Is burning coal a source of radioactivity?
Burning coal simply releases vast quantities of uranium, thorium, potassium-40, and other radionuclides into the environment. It isn’t that it’s a concentrated source of radiation, it’s just that so much coal is burned that even trace impurities can have large effects (the same goes for nonradioactive impurities in coal, like mercury). Radioactive material from burning coal is mostly nonvolatile, and remains in the ash. Thus, capturing ash from coal smoke helps prevent spreading this radioactive material over a large area. Cigarettes would also have low concentrations of many naturally-occurring radioactive isotopes – thorium, but also uranium, potassium-40, carbon-14, etc. Maybe thorium levels are higher in tobacco than in other plants? As for why coal presents a greater radiation hazard than nuclear power plants, coal plants without scrubbers simply dump the radioactive material into the environment, whereas all of the spent fuel from a nuclear plant is treated as nuclear waste and (
