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Comment by maksimka | Hacker News Reader

I like the idea, as long as it's very far away away from my house.

I don't mind at all having a nuclear power plant upriver not particularly far from my home. It makes the electricity rates here noticeably less expensive than in many other parts of the country. That plant has been operating harmlessly for about four decades now.

After edit: indeed, I prefer having a nuclear power plant (somewhat) nearby to having a coal-burning power plant equally upstream and nearby, and prefer both to living without inexpensive electricity.

As the other poster said, it's better than living next to a coal burning plant. The coal burning plant would actually release more radioactive material into the environment than a nuclear power plant would.

I’ve heard this before, but is there any reason to think that the issue goes beyond the fact that CO2 has a higher natural level of radiation than H2O?

incomplete combustion\plenty of other stuff in the ground in it(heavy metals etc.). The smoke is not just CO2.

Plus " sulfur dioxide (SO2) and nitrogen oxides (NOx) are the primary causes of acid rain. In the US, About 2/3 of all SO2 and 1/4 of all NOx comes from electric power generation that relies on burning fossil fuels like coal." http://www.policyalmanac.org/environment/archive/acid_rain.s...

and acid rain causes a number of environmental problems.

NOx also creates low level ozon when it breaks down, which has a number of nasty environmental and health side effects as well.

At least with nuclear power the byproducts are stored in nearly-indestructible containers. Where are the byproducts of coal-fired generation stored?

Actually that's not quite right. (I was just talking to an engineer who services nuclear reactors for a living about this.) Most of the spent fuel rods are left sitting in storage pools ("wet storage") next to the reactor. What you refer to, cask ("dry") storage, is the other option, but is not as prevalent due to cost and opposition to storing nuclear waste outside. Ironically wet storage is the less safe of the two, because mechanical failure could result in the coolant boiling off, at which point radiation would be released into the air. Apparently this scenario is outlined in one of those Discovery channel, "What would the world be like without humans" shows.

As I recall, wet and dry storage are not mutually exclusive. The usual scheme is to let the waste sit in wet storage until the shorter-lived isotopes have decayed away and the waste has become cool enough to move to dry cask storage.

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