/power/chart.htm?l=en&c=FR&... https://energy-charts.info/charts/power/chart.htm?l=en&c=FR&...
> Nuclear is very bad as a variable energy source and therefore, aside for nuclear carriers, nowhere the only source of power. It would be nice if it were, but it is not.
Literally nobody but you even hinted that nukes could (let alone should) be the sole power source.
Why do I criticizes Swedens green party for wanting to use fossil energy as a backup? Pretty simple answer to that, and I will use an old green party slogan to do it. Keep it in the ground! We won't reach the climate goals if we burn fossil fuel for power and heat. The green party should have been the last ones arguing that we must burn fossil fuels because the alternative cost too much money. Climate scientists has known for a while that we must keep fossil fuel in the ground, but what hope is there if even the green movement is advocating to digging it up and burning in order to save a buck?
That’s not “nukes as the sole source of electricity”. Sweden has huge amounts if hydro, it accounts for 50% of their productions.
> Still, even in the days you picked, they are running 5% on gas.
How much of that is cogeneration? You can’t shut off a cogeneration plant, it does not just produce electricity.
Yet, somehow, power is cheaper in France than in Germany, and the energiewende investments cost about twice France's investment for its whole nuclear fleet.
Sure, new designs are more expensive, but I can't help but think that the main issue with nuclear is the impossibility to have a discussion free from disinformation.
Plus designers tried to design even safer plants, meaning costs increase, meaning you want to increase power density, leading to further complexity and thus cost increases.
The would would be in a much better position if we’d kept building (and improving) Gen IIs as we tried to resolve Gen III’s teething issues.
What the end user pays for electricity is just one part of the total costs. That's true for all forms of generation of course.
Meanwhile, recent headlines:
> German Emissions From Electricity Rose 25% In First Half Of 2021 Due To The Lack Of Wind Power, Not Willpower
* https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelshellenberger/2021/07/28...
> Energy Prices in Europe Hit Records After Wind Stops Blowing
* https://www.wsj.com/articles/energy-prices-in-europe-hit-rec...
In 2010 the plants were granted an extension by the conservative party, 8-14 operating years each, depending on their age. 2011, after Fukushima, that extension was scrapped for the most part, reverting to the previous terms.
So yes, Fukushima accelerated the shutdown after CDU first slowed it down, but the original plan was for nuclear to be already gone by now. That there's still nuclear power going on until 2022 is due to several plants not operating for a while in the aftermath of Fukushima (due to operating life time being the relevant number).
That original plan also aimed for a massive build up of renewable power sources which has been sabotaged in much the same way (e.g. installed wind power capacity going _down_ due to messed up updated regulations: can't upgrade a wind mill in-place while simple repairs aren't cost effective). Cost us ~120k jobs in renewables, too.
Coal had full political backing though: Coal plants have been built illegally (with no political consequences), property has been seized to dig more coal (while the same conservatives pushing these seizures claim the eco movement wants to dispossess everybody), the 40k jobs related to coal are considered indispensable.
tl;dr: We're replacing nuclear with coal because politics sabotages everything else. Fukushima is just a footnote in that mess.
There are lists on the German wikipedia of the coal plants being built/replaced/renovated. There are some small coal plants being built and mostly replacing older small plants at the same location. I don't understand either why they're being built or why the older plants were there, but who cares, they're small. And there's a single big plant being built. Perhaps. The company that's building it doesn't seem to be in a hurry to complete construction.
No matter how to assign output and add up the possible capacity, it's not enough to replace even a single nuclear plant.
So you mean exactly how with coal the entire society bears the cost of just running the plants? Even if we set climate change aside for a second, there are huge health downsides to burning coal. I mention coal specifically because we're talking about the contrast with Germany here.
>>Same with decommissioning the nuclear plants, for which the companies are supposed to hold back some funds, but they just undercalculate that, go bankrupt and the taxpayer pays up.
The only issue I have with this is that nuclear power plants should have never been operated by private companies in the first place. They should have been national property and taxpayer funded from start to finish.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%89lectricit%C3%A9_de_Franc...
Also, there are possible solutions to nuclear waste, such as auto-breeding reactors that basically burn waste, or energy amplifiers... that also reduce nuclear waste to waste products with much more manageable half lifes.
IMO Being a luddite with nuclear energy means not looking at reality for what it is
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CANDU_reactor
The CANDU is a successful attempt, the energy amplifier was never attempted, and self breeding reactors are a material engineering problem (alas not yet completely solved), not a physics problem.
Throwing a fraction of what we are spending to chase the "fusion dream" we could have achieved a great deal more for present reality.
Again that's all IMO.
edited: clarification
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breeder_reactor#Development_an...
Which is why one might be careful about ramping up the production of the waste.
The rest of what you say is are regulatory issue. Similarly coal burning externalities are paid not by the generating companies but the rest of the society. Not that I'm suggesting coal and nuclear to be the only options.
I'd like to wait for it to actually work before accumulating ever more of the stuff.
I know Germany prefers to strip-mine their coal these days, but digging tunnels several kilometers deep is a skill that's been mastered for more than a century.
These discussions are way more complicated than you apparently think, and they are both scientific and political. Nobody wants this stuff in their backyard, even a few kilometres underground. And Germany is relatively densely populated, making "nobody's backyard" a tight constraint...
Some countries may or may not have found storage options. But it is more complicated for most countries than you appear to think.
