Snipped from SciAm.com.

As if we didn’t have enough reasons to fight against the use of coal power plants, we have, yet, another one that may be just as bad as the others! The stereotype of coal power plants being safer than nuclear power plants, at least when it comes to radiation, has been drastically broken. It seems that coal ash, also known as fly ash, “contains up to 100 times more radiation than nuclear waste.” It has to do with the uranium and thorium levels in natural coal. Unburned, the levels of these dangerous compounds are somewhat benign, but when burned, they are concentrated up to ten times their natural levels.

Thank God that some of these politicians here in Texas have slowed down the fast pace creation of these coal power plants here in my own back yard. Our wonderful governor, Rick Perry, bought and paid for by our lobbyists, has been trying to fast pace the creation of approximately 7 coal power plants here in Central Texas. Many organizations have been fighting against Perry and his cronyism because these coal plants have been linked to everything from global warming to heavy metal pollution. Now that we can add radioactive waste to the pile of dangerous consequences to the operation of coal power, we should push back even harder to not only stop the formation of new plants, but to shut down the old as well. Fight the power, literally!

Here is a small portion of the article:

Fly ash uranium sometimes leaches into the soil and water surrounding a coal plant, affecting cropland and, in turn, food. People living within a “stack shadow”—the area within a half- to one-mile (0.8- to 1.6-kilometer) radius of a coal plant’s smokestacks—might then ingest small amounts of radiation. Fly ash is also disposed of in landfills and abandoned mines and quarries, posing a potential risk to people living around those areas.

In a 1978 paper for Science, J. P. McBride at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) and his colleagues looked at the uranium and thorium content of fly ash from coal-fired power plants in Tennessee and Alabama. To answer the question of just how harmful leaching could be, the scientists estimated radiation exposure around the coal plants and compared it with exposure levels around boiling-water reactor and pressurized-water nuclear power plants.

The result: estimated radiation doses ingested by people living near the coal plants were equal to or higher than doses for people living around the nuclear facilities. At one extreme, the scientists estimated fly ash radiation in individuals’ bones at around 18 millirems (thousandths of a rem, a unit for measuring doses of ionizing radiation) a year. Doses for the two nuclear plants, by contrast, ranged from between three and six millirems for the same period. And when all food was grown in the area, radiation doses were 50 to 200 percent higher around the coal plants.