::chuckle::
This has been known for years.
The biggest offender in that respect is the wonderful, EPA-approved low-sulfur coal from Wyoming, etc. You know, the stuff that comes from the same geological formations we used to get uranium from?
The nice thing about nuclear waste is that there's so little of it, from a volume point of view -- without shielding [which I am NOT suggesting] you could transport all that's been generated in a couple of boxcars. Even counting the shielding and protection necessary for reasonably safe transport, it's a really minor problem from the logistics point of view; it's only the knee-jerk reactions of NIMBYs that makes it hard. Especially compared to the effluvia of coal-fired power plants.
Go to a coal-fired power plant. Pick up a handful of the ash. The radiation content of that handful is roughly equal to that of a set of gloves used by a nuclear power plant worker to handle samples, and the isotopes are much longer lived. The ash gets spread on the ground. The gloves are "low level nuclear waste" and must be transported in sealed steel barrels with bloodthirsty warning flags on them, over the dead bodies of "environmentalists". (Of course they don't get transported at all; they're too dangerous to be allowed to pass through MY neighborhood!)
Put it another way: Use a couple tons of fly ash as a concrete ingredient and make a road out of it (usual procedure, done every day). That couple of tons of power plant waste contains more radioactivity, with longer-lasting isotopes, than the emissions from the ::gasp choke:: NUCLEAR DISASTER at Three Mile Island.