Nuclear waste is not a real problem - the total amount of long-term waste produced by France is less than 10 tons a year. That's for a country of half a million square km..
But still, even though France is exporting more energy than importing, over the whole year, at certain times, especially in winter they have to import coal power...
Same goes with, say, hydropower. If a dam breaks and flood a region, the tax payers will pay. Are you against hydrolic dams ?
I obviously not saying that we should phase out dams, what I am saying is, nuclear power is one of the safest energy we have, funnily enough[0].
COVRA only does temporary storage (100 years). They are coordinating research into finding a final long-term solution, meaning they don't have a solution currently. Where do you get that 1000 year duration?
I don't know about the Finnish solution. Do you have some links about that?
French subsidizes on nuclear is about the same size as Germany, but that is not the most strangest fact. The biggest subsidizes french pay on the energy grid is for fossil fuel! The fossil fuel subsidizes is also almost identical in size to Germany subsidizes to fossil fuels.
Germany actually spend twice the amount of total subsidizes than France in the energy sector, with half of it going to renewables. The amount of nuclear subsidizes and fossil fuel subsidizes are similar, but then they have the combined amount added to just renewables.
In raw numbers, the French pay about €25 billions of subsidizes with fossil fuels getting the biggest share. In Germany that is €50 billions, with about €25 billions going exclusively to renewables.
That's just flat out wrong. Decomissioning costs are included in the TCO and electricity price, and IIRC for Hinckley Point C it's a big chunk of the costs. Furthermore, EDF is state-owned and won't just go bankrupt. Yes, the taxpayer will cover any shortcoming, but at least significant efforts are made to plan for decomissioning and cover the costs from the start; can anything similar be said about coal?
https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/germany-four-others-...
Nuclear power is green for the duration of our lifetimes, at the cost of a near eternity of fallout.
We have a permanent, forever solution to nuclear waste, it's just that no one wants to pay for it. It's easier to just keep kicking the ball down than solve the issue permanently.
It's called deep borehole disposal - you drill a hole down to Earth's crust(~5km or deeper), fill the bottom 1-2km with nuclear waste, fill it back up. Literally solves the problem forever. It's not coming back up on anything shorter than a geological timescale, and the land above the borehole is perfectly safe to live on.
The main reasons why it wasn't and isn't pursued is
1) cost - drilling itself is "solved" but inventing new storage casks that would fit the hole and re-processing the waste to fit is a new engineering challenge which would cost money
2) the idea that nuclear fuel, even spent, can be reused - either in breeder reactors, or for other purposes. If you bury it 5km deep it's almost impossible to retrieve it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_borehole_disposal
The above is why I'm kinda annoyed when people say that nuclear is bad because we just produce waste that will pollute for centuries. Like, yes, but we also know what to do with it, we're just unwilling to pay for it.
On a brighter side, fusion is making progress and produces no waste.
When many of the nuclear reactors were built, there was no pervasive global terrorism that is a threat to nuclear waste storage (edit: an nuclear reactors).
Things don't always improve.
It doesn't necessarily need to become cheaper in absolute terms, just cheaper than the alternatives of climate change damage. Those may continue to rise as we lollygag.
Groundwater intrusion is a clear risk. Oil companies already have (minor) problems with fracking fluids. Nuclear waste is orders of magnitude more risky.
It’s not centuries of waste, it’s millions of years of waste.
How? 5km down is way below the water table. Also 5km down the soil is already radioactive by itself, so it's not like you are storing your waste in some pristine environent and polluting it - it's already a very dangerous place. If the elements at 5km depth could get into our grandwater it would all be polluted already. They can't.
>>Oil companies already have (minor) problems with fracking fluids.
Again, no one is fracking 5km down. Not even close.
>>It’s not centuries of waste, it’s millions of years of waste.
Uhm....."kinda". The highly radiactive stuff has half life of few centuries at most, otherwise it wouldn't be highly radioactive. Yes certain elements produced in the waste exist for "millions" of years, but that's no different than saying that naturally occuring Uranium exists for "millions of years". Like, yeah, duh. Again, at 5km or deeper depths that's not an actual problem.
>>but nobody wants to store it on their property.
I feel like I'm repeating myself, but 5km down is hardly anyone's property. Like, it's really really really not. You could fill up the drill hole and turn the surface into a national park and no one would ever be able to tell there's anything stored down there, just like you can't tell you might have a natural uranium deposit 5km down below you. And yes, certain groups will protest it anyway - but I think it's important to call them for what they are - insane.
Waste would have to pass through the shallows of the borehole which is a risk, and then the well remains a high permeability conduit for the duration of its existence. If/when the well collapses, the infill is likely to be high permeability on a human/civilization timescale.
That’s not to mention the volume of material that would need to be placed downhole, which I would imagine is significant.
Re: duration of harmfulness, doesn’t uranium have a half life of some 10^9 years? Not an expert in nuclear chemistry, but I wouldn’t want that stuff in concentration anywhere near me, or beneath my feet, and neither does any state in the US it seems.
Yes, and uranium in its pure form is hardly dangerous. Like, don't eat the stuff, but the same could be said about lead - you're perfectly fine holding it, just don't eat it.
Again, the more dangerous something is the shorter is its half life, stuff that has incredibly long half life is almost by definition not very dangerous. With uranium you'd worry more about the toxicity than the radioactivity.